Foreword

Welcome to everything I read in June and July!

This marks half a year of sharing what I read every month, a commitment I started at the beginning of 2026 with no idea where it would take me. Since then, we’ve gone from 100 subscribers to over 4’000. This reading recap is a little different, with some stats of my reading so far this year, and some fun medieval inspired graphics. I hope you enjoy!

Thank you for reading along with me,

Jada

Everything I’ve read so far in 2026:

Mid-Year Reading Check In

Hear ye, hear ye! It is the middle of the year, ye! My reading check in is going to look a little different than most. For starters, it’s medieval themed (because why not), and lead by the curiosity of adventure and honouring just how much fun I’ve had with reading this year. There no reading goal in sight. I don’t care to read X amount of books a year, I care that I’m engaging with them and understanding them.

Instead, here is a jovial and creative overview of the last six months!

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Reading Stats

• Number of books read: 42

• Genres read: 15

• Number of reviews written: 35

• Total page count: 7’238

The Main Quest

At the beginning of 2026, I wrote that I was “tending to the mare before the adventure” in which I was finding the reigns of sharing my reading life on my newsletter. My ‘main quest’ was undefined back then— I just wanted to set off on this journey and see where it took me. Six months later, I have committed myself to writing a monthly reading recap for every single month, so we’re halfway there! But apart from this objective to tick off, some other lofty ‘reading goals’ that I had included to:

1. Read every day — which I have mostly managed to achieve. Even if I’m not picking up a book, I am always reading. I’ve found some incredible and enlightening articles here on Substack, and enjoy reading essays or researching topics that interest me.

2. Create a reading community — there are now 4’000 of you. I have loved swapping book recommendations and discussing authors and novels with kindred souls. I very much feel like my newsletter is a landing spot for the weary adventurer to put their legs up and enjoy a warm cuppa!

3. Use every opportunity I can to discuss a reading life — Finding new ways to explore the dialogue for my passion for literature and challenging myself to interrogate reading not only as an activity, but as a medium that can be interacted with and shared.

Top Reads (As of June & July)

What has stood out to me the most in my reading so far this year has been the Earthsea Cycle and the writings of Leonora Carrington. Both works and authors have made a profound impact on both my reading and writing, and they have become integral sources of inspiration for me!

My Favourite Quotes

The above quotes summarise my gravitation towards specific writing: that I want to read writing that feels like spell work; literacy and the imagination is deeply important to me; building a personal library is the greatest feat a reader can undertake; beauty can be found everywhere.

“As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

– A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin)

I adore this quote because it was a sensory delight to read. The scene depicts the main character, Ged, beginning to notice how magic and language amalgamate in nature; a combination of beauty, ambience, movement and the delicate connection between these things. It was from this quote that I knew the Earthsea Cycle would be a series that deeply resonated with me. It also uses one of my favourite literary devices, polysyndeton!

“I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children.”

– The Language of the Night (Ursula K. Le Guin)

I had to pull a quote from Le Guin’s non-fiction and writing-about-writing because I am fascinated with how writers speak about the importance of imagination, literacy, and reading. I have always felt a devotion and vocation towards the imagination, which in this quote, Le Guin aptly summarises as “the most deeply human, and humane … faculty.”

“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us, and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”

– Why Read The Classics? (Italo Calvino)

Calvino’s zeal in Why Read The Classics? was so infectious that it has left a lasting impact on me since I read it in February. The concept of our “own ideal library” and what books have a spot in my personal canon have really shaped my approach to reading, and Calvino’s work has motivated me to wring all meaning and enjoyment out of everything I read. These words, the suspense of “empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries” has remodelled my approach to reading, and also helped me remain consistent with these monthly reading wrap ups.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”

– Upstream (Mary Oliver)

Perhaps one of Oliver’s most known quotes, but notoriety doesn’t water down how this simple quote directs and instructs how we see the world with a calm, lyrical authority. Oliver makes you want to see, feel, and hear the world. She fashions the art of noticing as an act of reverence, which has reshaped how I see rest and pursuing things with calmness and intentional slowness.

Notable Authors

I’ve noticed that I am exploring reading not only via genre and topic, but in particular by author. It has become important to me to read deeply within an author’s oeuvre— not as an achievement to say “I have read an entire author’s works,” but to seek out the depth of their words, and how their work intertwines and connects with each other. What I have found most valuable in my reading this year is that a story does not begin and end within the confines of the binding of a book; traces can be found mingling across an author’s fiction and non-fiction; a continued conversation. The above authors have a lot to say in particular because they are multi-genre: Mary Oliver wrote poems and essays, Le Guin wrote high fantasy and also speeches and essays about fantasy as a genre, Italo Calvino wrote magic realism but also interrogated the medium of reading and writing in his literary criticisms, and Leonora Carrington dabbled in both memoir and surrealism.

Mary Oliver — The Empress (III)

The Empress is primarily concerned with nurturing; it is the Earth Mother archetype. Beauty, abundance and nature all synergise beneath this card, which is why I feel like it is an apt representation of the poet Mary Oliver. The card depicts a woman, clad in a robe of pomegranates, surrounded by a lush forest, wheat field, and a running stream. I believe Oliver sat at the seat of nature, not to rule over it, but to observe it. I am reminded of The Empress in particular when recounting an essay from Upstream, where Oliver describes nursing an injured seagull that she found.

Ursula K. Le Guin — The Hight Priestess (II)

When I think of Ursula K. Le Guin, she assumes the position of The High Priestess due to her connection with high fantasy, sci-fi, and the reflections of the subconscious within these stories. The High Priestess is all about listening to that inner voice, which is a topic that Le Guin explores in the Earthsea Cycle. She writes of the intuitive and intrinsic nature of the meaning behind words, and of crossing the thresholds between life and death, magic and art. Known as The Witch Archetype, The High Priestess is the guardian of thresholds. She sits, waits, receives, listens. Her writing reminds me to listen to the magic of the world.

Italo Calvino — The Hierophant (V)

The Hierophant is a figure to seek wisdom from. Seeking him out means to learn from someone of profound knowledge that I can learn from, and I feel this way when I read Italo Calvino’s non-fiction. The Hierophant has a deep devotion to their work, which I can clearly feel in his essays and literary analyses of his favourite classics in Why Read The Classics? Perhaps I have superimposed him, due to my admiration of his work, to a figure of learning. His writing, both fiction and non-fiction, reflects a level of intellect, clarity, and creativity that I really aspire to achieve in my own work.

Leonora Carrington — The Magician (I)

Leonora Carrington will forever be the outlier that rejects any sense of conformity or archetype. She displays a multiplicity that I found difficult to define— I toyed with the idea of Carrington as The Lovers, or even The Tower— but I ultimately settled on The Magician because of how she harnesses multiple mediums. All tools are at her disposal, and I believe The Magician to be a figure of transmutation above anything else. Considering Carrington’s interest in alchemy, her use of egg tempera in her visual art, and how every symbol is harnessed as a tool in her writing, the combination of all of these things creates a unique blend and artistry. A writer that uses everything at her disposal.

The Journey So far - Genres of 2026

Whilst I was under the impression that my reading was mostly a fantasy rabbit hole (which to be honest, it really was), in correlating the stats for my mid year check in, I realised how synonymous the genres I read are with my personal interests. This year, I’ve felt like the world (and its knowledge) is truly my oyster, or perhaps I’ll use another cliche analogy and describe my reading as “sucking the marrow” out of everything that I find fascinating.

Fantasy has most certainly taken off this year after a very long dormancy. The reason behind this was because I very much have struggled to find fantasy that I enjoy, and fantasy that goes beyond tropes, romance plots and the same plot patterns that contemporary fantasy seems stuck in. And don’t get me wrong, there is cheesy fantasy from the 70s - 00s that had its own pitfalls too. In seeking out quality fantasy, I’ve narrowed down my interests to an interest in Surrealism and Mythology as well.

Notable fantasy reads include Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, The Goblin Emperor, Theodora’s Tea Shop and The Hobbit. These segway and intersect with Surrealism, including titles like Alchemy of a Blackbird, The Stone Door and Down Below, and Mythology, such as All the Horses of Iceland. I’ve been reading up a lot on Astrology as well with guides such as Tarot: Mirror for the Soul and Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.

Children’s fiction intersects with Cosy Fiction, as they feel very much entertained in titles such as Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle and Sato The Rabbit. I think it’s fantastic that I have literally picked up children’s picture books, because the creativity, colour and imagination is refreshing and very much whimsical.

On that note, reading comics and manga also counts as reading. I read through the entire of Delicious in Dungeon and A Cat From Our World and The Forgotten Witch, and am regularly reading the updated chapters of Witch Hat Atelier.

In the opposite direction, non-fiction and writing about reading fuels my research, essays, and expands my thoughts about reading and writing as mediums as opposed to merely activities. Some books that have broadened my horizons include Why Read The Classics?, Unpacking My Library, The Language of the Night.

As usual, translated fiction remains on a high pedestal. I was actively following along with the International Booker Prize, and read Taiwan Travelogue, The Wax Child and Women Without Men. Another translated work I really enjoyed was The Perfect Circle.

Much of my reading has been intuitive, sequential, and either falling down rabbit holes or running along tangents. My monthly reading recaps seems to be one of the few ways I can comprehensively but also cohesively talk about my reading. More on genre on another day otherwise this newsletter will go well beyond the email limit (as if it hadn’t already).

Let’s get into what I read in June and July 2026!

Books I Read In June & July

• The Goblin Emperor — Katherine Addison ★

• The Language of the Night — Ursula K. Le Guin ★

• The Farthest Shore — Ursula K. Le Guin ★

• Tehanu — Ursula K. Le Guin ★

• The Other Wind — Ursula K. Le Guin ★

• The Wind’s Twelve Quarters — Ursula K. Le Guin

• Foucault’s Pendulum — Umberto Eco

• Fabrications — Zachary Mason

• Helm — Sarah Hall

• Alphabet of Thorn — Patricia A. McKillip

• The West Passage — Jared Pechaček ★

Reviews, Thoughts & Musings

I will only be writing about some notable books from June and July, considering how long this post is! These are marked in the above list with a star. For all of the reviews, follow along my Goodreads.

Goodreads

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I find political intrigue absolutely delicious, and The Goblin Emperor was full of it. What was so brilliant about this book was that it’s relationship with revenge, compassion, and the temptation of power was infused with a main character that, by all means, could of acted from a place of anger and resentment, and yet actively chose not to.

I often describe my inner pettiness as the “gremlin whispering in my ear that I actively choose not to listen to”, but The Goblin Emperor really takes the moral high ground with a half-elf, half-goblin son of the Emperor, Maia, whom is suddenly pedestaled to the throne following the sudden and unexpected death of his father and three older brothers. Unlike me, he is very good at coming to terms with his inner gremlin— both in accepting it and denying it. The line of succession reaching Maia is unlikely, as he is banished to live with his abusive cousin following his mother’s death, but still entirely plausible. A lot of things in this book are portrayed as being unlikely, but not zero-chance either, and Maia surprises, delights and quells my inner vengeance-seeking tendencies.

To ask and receive help is an incredible risk in a court enshrouded by murder, grief, and the lack of a political upbringing, but Maia’s compassion proves that it is never a liability when there does exist good in others. Acting on this assumption is not weakness, but a vulnerability that actually takes a lot of strength. This book acknowledges the mental battle when the opportunity to enact revenge arises: do we take it, or do we rise above it?

“The Emperor of Ethuveraz cannot become vengeful, for once begun, there will never be an end to it.” (p. 332)

“Let my anger die with him. Let both of us be freed from the burden of his actions. Even if I cannot forgive him, help me not to hate him.” (p. 333)

An aspect I highly enjoy about political intrigue is when it is enmeshed with linguistics and philology. This part of world-building seems to be a Tolkien-esque skillset, which is difficult to do well. My reading experience of The Goblin Emperor felt reminiscent of A Memory Called Empire, which was one of my top reads for 2025, because Addison achieves a lexicon of words and names that are representative of a dizzying political system. The naming conventions are intentionally overwhelming because they are also being learnt by the main character. It is a device intended to confuse and really signify the weight of being thrust into Emperorhood with no prior knowledge. Maia achieves this with a lot more grace than I ever could.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Read this if you enjoy political intrigue with a high fantasy, steampunk twist.

Books I’d recommend with court politics, a focus on language, morality or morally good main characters: A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama, Priory of the Orange Tree by Shannon by Samantha Shannon

The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin

I cannot stop reading Le Guin. When it comes to reading non-fiction, I find a compilation of essays/writings that each have their own focal point is a great way for me to ingest ideas and new information. My brain operates at a much slower capacity when it comes to non-fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed how focused reading The Language of the Night was.

Quite simply, these are essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. I really took my time annotating and highlighting passages from Le Guin’s writing and speeches, because she provides insights into these two genres that weren’t things I previously considered.

Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? is a brilliantly titled analysis about the “moral disapproval of fantasy, a disapproval so intense, and often so aggressive, that I cannot help but see it as arising, fundamentally, from fear.” In this essay, Le Guin picks apart the relationship between anti-fantasy and anti-fiction.

My favourite essay was Dreams Must Explain Themselves, written in 1973. With candid irony, Le Guin writes about the methodology of being a fantasy and sci-fi writer, and the two methods that writers use to approach such a task: planning versus intuition.

“All my life I have written, and all my life I have (without conscious decision) avoided reading how-to-write things.”

As a reader, my focal point is reading about why we write things, and reading about Le Guin’s non-linear approach to writing, her penchant towards introversion, and her dislike of phone telecommunications was amusing and eye opening. In this essay, discovering her personal reading of A Wizard of Earthsea being “about artistry” was sublime. Also this quote:

“I can’t stand there in the hall with the child and the cat both circling around my legs, frisking and purring and demanding cookies and cat food, and explain to a disembodied voice in my ear that the Jungian spectrum of introvert/extravert can usefully be applied not only to human beings but also to authors.”

Essentially, the answers are in the works themselves, but she doesn’t shy at the opportunity to discuss in her own unique way either. You can’t really argue with a writer that says: ‘read my work and figure it out yourself’ and then proceeds to dedicate endless essays and speeches to said figuring out, but the figuring out is not anything you ever expected, nor asked of, it’s just the writer enjoying themselves and their craft.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Read this if you have been reading back to back fantasy, aren’t quite ready to put them down, but know you need to read something else at the same time.

Books I’d recommend about writing and essays: Why Read The Classics? by Italo Calvino, Upstream by Mary Oliver

The Farthest Shore, Tehanu and The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve already written extensively about Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle. In June, I finished the entire series, which was an absolute delight. These novels are feats of fantasy, and I will save my thoughts for some essays I have planned.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Read this if want a fantasy series that has a magic system as natural as breathing, deals with existential ideas, and follows characters across lifetimes.

Books I’d recommend that are high fantasy: To be honest, nothing compares to these books!

The West Passage by Jared Pechaček

Reading The West Passage was dark, whimsical, medieval, with a dash of sweetness to counteract the grisly parts, like when you put a dollop of honey in black tea that’s been steeping for too long.

Lucky for me, I love strong tea, and Pechaček’s writing uses mixes in heavy themes of death and decay with character’s you are really rooting for. In a crumbling overworld, where a palace is the size of a city and split into five distinct jurisdictions, the characters undergo a metamorphosis against a backdrop of architecture, legacy and hierarchy.

Medieval, at times absurd, most certainly surrealist, The West Passage is some of the most inventive fantasy I’ve read in a long time, deserving of existing in its own category. Whilst at times a fragmented narrative, I saw the dual adventures of the main characters as discovering a city brick by brick as opposed to a draw back.

This novel heavily reminded me of a dark, medieval version of Steven Universe crossed with one of my favourite novels Piranesi. It has similarities with these titles in that it includes large eldritch women, a hierarchy system denoted by colour, and shifting architecture.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ¾ (3.75 stars) - This was so close to being a four and above, but the latter half and ending fell short ever so slightly. Regardless, this is a massive feat for a debut novel.

Read this if want a dark, whimsical series that is queer friendly, puts the grisly in medieval literature, and like giant eldritch women.

Books I’d recommend with the same dark, mysterious and whimsical vibe: Piranesi by Susanna Clark, Katabasis by R.F Kuang

Afterword

Making the graphics in this newsletter was so much fun! I am going to the renfaire for the first time for my birthday, and have been listening to so much “tavern” music and RPG soundtracks. Please let me know what you think, it was great to translate my reading life in a unique and different way.

In semi related news, I have started volunteering at my local cat shelter and rescue, and assisting them with their marketing! If you enjoyed the graphics in this post, you would also like the work I’m doing with them.

TLDR: Wizard cats!

Check it out here:

Even if you don’t live locally (as many of my readers don’t), any engagement helps get these cats off the streets and into loving homes!

Thank you for reading,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work here

^{Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:}

^{Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.}

^{Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.}

^{Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.}

Art References

1. ^{Heptu Bidding Farewell To The City of Obb (1909) – John Duncan}

2. ^{Perseus & Andromeda (1891) – Frederuc Leighton}

3. ^{The Ambassadors (French Envoys) (1533) – Hans Holbein (DETAIL)}

4. ^{The Young King of the Black Isles (1906) – Maxfield Parish}

5. ^{Landskap med hus (1911) – Ole Peter Arnulf Øverland}

6. ^{Medea, Theseus and Aegeus (1910) – William Russel Flint}

7. ^{Binding (2026) – Andre Remenev}

8. ^{Tranquil Interlude Inside A Roman Palace (1875-1920) – Ettore Forti (DETAIL)}

9. ^{Napoli 1956 Mediterraneo (2009) – Antonio Nunziante}

Foreword

The place journaling has in my life is not only introspection and meditation; within the pages of my journal I have sought and challenged my creative self.

These journaling prompts continue to stretch my repertoire because I take them very seriously. All prompts originate from an essay, a strain of thought, a curiosity to follow. These prompts are not simply “Journal prompts for X,” they interrogate what living a journaling life actually means.

Which means I wrack my brain to find the connection, the inspiration, and the language to connect opposing ideas and generate discussion. That is what journaling is: communication, connection, discussion, translation— all these yummy buzz words!

I would love to know what prompts resonate with you.

Happy journaling,

Jada

More writing about journaling:

For more journaling prompts:

Discovering Our Personal Visual Language & The Search for the Ineffable

Visual language is a mode of communication: the elements of art convey ideas, invite creative interpretation, and serve as a foundation for how visual art is received. Alternatively, it is a mode of translation for the ineffable, as the visual communicate the farthest recesses of the imagination.

If we are to traverse the ineffable, undefinable spaces that visual art offers us, the elements of art not only serve as a brilliant starting point, but in their simplicity, transform visual language into language that we can use and a renewed way to travel through life.

A Preamble About Rothko

For I can say that “I resonate with what I’m looking at” or that “this combination of colour, composition (or any visual component at that) agrees with me,” or “even I could do that” (as some may say) when viewing Rothko’s infamous colour paintings, but all of these statements waste breath when only considered at face value. Instead, using resonance, interest, and even dislike in conjunction with the correct language— even if it is the criticism behind Rothko’s ‘simple’ glowing, colourful rectangles— creates a filter through which to define the ineffable; to define what it means to us personally. That is what a personal visual language is: noticing visual components, but then also interrogating them; perhaps realising that we actually couldn’t do that. In the example of Rothko, perhaps our creative compass then begins to point us in the directions of meditation, contemplation and curiosity as we realise that these deceptively straightforward paintings are an attempt to convey fundamental human truths. Universal as they are, definable they are not. Compelled by our understanding of visual language, we can be lead to new creative dimensions.

Irony and Ineffability

Your compass may still point in the direction of being a Rothko naysayer. It may not. Or, you’re probably a journaler that is looking for new prompts. Preamble about art discourse aside, how does all of this relate to journaling? Stick with me here.

The irony of describing the unparalleled ineffability of visual art whilst attempting to assert journaling– a writing practice– is not lost on me. Journaling is also a powerful mode of communication and the translation of the introspective. Irony and ineffability are landscapes that creative thought thrives in when it is questioned and challenged. The first rule of any mode of creative translation is that there isn’t one; technique and structure has its merits as an important aspect of how art speaks to us, but how can I claim something is indescribable, and yet also suggest you attempt to define such things by learning about the elements of art? What use is knowing the fundamentals? To using words to write in our journals about what has been deemed “indescribable”?

I will tell you: there is a great use. We must learn the pillars and foundations of any medium, whether visual or written in order to sequentially disobey them. We must know them, interrogate them, learn them, so that we may in turn deconstruct them. I believe the ineffable happens within the transformation of new, unbelievable things that we did not previously consider. That’s what the compass is truly pointing towards.

“There is probably no conviction more deeply rooted in modern aesthetics than this, that works of art express what cannot be expressed in ordinary discourse,” writes W.E Kennick in Art and the Ineffable1. The writer cites others to support this argument:

“D.W Prall puts it this way: Cézanne was not just painting trees. He was giving us the feeling of them with the spaces and lights among them, their fine delicacy in solid volume and relations.... Language cannot name the feeling here given; for language cannot reach, in these regions of light and color and volume, the specification that constitutes the quality of an actual, determinate, individual picture.2

John Dewey puts it this way: If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence.3

Mrs. Langer, to whom the conviction is dear, has most recently put it this way: What does art seek to express?... I think every work of art expresses, more or less purely, more or less subtly, not feelings and emotions which the artist has, but feelings and emotions which the artist knows; his insight into the nature of sentience, his picture of vital experience, physical and emotive and fantastic.”

How Does All This Relate To Journaling?

These philosophers and art academics clearly segregate the visual and written from each other based on what is achievable and accessible beyond words. I don’t disagree, but branch off slightly in thinking about how the “realms of the ineffable” and pursuit of creativity, in practice, don’t exclusively cancel one another out. I’m not a philosopher but I am a visual artist and writer that prioritises the intersection of mediums, and so even though this essay is an attempt to go beyond the normal understanding of where visual and written journaling converge, it is really my hope to stretch it as a medium. Creativity thrives in paradox, irony and I believe that is how the ineffable is accessed.

Our creative interests and tendencies aren’t really meant to be explained, simply accepted as what we enjoy simply because we do. The ineffable is so because it is the intrinsic, natural and unexplainable compulsion of combinations that tickle our brain and just make sense. But awareness and (an attempt at) contemplating what the ineffable means, and what our understanding of visual elements are, shouldn’t be sidelined. A lack of a calling towards visual mediums does not mean you do not have a visual language that is personal to you. The above arguments imply that, therefore, writers do not have access to the ineffable purely because of choice of medium. I beg to differ. Despite being a collage artist, and previously an oil painter, I cannot conceive of visual journaling (scrapbooking or creating artistic pieces based on prompts) being helpful to my creativity personally, but the way I combine mediums is by acknowledging that the analysis of and my education in visual art is infused heavily, and an integral part of, my writing. My writing simply would not exist without it.

This understanding motivated me to write the following prompts, using this article as a dual purpose: to educate others on the fundamentals of art (which was a question I received a lot after my analysis of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo’s works) and to allow journalers to access their own ineffability, when they may not be particularly drawn to creating visual art.

A Quick Picasso Case Study

Artists exhibit time and time again where “opposing” materials, topics or mediums intersect in unexpected ways, or are explored unexpectedly. I experienced this first hand in Hakone during my visit to the POLA Art Museum, in which a ceramic owl was staring beady eyed at me, a presence in the exhibit that I couldn’t pinpoint, until I was surprised to discover that the artist that had created it was Picasso.

In 1946, Picasso rescued an injured owl in Antibes, which he kept as a pet in his studio for several years. The bird became a symbol of watchfulness, but also provided Picasso with a versatile and sculptural form that could be conveyed across mediums. Picasso even went as far to collage a self portrait of himself as an owl:

It is a subversive and vital act to remain curious and attentive to alternative mediums in order strengthen our creative capacities, diversify our inspirations, and access realms previously unattainable. It is important to be curious and multidisciplinary in our approach to creativity, which is why an understanding of visual elements— especially when we journalers are not visual artists— can create expansive writing practices. Applying them not only goes beyond our journaling practices, but if we learn to write about what we see, we challenge the very form and shape of journaling as a mode for communication and translation. The communion of pen to paper, when infused with an understanding of visual elements, allows us to join our creative selves at the seat of the ineffable.

“Art describes what words can’t.” Says who? Let’s give it a shot!

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Prompts For Creativity Inspired By The 7 Elements of Art

Saying that “the elements of art are the fundamental building blocks” of visual art is the equivalent of saying “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. The seven elements of art (line, shape, form, value, space, colour, texture) allow for the creation and interpretation of art. Each element has different categorizations, and are components that can be isolated and defined within a piece. In this journaling exercise, we will be going through each element, analysing some art, and then succeeding these with journaling prompts.

Happy journaling!

1. Line

Line is an element of art defined by a point moving in space. It may be descriptive, implied, or abstract, vary in width, direction, and length, and be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, straight or curved, thick or thin. They lead your eye around the composition of an artwork, and communicate direction.

One of my favourite artists that utilise line in multidimensional and transcendental ways is Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.

A horizontal line suggests rest or repose because of the universal understanding that objects parallel to the earth are at rest. The lines clarify and separate sections of a landscape, and can suggest continuation beyond the picture plane. Stability, expansion, calm and distance.

Whilst the title of the above piece, Serenity, supports this type of reading, Čiurlionis cuts the canvas in half through the horizon of the water, which looks calm. However, the reflection of the hill on the right side of the painting has two vertical lines which are painfully obvious against the gentleness of the rest of the painting; the fires on the beach resemble the eyes of a beast.

✷ Prompt: Define the aspects of your creative practice that you are comfortable with. On the flip side, are there parts you are scared of?

Vertical lines communicate height and expansion of a spiritual nature. These lines, that are perpendicular to the earth, suggest rising beyond human reach and towards the heavens. This expansion is not of distance, but a representation of contemplation.

Where Serenity is a simple use of line, Čiurlionis used vertical lines to create grandiose. Creation of the World is a series, or “cycle”, of thirteen paintings, many of which exhibit intense use of vertical lines. Creation of the World XI in particular has an ephemeral and grandiose quality about it, layering a black wall with three towers. Behind them are two giant harps, and in the background are three even larger towers. Here, vertical line is used to create forms like massive harps and looming towers, but also creates a sense of upwards meditation reminiscent of the title.

✷ Prompt: Think back to a recent piece of creative work that resonated with you: what wisdom can you discern from it from both a contextual and intrinsic standpoint?

Diagonal lines create movement, of something already in motion. As these lines are neither horizontal or vertical, but are that ambiguous middle ground, we ask ourselves: are we falling, or rising?

Diagonal lines are oft used to paint natural forces such as waves, wind, and rain. In Sonata No. 5 (Sonata of the Sea) Final, the sheer size and force of the sea waves overwhelming the boats is achieved by diagonal lines.

✷ Prompt: Is there a creative project you have always dreamed of putting into motion? Describe in the present tense what the process of making and completing it feels like.

Curved lines are unpredictable and curious, and are slightly distant from diagonal lines because they can be in any direction and orientation, and instead of suggesting movement, they create energy.

Sonata No. 6 (Sonata of the Stars) Allegro feels like how my head feels when I use an electric toothbrush— energetic movement in all directions, a warbling vibration. Čiurlionis creates not only movement, but a cosmic landscape that is indefinable, dreamlike and playful!

✷ Prompt: In what ways do you invite playfulness and energy into your creative rituals and practices?

2 & 3. Shape and Form

I think it’s appropriate to combine shape and form together, as they share some components.

Shape possesses height and width, defined by a contour that can be created through line, colour, or value. Being limited to only height and width, it is two-dimensional and flat. They can be organic or geometric.

Organic shapes are irregular or asymmetrical, most often found in nature. Geometric shapes are mathematical such as rectangles, squares and circles. Both can be manmade.

One of my favourite examples of shape is The Lantern Bearers by Maxfield Parish, simply for how satisfying and whimsical the circular lanterns that the pierrot are holding. The use of shape creates a buoyant, weightless quality to the piece that highlights the transformative power of light as a symbol of resilience, whilst still maintaining a unified, playful and enchanting scene. The figures in the painting are believed to be inspired by classical mythology, evoking the timeless themes of beauty, grace and transcendence that circles oft symbolise.

In its fullest sense, the circle is a universal symbol for wholeness, eternity, and the cyclical nature of the cosmos. In Classical and Christian myths, the circle also represents cosmic justice, destiny, and the inevitable turning of fortunes— all seemingly ineffable subjects. In The Lantern Bearers, circles are used as a nod to sacred geometry, in which circle halos, nimbuses or mandalas, signify the aura of the protective power of the divine. It is incredible how something so profound can be communicated through shape!

When I think of an artist that has mastered the use of organic shapes, I think of Hilma Af Klint’s The Ten Largest, which is a series of “ten paradisaically beautiful paintings” that would “give the world a glimpse” of the stages of human life. These paintings are botanical, natural, abstract, and are composed of a myriad of organic shapes that resemble shells, pebbles, eggs, flowers, insects; a plethora of natural ephemera saturated in vibrancy. Klint’s use of organic shapes suggests a connection to the natural and become representative of the transformative and unpredictable nature of human development from childhood, youth, adulthood and old age.

✷ Prompt: When you were a child, what was your favourite way to express yourself? Explain a core memory associated with it, and how that medium evolved over time.

These pieces, when observed together, remind me about the storytelling aspect of art. In this way, the “ineffable” human experience and ambivalence is communicated without a central subject matter, and instead with intentional organic symbolism that feels both child-like and deliberate. These pieces, whilst exuberant, should not be deceptively thought of as mere shapes— they represent something much more beautiful.

✷ Prompt: What organic shapes that exist in nature inspire you the most? What does their shape teach you?

If you haven’t guessed it already, form is three dimensional. Also known as volume, it represents architecture and sculpture, but also the aspect of two-dimensional art that would suggest the illusion of dimension. Like shape, form also includes geometry within the three dimensional: spheres, cubes, cones. These forms enclose volume, consisting of height, width AND depth.

Some famous statues include the Terracotta Army of X’ian, Michelangelo’s David that sits in Florence, or the looming Christ The Redeemer in Rio di Janeiro, and whilst each of these pieces have grandiosity, history and faith at their foundation, I do not wish to discuss any of them to show you form.

Sculpture is a medium with profound impact, and ironically, one of my favourite paintings that depict this uses form to create a tableau, a time capsule, an inner glimpse into a sculptor’s workshop. Phidias In His Workshop, Carving The Statue of Minerva, was commissioned from Rafaello Sorbi by sculptor Giovanni Duprè. Two conditions were to be met: that the painting portray Phidias mid-work, carving Minerva, and a part of the Parthenon frieze in the background. Both Minerva and the Parthenon frieze portray form and are vital to the theatrical and romantic nature of this painting— grand works such as these were “not carved in situ by in the workshop.” The painting feels like a symbiotic ode to sculpture, both in the importance of actual three dimensional works, and a sculptor’s workshop being a subject of fondness, as commissioner Duprè personally identified with the figure of Phidias. Phidias was the artistic director of the Parthenon, and one of the most significant figures in ancient Greek artistry. Truly, I can think of no better artwork to depict the impact form has across the ages.

✷ Prompt: Tap into a corner of your imagination that remains “uncharted”. Why have you not yet given it form? What do you need to do in order to give it shape?

Still life is not just about fruit. There are actually multiple still life themes that portray the illusion of three dimension within the two dimensional, through the arrangement of inanimate objects. Vanitas or Memento Mori is a philosophical style responsible for those brooding symbols like skulls, hourglasses and candles, that represent the fragility of human mortality. Kitchenware and tableware create a unique blend of teacups, kettles, bottles, and other vessels, but my favourite motif in Vanitas are instruments, books, curtains, jewellery and globes. Form is created through how material such as silver and copper interact with light, which suggests three dimensions.

Vanitas Still Life by Edwaert Collier utilises form to create disarray; the objects in the painting are arranged in multiple X-patterns that attempt to create some cohesion, but the tipped over tazza and green-glass roemer are decorated elaborately. Collier focuses on the form of reflective surfaces, but there is also a sense of unity in this painting: “the pearls, the moneybag, the oil lamp, and the books look nearly as wooden as the violin and the shawn.”4

These objects portray wealth and individual intellectual accomplishment, with objects of learning being of particular emphasis to represent literature, music, and hobbies such as astronomy. Combined, these objects form an outlook that doesn’t need a skull, an hourglass or a candle a I previously mentioned. What makes this painting so interesting is that none of the usual Vanitas memorabilia are present, instead offering a monochromatic wash of items that will eventually be eroded like time, or whiffed away like smoke from a fizzled out flame; “like … days marked by an almanac, hours ticked off by a watch, a tune played on the shawn, and measures of music. A string on the violin has conspicuously snapped.”5

✷ Prompt: If there was a still life of your personal symbols, icons, or memorabilia, what would it look like? What message would it portray?

4. Space

Since we have touched on form being three-dimensional, it is sequential to continue with space. Whilst space in reality is three-dimensional, space in art refers to that feeling of depth, as well as an artist’s use of area. These areas are referred to as both positive and negative space.

How an artwork is received or interpreted can be greatly attributed to how an artist portrays the relationship of positive to negative space. The amount of negative space, if disproportionate to the subject, can suggest isolation, whilst a lack of negative space would infer chaos or busyness in a piece.

In The Death of Cleopatra by John Collier, positive space is granted to the three subjects in the foreground due to the lighter colours— we understand that these figures are the subject of the painting. Whilst the background has elements such as walls with hieroglyphs and looming statues in the receding darkness, this can still be regarded as negative space, as there is nothing that obstructs, or is equal to, the figure lying down in the lower half. Rather than isolation, negative space is used in this painting to a macabre nature. For the majority of the vertical length of the canvas, there is a stretch of darkness and lack of a focal point between the figure lying on the chaise, whom is presumably dead.

✷ Prompt: Write a creative ethos. What messages do you hope will survive you?

“Luxury and ruin meet face to face”6 where positive and negative space converge in the painting— which is notably incredible large at 3x4 metres! This creates a canvas that almost feels like theatre, a narrative painting that through its opulence, scale and dense shadows, portrays not only the dignity Cleopatra’s stillness in choosing death over humiliation, but also how her attendants remain “suspended between loyalty, grief, and ritual.”7 This suspension is inferred through the positive and negative space.

✷ Prompt: Do you view creative blocks as stillness or stagnation? In what ways can your creativity thrive when you take a break?

✷ Prompt: Choose one of your creative pieces and provide an alternate meaning to what you originally intended.

5. Value

Regardless of colour, value refers to lightness or darkness of a colour or tone, creating the illusion of form, depth, and most importantly, contrast. Strong differences between light and dark values stand out, whereas gradual changes make flat shapes appear three-dimensional. Value plays a role in unifying the piece (or the opposite!) and artworks that are high-value (lighter) have more positive associations than low-value (darker) pieces, which instead create drama and mystery.

The Sphinx is an almost monochromatic piece that is an example of the middle ground between low and high values. The predominant ochre colour is included in all elements of the painting, from the sphinx, the rock she is perched on, and the cave in the background. The sphinx is a merciless being with the head of a woman and the haunches of a lion, whom according to Greek myth challengers those who encounter her to answer a riddle, ultimately eating them upon their failure. The lack of contrast between values in this piece still gives form to the rock and the sphinx, but barely. Von Rosen uses value to camouflage his subject, showing how her deception and malicious intent is hidden behind her riddle. Is she a lion, or a woman? Is that a rock, or a sphinx ready to pounce?

✷ Prompt: What internal feelings are hidden in your creativity? Are they positive, negative, or a bit more complicated?

Another feline focused piece that shows value is Drei Katzen (The Three Cats) by Adolf Fleischmann. This piece shows a clear distinction between light and dark and the gradient of values creates three cats. The closer the degrees of value, the more realistic or defined the cats are, such as the one in the foreground, until you reach a silhouette where only the broader details of light and shadow can be distinguished in the last cat.

✷ Prompt: Write about two polarising or opposing aspects of your creativity. How can you combine them? Where do they actually share similarities?

6. Texture

Many of the pieces I’ve shared thus far have included texture: reflective surfaces, wood, stone, fur, paper. Smooth, rough, fuzzy, bumpy, furry, feathery, silky, buttery, glutinous, slick— these are all sensory adjectives that describe a tactile experience, because texture refers to the illusion of feeling.

In Andrey Remenev’s Roman Holiday, the two major elements in the painting (the geese and the woman) portray texture: the geese are silky, the woman’s skin is smooth, but her robe has fruit and vegetables embroidered on a metallic material.

✷ Prompt: Make a list of tactile adjectives that you associate with your creativity, even if they aren’t related to art at all.

7. Colour

And finally, we circle back to Rothko, whose use of colour is undeniable. The visual element of colour need not be explained, only observed, in a realm of its own ineffability.

When I reference Untitled, I could be talking about any of roughly 600 pieces. His catalogue raisonné include 836 works on canvas, and over 2,600 works on paper. A significant majority are either unnamed, or feature descriptive colour pairings or numbers that were casually assigned later. During an address at the Pratt Institute in 1958, Rothko provided a “recipe of a work of art”, with 7 specific “ingredients” for a work of art: preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit, chance and hope.

Out of all of the elements of art, colour is many things: the most universal, identifiable, obvious. All of the artworks I have shared thus far have colour, but Rothko’s colour fields are (almost) exclusively colour.

Rothko’s belief was that art should connect deeply with universal emotions.The key distinction to make is that Rothko painted to convey fundamental feelings, “basic human emotions”, rather than intellectual concepts. In this way, the ineffable is also the most simplistic. That is the power of understanding visual language— that it all, in some way, shape or form, eventually circles back to the human condition.

✷ Prompt: Write what the link between the ineffable and creativity means to you. Give it a colour. Describe that colour using only words.

Very rarely do the elements of art exist in isolation of each other. Our creativity has multiple languages. The elements of art are not a formula for making meaningful work, nor are they a checklist for interpreting it correctly. They are simply a vocabulary. Like any language, they become most interesting not when we recite them, but when we begin to speak with them in our own voice. We learn line, colour, shape, form, space, value, and texture not to imprison the imagination within definitions, but to begin listen to the intrinsic undercurrents that connect even visual and written mediums together.

We are all, in one way or another, collecting a private lexicon of images that point toward the same enduring questions. I hope that these prompts allow you to become more fluent in conversation with your creativity.

Happy journaling,

Jada

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Journaling Prompts For Creativity

1. Define the aspects of your creative practice that you are comfortable with. On the flip side, are there parts you are scared of?

2. Think back to a recent piece of art that resonated with you: what wisdom can you discern from it from both a contextual and intrinsic standpoint?

3. Is there a creative project you have always dreamed of putting into motion? Describe in present tense what the process of making and completing it feels like.

4. In what ways do you invite playfulness and energy into your creative rituals and practices?

5. When you were a child, what was your favourite way to express yourself? Explain a core memory associated with it, and how that medium evolved over time.

6. What creative messages do you hope will survive you? Write a creative ethos.

7. Do you view creative blocks are stillness or stagnation? In what ways can your creativity thrive when you are taking a break?

8. Choose one of your creative ideas or pieces and provide an alternative reading to what you originally intended the meaning to be.

9. What internal feelings are hidden in your creativity? Are they positive, negative, or a bit more complicated?

10. Write about two polarising aspects of your creativity. How can you combine them? Where do they actually share similarities?

11. What organic shapes that exist in nature inspire you? What does their shape teach you?

12. Tap in to a corner of your imagination that remains “uncarved”. Why have you not yet given it form? What do you need to do in order to give it shape?

13. If there were a still life of your personal symbols, icons, creative objects and memorabilia, what would it look like?

14. Make a list of tactile adjectives that you associate with your creativity, even if they aren’t related to art at all.

15. Write what the link between the ineffable and creativity means to you. Give it a colour, and describe that colour using only words.

Afterword

What’s your favourite Rothko painting? Mine is Untitled. Which one? I think 1962.

I hope you enjoy these prompts, and thank you for 4000 subscribers! My Whimsical Journaling Rituals has recently seen a surge in new readers, so welcome to the newsletter!

Please note, I create these exercises free of charge, as accessibility to a reading, writing and journaling life is important to me. If you enjoy these monthly prompts, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.

Thank you for reading,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work here

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

Welcome to May’s Bookmarks!

Previously known as my monthly reading list, I’ve rebranded these articles both in name and structure. I like to think ‘bookmarks’ sounds more whimsy!

In May, I couldn’t pick up the keys for my new lease until a week after my previous one ended, so I decided to spend ten days down south, and between the fireplace, the bathtub, and a cosy attic room, I got a lot of reading done.

My reading patterns for May included:

• Seeking out my idyllic reading environment in nature

• The lyricism, narration and fluidity of fantasy as a genre

• My reading hot take about romantasy and cosy fantasy

• Reading to deepen my knowledge as a tarot reader

If you have any winter reading recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Happy reading,
Jada

Everything I’ve read so far in 2026:

Books I Read In May

• Theodora’s Tea Shop – Christy Anne Jones

• A Wizard of Earthsea & The Tombs of Atuan – Ursula K. Le Guin

• Remarkable Creatures – Tracy Chevalier

• A Conspiracy of Truths – Alexandra Rowland

• Upstream: Selected Essays – Mary Oliver

• Tarot: Mirror of the Soul – Gerd Ziegler

• Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot – Lon Milo Duquette

Reading Patterns

Letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves: the idyllic reading environment

I did not read until well into May, and very far from home. Between one lease ending at the beginning of the month and another starting a ten-day after, I decided that the liminal space between moving houses would not go to waste; I would go somewhere where all I could do was read, read and read.

My idyllic reading destination followed three prerequisites: the cold, silence, and fresh air. If I wanted to be indulgent, a fireplace and a bath tub were added bonuses. These reading wishes lead me a four and a half hour drive away to the bottom of Western Australia; looking out at the sea meant that 16’000 kilometers onward you’d eventually collide with Antarctica. The beauty of Wadandi Boodja (The Saltwater People’s Country) and the native flora and fauna was not only the perfect place to read, but also an ambient companion to seeking out the natural world; the silence except for the laughter of kookaburras, the olive green glow of light flittering through gumtrees; the drop in temperature, unique to May, that makes you look up and realise “ah, autumn is here” with a breathy exhale that is visible to the naked eye.

In the selected essays of Upstream by Mary Oliver, I read of Princetown through the poet’s eyes; her delicacy in nursing an injured seagull; her relationship with the spiders beneath the stairwell; her love of literature. I bid good morning to the geese next door every day, with a warm cuppa in one hand and a copy of Upstream in the other, and I sat on a tree stump nearby, telling my goose friends Thea and Bo how much I hate moving house and that if I could spend all my time reading, I would.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The soft animal of my body loves reading. It lead me to the cold, the green, and the silent. Each book finds me at the precise moment it is meant to, and not a second before. What good would reading Upstream amidst moving boxes and the stress of the end of a lease have done?

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One of my favourite quotes from Upstream was the final line of the first essay, which set the tone for the essays that followed and became the focal point of my reading during my time away:

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

And so, on the first night of my stay, I left the windows wide, wide open, to listen to the crickets, the frogs, and the distant laughter of the kookaburras, the perfect playlist to Oliver’s prose. But really, what this moment meant to me was that I have always known what the idyllic reading environment is, and for once, I gave myself permission to seek it out.

Lyricism, narration, and the fluidity of fantasy

Two authors made me sit with my morning cuppa, staring at the gumtrees a bit longer than usual to think about how stories are told when it comes to the cadence of narration, achieved either through a writer’s style or through the voice of their characters. Cadence is created through mechanical elements (punctuation, sentence length, word choice) that create a fluidity that is particularly affluent in fantasy writing. I am particularly drawn to writing that has a mystical, fable-like rhythm, flow and pacing, like the following excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea:

“As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

This fluidity and fantasy go hand in hand. Le Guin’s writing is pragmatic yet enigmatic, and I read through two novels from the Earthsea Cycle, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan mesmerised by how well she harnesses mechanical components, and yet never writes a novel beyond 300 pages.

A Wizard of Earthsea was published in 1968— the transformation of a boy maturing into the wise Archmage is not a new concept— but Le Guin distances herself from anything else I’ve ever read within the fantasy genre because her writing reads with a fluidity that I feel is lost in modern fantasy.

In A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland, a wandering storyteller is charged with witchcraft and arrested in a foreign land. From his prison cell, he narrates tales from his travels, history, and myth to the five rulers of the country:

“There is a story in anything, if you know what to look for and how to frame it. If you can find the person who needs to hear it. That is my sacred calling— collecting stories and passing them along— but it’s not just myths and tales, it’s people, and the way people are.”

Rowland is beyond an apt storyteller because her main character, Chant, is also one. I was enraptured by this first person novel, where normally this point of view is lost on me. Not only was the main character enrapturing the five rulers with his stories, but me as well. The novel was interluded with fables and narratives, stories-within-stories told by the characters to each other. Storytelling becomes a medium that infuses with moral ambiguity and interpretation. Rowland’s writing reminds readers to not simply accept that they understand a story, but to question how they came to that conclusion. For myself, I am still staring at the gumtrees even after my holiday and having moved into my new home, but at the very least, I can say that the conversational lyricism of the stories told in A Conspiracy of Truths has something to do with it.

A reading hot take: modern fantasy is a commodification

Le Guin has written book reviews of the works of Italo Calvino (one of my favourite Italian magic realists) and blog posts about her cat Pard using the Time Machine attached to her computer, but the most impactful of her non-fiction has been her essays and speeches debunking the assumptions behind fantasy as a genre:

“Some assumptions are commonly made about fantasy that bother me. These assumptions may be made by the author, or by the packagers of the book, or both, and they bother me both as a writer and as a reader of fantasy. They involve who the characters are, when and where they are, and what they do. Put crudely, it’s like this: in fantasy, 1) the characters are white, 2) they live sort of in the Middle Ages, and 3) they’re fighting in a Battle Between Good and Evil.”

Le Guin’s writing creates a space where we can safely explore morality, power and freedom and rejects wishful thinking— to her, fantasy was not mere mindless escapism, but a vital instrument of ethics. Fantasy becomes an important genre when narrative is funnelled in this way, and in truth, the current assumption about fantasy that I heavily dislike is that quality fantasy needs to be cosy or romantic.

What I’m gently trying to say is that I don’t believe contemporary fantasy is making the cut. For me, anyway. Cosy and romantic fantasy are not genres I feel are interrogating and expanding the true power of fiction; they don’t read like magic, they read like commodification, and to Le Guin, “commodified fantasy takes no risks.”

In the foreword of Tales of Earthsea, Le Guin writes a scathingly accurate account of the current state of fantasy as a genre. This novel was published in 2001, the year I was born, and twenty-five years later, I’m reading this foreword and vehemently nodding my head. The current commodified ‘industry’ of fantasy feels like we’re stuck in a printing loop, or as Le Guin aptly puts it, “imitates and trivialises.” For someone that adores fantasy in many mediums, I hardly reach for contemporary fantasy novels because they are missing key elements of what magic means to me: fluidity, interrogation, curiosity and creativity. I don’t want cosy, I don’t want romantic, I want wonderful! Poetic! Fantastical! Perhaps the most common reference to a novel that does these things well is The Lord of the Rings, which Le Guin also commends the “rhythm of Tolkien’s writing” in one of her essays. She deemed Tolkien’s prowess to be a “cyclical repetition in his work, which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us." I believe there is a difference between the poetic nature of cyclical repetition and regurgitation:

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, Foreword of Tales From Earthsea

Another book in May that deviated from the tropes and predictability of contemporary fantasy was a lovely ARC of a book that I have been anticipating for a very long time, Theodora’s Tea Shop by Christy Anne Jones. Le Guin was correct in identifying that there are indeed assumptions made of fantasy characters— Ged, nor the majority of the characters in Earthsea, are brown.

“I have received letters that broke my heart, from adolescents of color in this country and in England, telling me that when they realized that Ged and the other Archipelagans in the Earthsea books are not white people, they felt included in the world of literary and movie fantasy for the first time. Worth thinking about?”

Theodora’s Tea Shop is a thoughtful novel that doesn’t rely on current fantasy tropes; the main character, an aspiring witch, has a chronic illness, which deviates from the assumption that main characters in fantasy are always able bodied. For a lot of the novel, she is unable to use magic– but this becomes her strength.

Both of these novels ignite curiosity and wonder, add new insights into fantasy as a genre, and as a woman of colour with a chronic illness, create realms I can exist in.

Reading to deepen my practice as a tarot reader

I have been a tarot reader for almost seven years, and with every new deck I acquire, there is even more reading and even more learning to do.

I’ve been trying to find a tarot deck painted by Andrea Serio for a long time, enlisting the help of my dad in Italy and asking him to scour Italian secondhand marketplaces in my stead. Last year, I came back home from Italy empty handed and rescinded Serio’s distinct art style as a far away dream; he painted only two tarot decks for Lo Scarabeo— one printed in 2001 (The Dante Tarot) and the other in 2004 (Stelle Eterne/Liber T), which was out of print by the time I turned six in 2007; my odds of owning a deck were very, very slim.

And then, at the beginning of May, I found a sealed version of the Stelle Eterne at a secondhand bookstore thirty minutes from home, right under my nose! Published in 2004, these weren’t the cards painted by Serio that I originally had my eye on, but when I saw them packed away at the back of the shelf, I recognised the art style instantly and couldn’t believe that after a cross country, multi-generational and bilingual search, I was able to acquire a deck that had never known another owner.

These cards are fashioned after the Thoth Tarot, which deviates from the usual Rider Waite deck designed by Pamela Coleman Smith that many are accustomed to. The Thoth deck was designed by Lady Frieda Harris, and caters to a different reading style that draws from astrology, mythology and geometry in conjunction with the rich symbology of the tarot. Although I have interpreted tarot for many years now, my new Stelle Eterne deck prompted further reading and the excitement of feeling like a beginner and learning something new again! I would readily recommend both Thoth guide books I read to learn more about my new deck, Tarot: Mirror of the Soul by Gerd Ziegler and Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot by Lon Milo Duquette, to anyone interested in the convergence of esoterica and art.

Reviews, Thoughts & Musings

Theodora’s Tea Shop by Christy Anne Jones

I have been following Christy’s journey writing Theodora’s Tea Shop since she uploaded the first writing vlog for it four years ago, and I have been a subscriber to her channel for double the amount of time, so to say that Theodora’s Tea Shop was my most anticipated book of 2026 was an understatement. Thank you to Hachette for providing me with an ARC copy!

This novel was a unique experience that unique to contemporary readers in the digital age, as Christy documented the entire writing, editing and publishing process of this novel (which was formerly referred to as Project Teacup) from beginning to end. Being able to witness over so many years how the sapling of an idea grew into such a charming and delightful novel was such a joy!

Theodora’s Tea Shop has been marketed towards “fans of Howl’s Moving Castle,” which I read and reviewed two books out of the trilogy in February. In Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie’s journey reminds us to give ourselves permission to love, experience, and create magic, but for Dorothy Louise Walcott in Theodora’s Tea Shop, readers are faced with higher stakes and far more serious themes, including how we process grief, the imperfections of found family, healing from abuse, and the strength of those that have chronic illnesses.

As a reader and writer that is chronically ill, the perseverance and tenacity of Dot was encouraging and refreshing. It was a massive comfort to read about a chronically ill main character in a fantasy setting, which surprised and really resonated with me personally. In particular, the following passage struck very close to home:

“Dot pushed through the throng of people, her vision smeared by a flurry of tears, until she found a concrete step at the edge of the square and sat down. She opened up her bag and, fingers tremoring, tried to pick out the shattered glass. Two of her blouses were ripped. She mopped up the tonic as best she could with her bath towel. Tiny insects swarmed the lampposts. The smell of pastry, pistachios and clotted cream wafted from a nearby street vendor. But Dot’s groaning stomach was tempered by humiliation.”

This scene reminded me of the day my chronic illness flared up in Rome, my phone’s signal failed and there was nowhere to properly rest, and so I hopped between churches, crying in the pews to collect myself before moving onwards, wondering if I should give up the day and return to my accomodation or keep going. I decided to keep going, and that tenacity meant I stumbled upon some Picasso and Caravaggio paintings; an experience I wouldn’t have gotten if I had just given up.

Another aspect of Theodora’s Tea Shop I enjoyed was the questions regarding identity– who do we choose to be, who we think we should be, or who we really want to be? Theodora’s character was a complex and intricate exploration of self preservation and survival, which made me question all of the times I’ve fragmented myself to survive:

“A thousand Theodoras lived in this room: a thousand hobbies and tasks and costumes abandoned partway through for something or someone else.”

The worldbuilding and magic system, laden with spirits, packet spells, sigils drawn in chalk, and a capital city infused with religious and magical history was colourful and vibrant:

“Four religions had been practised under the cathedral’s great dome. Incense had changed to idols and then to beads and then to silver. Four times, conquered. With each tumble of the crown, the great cathedral had absorbed the influence of its new inhabitants, along with the rest of the melting pot city.”

A brilliant and imaginative debut novel from a fellow Aussie writer, to which I applaud after years of hard work!

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

Read this if you enjoy Ghibli movies but want to read a higher-stakes, gothic fantasy. Whether you like the salt spray of the sea or the many sights and sounds of a booming city, Theodora’s Tea Shop reminds us that found family, and our own independence, must be fought for.

Books I’d recommend with found family and magic: Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianne Wynne Jones, The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J Klune

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Lyrical and poignant— I have not been able to stop thinking about A Wizard of Earthsea since I finished reading it because the vast expanses of the Archipelago and the journey of the young Ged into sorcery is of such a high caliber that defines high fantasy. I would even go so far as to argue that A Wizard of Earthsea is a pillar of fantasy— one of it’s founding mothers. Ursula K. Le Guin surprised me with this novel being my inauguration into her work, because it is equally one of my favourite fantasy books of all time and also the shortest fantasy book I’ve read; in a normal paperback version, the 56’000 words of magic and adventure equate to a mere 200~ pages. I believe the quality and succinctness of the writing— or to quote myself earlier, the “pragmatic and enigmatic”— is profound and unmatched.

“For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.”

Le Guin’s writing is fluid and magical, but what has drawn my adoration so vigorously to the Earthsea overworld is the Naming of all things. In Earthsea, true names are the language of creation, and represent the intense power of being known. To be fully seen and accepted as one truly is means that one can ultimately be known and a metaphysical dominion over them can be established. The “true naming of a thing” is the undercurrent that connects all of the novel’s major themes such as coming of age, identity and the shadow self, and cosmic balance.

This language, the Old Speech known by dragons, is an intense and omniscient power. True names, even between individuals, are not given lightly. To master a thing’s name is to master the thing itself. Wizards in training spend a long time studying the true names of almost every living thing in order to fully understand how consequential possession of a true name is, even down to the most minute things:

“To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. […] You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. […] It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”

As someone that has a fascination with words, and loved the concept of “words of power” in Skyrim, A Wizard of Earthsea has taken its place in my personal canon. You will be hearing from me with an essay once I finish the entire series. (Also, I just really like dragons.)

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars!)

Read this if you are intrigued by magic systems surrounding the meaning behind words, enjoy conversations with dragons and are interested in etymology and cosmology.

Books I’d recommend that are fantasy with strong narration: The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino. The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Witch King by Martha Wells, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

Whilst the second book in the Earthsea Cycle series was not as mesmerising as the first, as I write this review I have almost finished the third book, and so I do find merit in both the writing and storyline, and understand the importance of The Tombs of Atuan. This is a story about womanhood, identity, and the transition from oppression to freedom.

This novel is far more serious, sinister, and dark than the tales of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, deviating from his story to focus on the worldbuilding beyond the Archipelago. Le Guin does not mention any detail idly— the aforementioned Ring of Erreth-Akbe in the first book becomes a vital symbol in this book. Tenar, a young girl that is born in the Kargish empire, is taken at the age of five to the Place of the Tombs in order to assume the position of head priestess for the cult that worships the Nameless Ones. The titular tombs are explored across the book as a richly detailed and vast underground complex, shrouded in darkness, but they also exist as a physical representation of breaking free from oppressive dogma. Ged returns as a supporting character, seeking the other half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and in doing so, aids Tenar in seeking a new beginning beyond the tombs.

The contrast between Ged and Tenar’s coming of age stories is like light and darkness; Le Guin’s thematic coherence uses magic as a tool for maturity and growth to show that freedom is not only the physical act of traversing wind and sea, but also escaping from our deepest, darkest inner labyrinths.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ (3.5 stars)

Read this if you are planning to continue reading the Earthsea Cycle series. I wouldn’t recommend stopping here, keep going!!!

Books I’d recommend that are similar: Same as above.

A Conspiracy of Truths

With such a paradoxical name, A Conspiracy of Truths lies in the liminal space of telling a half-truth, or the valiancy of telling a white lie in order to save face. Storytelling is a paradigm of human understanding. We do not solely tell stories to entertain or convey, but also to influence, to discover, and in the case of the main character Chant, to conspire with the five ruling forces of a foreign land to be acquitted of his charges of witchcraft and espionage, both of which are considered heresy, and both of which are punishable by death.

Rowland tells an intoxicating and compelling story like a game of chess, full of political intrigue, deception, societal rules and regulations, and the austere movements society is restricted by, all from behind a prison cell. In the first half of the novel, the only physical movement Chant gets is from cell to courtroom to a different cell and then back to the original cell. But boy, can this old, wandering storyteller run his mouth. And that he does, telling fables to those who will listen as his only tool for negotiation and unlocking the chains that bind him.

The narration of this book was incredibly humorous, and in the same way the characters were mesmerised and at times manipulated by Chant’s storytelling, so was I! He was not an infallible or noble character by any means, but he reminded me how much power storytelling has.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

Read this if you enjoy the political intrigue of games like Dragon Age, are fascinated by the gem hierarchy in Steven Universe, or enjoy stories that have a sarcastic and humorous narrator that stirs the pot without lifting a finger.

Books I would recommend with unreliable narrators, a focus on language and/or political intrigue and society’s downfall: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Babel by R.F Kuang

Upstream by Mary Oliver

I loved these selected essays by Mary Oliver so much (which is very unsurprising) that I in turn wrote two essays of my own. Upstream, alongside A Thousand Mornings which I reviewed in March, helped me navigate my PTSD and depression diagnoses that I struggle with on the daily; writing that has the capability to do this is sacred. Beyond reviewing, I simply had to write about these essays.

You can find a detailed summary and quotation study of each section of Upstream here:

I’m listening to the kookaburra’s laughter on a late autumn afternoon with lamington crumbs all over my shirt, thinking about prose written by poets; a sublime and beautiful convergence; the kind of writing I aspire to create and live to read.

Or read my analysis of all 36 poems in A Thousand Mornings here:

When the magnesium tablets and the sleeping pills stopped working, I annotated all thirty-six poems in A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver. It was during these sleepless nights at the beginning of my PTSD treatment that I truly came to understand her when she said: “I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.”

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars!)

Read this if you need to renew your faith in the beauty of the world, need to touch grass, or connect with the natural world and your place in it.

Similar books I’d recommend about the natural world: The rest of Oliver’s oeuvre— nothing else compares!

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

My family and I collect pebbles and shells, lay them all out on a cloth after rinsing them, and pick out our favourites, and so when I saw a massive ammonite on the cover of Remarkable Creatures and read the description promising female friendship in the regency era alongside fossil hunting, I added this book to the pile of secondhand books I got from a book exchange thirty minutes from home. (The very same place I got the aforementioned tarot cards!)

Unfortunately, I found the story to be quite unremarkable. Maybe because the novel reminded me too much of a beloved friendship I had that I look back on fondly and yet cannot return to.

The novel is based off of Marry Anning, whom is perhaps the origin of the tongue twister “she sells sea shells by the sea shore” and made significant contributions to palaeontology and Jurrasic marine fossils. I enjoyed how the discovery of fossils was used to interrogate the infallibility of the church in regards to creation and evolution and I wish it focused more on the idea of two truths existing at once.

Rating: ✷ ✷ (2 stars)

Books I’d recommend about friendship and connection: The Perfect Circle by Claudia Petrucci, The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, The Door by Magda Szabo

Tarot: Mirror of the Soul by Gerd Ziegler & Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot by Lon Milo Duquette

Fantastic companion books to begin learning about the Thoth Tarot. I refer to Ziegler’s interpretations and explanations on the daily when I draw a card in the morning. I’m loving learning about the elemental and astrological influences the cards have!

Rating: ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ (Recommendation on a scale of 1-5, 4 ticks!)

Books I’d recommend about learning tarot: The Tarot Handbook by Rachel Pollack

Afterword

Since the weather has finally cooled down in WA, I can’t wait to get stuck into even more reading. I even marked the occasion by buying a new reading chair!

What are you reading at the moment? I would love some winter reading recommendations!

For now, I will be writing bi-weekly instead of every week to maintain the quality and regularity of my newsletter. At times, publishing every week happens so naturally, and at other times, it is entirely the opposite.

I am excited to be publishing some more journal prompts soon!

Thank you for reading,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work

^{Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:}

<sup>Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.</sup>

^{Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.}

^{Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.}

More writing on Leonora Carrington:

The Threshold & The Monomyth

Introducing the boundaries of mythic narratives, and how they can be crossed

To cross between spaces is both a physical and metaphysical act; ascending, descending, oscillating, traversing, colliding– a journey may be linear in having a beginning, middle and end, or going from point A to point B, but there is a multiplicity in how it reaches these conclusions. Voyages, journeys, epics, mythologies and odysseys are granted such status because they refer to both mental and material pathways: when we observe the liminal space between crossing from one place to another, this transition can be interpreted two-fold, in both mind and body. It is the collision of these forces that is the quest of the soul.

In physics, a threshold is the boundary or minimum point wherein a physical system undergoes a fundamental change in state, behaviour or property. Physical thresholds exist all around us– hurricanes require surface water temperatures in the ocean to be at least 26°C (80°F) in order to form; wind speed thresholds help identify and classify tornadoes; dams have a specific threshold of water before collapse.
A metaphysical threshold is not about physical transformation, but the magnitude and intensity that must be exceeded for a specific phenomenon to manifest. In Ancient Egypt, tombs and temples often featured a “false door” that would be carved into the western wall, symbolic of the direction of the afterlife. A baptism crosses the boundaries between an old life of sin and a renewed one of grace through being anointed by water.

The dual nature of ‘crossing the threshold’ reaches an equilibrium through the medium of narrative– that seemingly indefinable middle-ground except through writing; a physical act of forming words and constructing sentences versus the metaphysical act of the conception and creation of myth.

The monomyth is the penultimate framework of all myths, stories and legends, argued by Joseph Campbell to be the “universal structure of narrative”, where all stories meet. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell proposes that most mythological and storytelling traditions share the same genealogical ancestry. To summarise, the Hero’s Journey follows the Hero departing their ordinary world, entering the unknown, and returning after much trial and tribulation irrevocably changed.

“This first stage of the mythological journey … signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.” (Campbell)

Under the umbrella of three core acts (Departure, Initiation, Return), the monomyth is expanded into seventeen sections. There have been many interpretations and expansions of Campbell’s structure– The Call To Adventure, The Road of Trials, The Boon– and whilst these can be used in writing, perhaps they can be better interrogated against literary analysis as a way to help us make sense of even the most austere, surreal stories that exist on an incomprehensible threshold.

For the divinity of storytelling cannot be simply subjected to a monomyth. Nuance, expansion and experimentation are essential explorations in storytelling; the monomyth is not the only kind of tale to be told. The writings of Leonora Carrington, including her memoir Down Below and surreal novel The Stone Door are such examples that bend– even break– the singularity of the monomyth. Surrealism in the written form transcends convention, crossing thresholds with such multiplicity that it becomes mythopoeic.

Leonora Carrington: The Fragmented Hero

Prim, The Ambidextrous Bride of the Wind

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As a child, Leonora Carrington’s nickname was ‘Prim’, a moniker that humorously contrasted her rebellious and free-spirited nature that she shares with many of her protagonists. The Stone Door and The Hearing Trumpet (which has been intentionally omitted from this analysis) include an eccentric cast mirror her in different ways, whereas Down Below is an autobiographical memoir that installs Carrington in the first person. These books are the three pillars of Carrington’s oeuvre and are written as stories-within-stories. When converged and analysed, readers at the very least can deduce that it is Carrington herself whom is transposed as the Hero. All three works synergise in a way where ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ lose their meanings and instead stretch the monomyth to its limits. Carrington as character and narrator writes the scripture to her personal canon; a fictional, artificial mythology that creates new definitions for the space between thresholds and explores the surreal ways in which they are crossed.

The four interconnected layers of human understanding, experience, and consciousness are the physical, metaphysical, spiritual and mental planes. The plurality of Carrington’s work explores all of them with little definition between them.

Although ambidextrous and ambitious, Carrington’s writing is far more ambiguous, deceptive and puzzling than her visual art. ‘Easy’ is not the correct word choice for such an artist, but audiences can glean an understanding of the occult symbology and mystic iconography of her paintings with much more ease than the cryptic, self-indulgent nature of her words. For Carrington, words do not define the narrative (as the monomyth would suggest) but instead create an entirely new language that has no dictionary or key.

To understand the eccentric, ecclesiastical and enigmatic journeys of these books, looking to Carrington as the omniscient creator and Hero, simultaneously split between her characters, can open them up to interpretation within the framework of the Hero’s Journey. Carrington’s multiplicity means she is equally fragmented and whole through these characters, a piece of her soul infused into every detail of these novels to a degree that exceeds mere personal canon. Comprehending the human mind and the unique cosmology of our inner-most thoughts is an impossible feat, doubly so when it comes to Prim.

Carrington’s known world began at the Crookhey Hall Estate, a large, Elizabethan, gothic style building that the artist felt stifled by in her debutancy. This origin provided the principal material for many sites of captivity and punishment in her work– the vices that she would antagonise her many years later in life. Whilst her writing oeuvre is oft overshadowed by her paintings, words were not an entirely unpredictable hole for the Hero to fall down– the nuns of the Catholic convent she was sent to as a child were “disturbed” by the way she wrote backwards with her left hand and forwards with her right, which was a sequential idiosyncrasy as later in life she was known to paint with both hands simultaneously. Carrington grapples with the scales between written and visual, crossing the thresholds between mediums before anything else. But she did not do this to measure the weight or value of her work, instead gathering a unique outlook on the mystical, natural and physical world from this vantage point:

“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.” (Carrington, Down Below)

The Hero’s Journey, in Carrington’s eyes, are both macro, micro, and above all else, cosmic. For like Carrington’s odyssey, the true scale of the cosmos is immeasurable, its meanings indecipherable.

Carrington rejects her beginnings and her biography, summarised astutely by Marina Warner in the introduction of the NYRB edition of Down Below. “A lot of people want to make me into gossip,” Carrington once said in a furious letter to Warner, “and it’s missing the point of anybody to make them into gossip.”

Down Below: Crossing The Threshold Downwards

Katabasis through the Belly of the Whale, anabasis into the Empyrean

Down Below oscillates between the physical and mental journey of Carrington’s imprisonment in an asylum in Santander after fleeing from WW2. It is here that she would cross thresholds devoid of severe pain and a lack of autonomy, undergoing a course of Cardiazol therapy that induced harrowing epileptic fits.

The writing in this memoir is an unsparing account of induced insanity; of a katabasis; of a “voyage to the other side of reason.” Written in diary entries, Down Below has crossed the thresholds between language and interpretation, having been moved to and fro between French and English translations, which may account for the memoir’s disconnect with the rest of her writing as audiences struggle to resonate with its confronting nature. Carrington endured a perilous journey in Santander, a threshold that will always remain distant to the reader; the treatment was abandoned in 1983, but fell out of favour dramatically in the 1940s and 50s. Reading this memoir was akin to a descent into hell.

Katabasis (κατάβασις) is the Classical Greek word for ‘descent,’ or ‘going down,’ most specifically in reference to the underworld. The mythic figures Gilgamesh, Aeneas and Ulysses enter the gates of the underworld; Dante shivers through the arctic circles of hell in Inferno; Orpheus seeks to revive Eurydice by travelling to the hell and attempting to charm Hades and Persephone; Aeneas descends to learn of the destiny of the Roman Empire from his deceased father. This mythical convention of ‘going down’ is expressed in Down Below as both a descent into madness and physical torture. Carrington astutely chose a title that is reminiscent of these mythological and literary descents, assuming the role of writers similar to Dostoevsky and Rimbaud as the omniscient narrator, but simultaneously stating herself as a protagonist that makes the descent themselves. Down Below infers a duality of experiencing a katabasis as both observer and feeler, most closely resembling the Divine Comedy, where Dante Alighieri writes himself as the protagonist of his own descent into the nine layers of hell.

Carrington’s memoir becomes a container for multiple descents with the same diversity of katabasis in Classic literature– descent into insanity, imprisonment, derangement, torment, but also freedom and survival. Both Dante and Carrington, in writing themselves as the protagonist and harnessing the power of first person point of view, imply some sort of victory after tribulation. In the Divine Comedy, Dante journeys to the deepest layer of hell, witnessing the greatest sin before rising through three acts to the Empyrean, the highest heaven.

“We have to hang on. Even if the angel cries, ‘Let me go, let me go.’ We don’t listen. No. We have to hang on.” (Carrington, in conversation with Marina Warner)

Carrington’s description of her favourite biblical story, where Jacob wrestles with an angel, denotes a desperate struggle with the imagery of wings frantically wanting to take flight. ‘Let me go, let me go,” is a repeated plea, a motion of attempting to break away and being pulled back, hanging on amidst an ‘angel[‘s] cries’– a recoiling. In a colloquial sense, Carrington superimposes herself and the reader (“we”) to contrast perseverance against struggle, and seeking flight even amidst the intense burden of suffering.

Medium becomes vital in the communication of katabasis, and subsequently anabasis (Ἀνάβασις – lit. ‘an ascent). A suffering so severe, so terrifying could not be fully realised and overcome by Carrington except through writing. She still has the personality of swaying between fiction and non-fiction, for Down Below reads at times as hallucinatory as it does autobiographical, but this becomes a consequence of trauma, not an intentional artistic statement: how should someone go about explaining a suffering that supersedes “ordinary human dimension”?
“Once I have written it down, I shall be delivered,” Carrington confesses in the epilogue. “But shall I be able to express with mere words the horror of that day?”

“And so it happens that if anyone—in whatever society—undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him)…. In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are cleansed and humbled,’ and the energies and interests ‘concentrated upon transcendental things...” (Campbell)

The Belly of the Whale is the section of the monomyth where the Hero is to be (re)born inwards. Carrington’s “derangement of all the senses” does not bring about the breakthrough of rebirth, but does prime her for anabasis. Down Below reflects this ambivalence by describing such a hellish, harrowing experience in conjunction with Carrington– Prim’s– indomitable spirit. She is chewed up and digested in the allegorical “whale’s stomach,” crossing the threshold into the unknown and appearing to die in the “crooked lanes of [her] own spiritual labyrinth.” The labyrinth (or belly) in which Carrington is chewed and churned is the never-ending torture she experiences in the asylum. “I was caught in a labyrinth, like a rat,” she said.

Unfortunately for Carrington, Alighieri descended nine layers of hell. She writes of a “new era” following her first injection, which is not the rebirth that the monomyth envisioned:

“A new era began with the most terrible and blackest day of my life. How can I write this when I am afraid to think about it? I am in terrible anguish, yet I can not continue living alone with such a memory.” (Carrington, Down Below)

Anabasis in Down Below can be likened to Campbell’s Atonement With The Father, where the Hero faces their deepest fears and comes to terms with the fact that they will have to continue living:

“The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vase and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being.” (Campbell)

Writing Down Below was Carrington’s anabasis into the Empyrean, not only surviving her inner and outer layers of hell, but distinguishing herself from death as the Hero who is liberated by writing. “I reconstructed this image so that it might leave me. I [got] rid of everything my illness had brought me, cast out these personalities, and thus [began] my liberation.”

In the monomyth, very rarely do heroes decide to remain in the Underworld– Carrington did not. Writing Down Below was her anabasis into the Empyrean; after demanding to be blessed, Jacob let the angel fly away.

“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?” (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto XII, lines 95–96)

The Stone Door: Crossing The Threshold Sideways

The Zig-Zag of The Road of Trials and Duplicity of Apotheosis

The Stone Door is a “noise puzzle whose solution is another puzzle.” Carrington wrote the fiction she wanted, not the fiction she desired others to understand as allegory carries her as the Hero across the landscape of this novel with curious fluidity and ambiguous form, which likens to the Road of Trials in Campbell’s framework. This stage is integral to the monomyth, where the Hero faces tests of courage and resilience. For the reader, these tests include a dizzying attempt to decrypt Carrington’s internal canon, and for the protagonist, an alternative to anabasis that doesn’t ascend, but meets in the middle.

Instead of regarding Down Below as ‘left-of-field’ in comparison to her other works, which is a common criticism of the memoir, it can instead be seen as the contextual primer that allows the reader to experience and decrypt even deeper thresholds only possible within the surreal literary world of The Stone Door. It serves a (hallucinatory) factual purpose in representing how Carrington and her expression of surrealism undertake physical and mental journeys. From this context, The Stone Door is elevated beyond physical or mental, becoming the allegorical journey of Carrington walking between worlds– from the “regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land etc.)” as “free fields of projections of unconscious content.” (Campbell)

Carrington, through the protagonists of The Stone Door, undergoes the Road of Trials, Apotheosis, and ultimately rises as the Master of Two Worlds.

“An answer is lying somewhere, if only I could read.” (The Stone Door, p. 30)

At its core, there exists a dual narrative in The Stone Door, where two opposing characters experience the monomyth in tandem, an inversion that follows a surprisingly simple trajectory: the meeting of Zacharias and an unnamed woman (which we can project Carrington into) as they cross the metaphysical lands of Mesopotamia to reunite. This reads as a surreal metaphor for Carrington fleeing World War Two, being imprisoned in and escaping the asylum, and her eventual marriage to Chiki Weisz in Mexico City. The Stone Door was written at the end of World War Two.

Mesopotamia, the “land between rivers”, was home to the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. Carrington chooses the setting of her novel as a land where the formation of the first cities, the development of astronomical and mathematical knowledge, and spectacular artistic and literary accomplishments originated. The first great composition in history was written in ancient Mesopotamia (the Epic of Gilgamesh), originating from five Sumerian poems.

The titular Stone Door lies in the middle. In the first chapter of Carrington’s first novel, the writings of the unnamed woman are discovered by another character, Amagoya, who notes her strange disappearance. She writes of “Cancer. Tropic of (Mexico).” I find it no coincidence that Carrington uses geographical, astrological and historical references in terms of distinguishing place, mapping out the threshold that is to be crossed in the novel. The Tropic of Cancer is the Earth’s northernmost circle of latitude where the Sun can be seen directly overhead; it splits Mexico in half. Paired with Mesopotamia and the location of the Stone Door, Carrington refers to duality and separation, a surreal and saturated overworld that converges in the middle, once again overstepping the monomyth by meeting in the middle. She connects the first civilisation and Mexico to make a commentary on a joining that supersedes time, an ambitious and grand allegory:

“It is true that there is an infinite empty space somewhere beyond the Universe. It is equally true that that space is as richly peopled and inhabited as this very Earth. The space is dark, with no beginning and no end. The space is light, it begins, ends and continues like life.” (The Stone Door, p. 21)

The concept of the monomyth becomes very blurry within the dialogue of Carrington’s characters, like the explanation of time and space. Multiplicity exists within this quote, as Carrington acknowledges duality, beginning and end, but also refutes time as a construct:

“It is prejudice that makes us conceive time as a straight line, or as any sort of line at all, from a corkscrew to a zig-zag, or a circle, or anything really.” (The Stone Door, p. 36)

As the novel continues, it proactively revokes the Hero’s Journey as being circular or chronological as the monomyth implies. The Artisan is a character that Amagoya encounters deep within the forest in the second chapter. She is an entity that rejects the construct of time and labels in the same way that Carrington connects the ancient with the contemporary. Mesopotamia becomes a place where convergence is non-linear, existing devoid of time, location or matter:

“Time was invented as something strictly beginning and ending irrevocably, a long time after they made clocks. It is erroneous to think that two necessarily follows one and that twice three is eternally condemned to make six. I forgot how to count long ago because as soon as I reasoned a while I saw I had to start everything all over again, and real counting did not fit at all into the strict stiff rules mathematicians have for us.” (The Stone Door, p. 36)

As the character Amagoya follows the unnamed woman’s journey across Mesopotamia, flanking behind her through dreams, we begin to wonder as we get lost in the depths of this novel about Carrington’s true definition of “meeting in the middle”– if there is no beginning of end in her ethos, if an end does not necessarily follow a beginning, what journey does The Stone Door intend to take us on? Is the Stone Door ‘eternally condemned’ to never truly being understood? Does this story exist on a threshold beyond myth that only Carrington can access?

Carrington and The Artisan share the same voice in refuting the Hero’s Journey, but The Artisan denotes an essential part of it as well: Meeting With The Goddess. “Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known.” (Campbell)
It becomes difficult to interpret and analyse Carrington’s works, even with the preface of Down Below, because of how The Stone Door crosses thresholds beyond the monomyth, and even further into a realm that has no answers. The Artisan becomes another character that represents Carrington, whom had “test tubes and beacons containing tea leaves,” “cats of every kind and shape,” and “models of houses and gardens, astronomical and mathematical instruments in varied dimensions.” The Artisan, and therefore Carrington, are beings that are divinatory, scientific, eccentric, mathematic and creative simultaneously; a divinity unreachable to readers.

This blend is harnessed by The Artisan as she revives inanimate ivory dolls with milk, regarding herself as the messenger between them as “Mercury” who “speaks to Ivory.” Part of the mystery behind Carrington’s work is the doubling and multiplication of characters, symbols and objects. Milk and ivory, symbols of science and life, are combined through an astrological force– Mercury is the planet of communication in the language of the stars, something that Carrington convened with often. Whether these layers confuse readers is irrelevant to Carrington, as in The Stone Door she hopes to create her own language, one of both oppression and revolt, of paradox. Carrington traverses beyond the monomyth by “disrupting and subverting the old language.” She chooses to write her own prophecies: the Stone Door will open “under the sign of Fire and Air, Ivory and Milk.” A disgusting cocktail, to which she adds “Urin, the microscopic ocean.” Gross.

Distaste aside, The Artisan is able to resurrect the dolls (ivory) with milk, and the conversation between them finally defines what the Journey in The Stone Door entails:

Artisan: Where are you, Ivory Doll?
Second Doll: Let me in, Let me in, I shall die of cold.
Artisan: Since you are alive, why are you amongst the dead?
Second Doll: I am seeking Air who passed through Mesopotamia.

(The Stone Door, p. 41)

This conversation creates clarity as it links with a previous diary entry of the unnamed woman:

“Try as I would I could find no way to open the door. I kicked and knocked and shouted: “Let me in, Let me in.” [...] I was bitterly alone in the land of the dead, on the wrong side of the great stone door.” (The Stone Door, p. 29)

We can now articulate that the goal of the Second Doll is the unnamed woman’s monomyth. Seeking to reunite with someone, her journey remains incomplete, and her conflict of not knowing how to open the door not only infers that finding the door is the least of our concerns in the Hero’s Road of Trials, but allows readers to cross into the threshold of a different understanding of The Stone Door where we question the validity of the concept of meeting in the middle. This tale becomes one not of convergence, but of accepting that two things can exist at once in a land that has no definitions and no thresholds.

The Stone Door is finally understood to be the “Door of Kescke” that is in the “country of the dead.” Kescke is Hungarian for goat, an animal that is a prominent figure in both the Major Arcana and astrology and representative of The Devil (XV) and the sign of Capricorn. Carrington painted her own renditions of the Major Arcana, and her interpretation of the fifteenth card is an artisanal display of the dissolution of binaries; the Devil being both human and animal, male and female, and a symbol of liberation against others who attempt to take control of one’s destiny. Both here and in Down Below, Carrington alludes to the turbulent journey of katabasis and anabasis in terms of one’s own autonomy, linking the intense ordeal of surviving and escaping the mental asylum to the journey of the unnamed woman seeking to open the Stone Door. Carrington was able to achieve her own personal anabasis through writing, but with only one condition of the prophecy fulfilled, the unnamed woman is left crying out on the other side of the door. If anabasis is not fated for the unnamed woman, why did Jacob let go of the angel? What part of Carrington is still stuck down below?

The figure that Jacob wrestles with is shrouded by the murky waters of interpretation; Carrington refers to them as an angel in her personal recollection, but in major traditions, this struggle is read in a myriad of ways. Some deem the parable as being representative of a struggle with God or the Divine; a confrontation with one’s own inner demons; a continuous struggle between ego and spirit– was Jacob wrestling with God, an angel, or himself? A door has two sides, and myths are called as such because they can have more than one interpretation. Even Carrington’s Devil Major Arcana acknowledges contraries and the dissolution of binaries, and this ethos is especially present in her writing.

“Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and I am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?—a feminine one, a masculine one, some?—several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars.” (Helen Cixous)

Ecriture Feminine refers to a unique style of writing characterised by disruption, coined by Helen Cixous in her essay The Laugh of Medusa. It is eccentric, incomprehensible, and inconsistent, and the difficulty to understand it lies in centuries of the suppressed female voice. Instead of explaining themselves in the “language of men”, writers like Carrington experiment heavily with language, writing and speech, crossing the threshold of understanding into dubious meaning. Carrington does not write about the linear nature of entering and exiting, but of places beyond every threshold of human understanding (physical, metaphysical, spiritual and mental) and into the vast unknown, with the only compass in The Stone Door being Fire, Air, Ivory and Milk and Carrington’s own personal canon.

“I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history-by her own movement.” (Helen Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa)

Carrington writes “by her own movement” through her own interpersonal occult allusions and iconographies. The prophecy that holds The Stone Door together depicts two opposing elements joining, like oxygen fuelling a flame. In tarot, Fire and Air are active energies that support each other; Air pushes fire forward quickly, breathing life into its goals, whilst Fire brings the flame of inspiration. As prophesied, the unnamed woman cannot open the door alone. While The Artisan resurrected two dolls, readers only begin to uncover the identity of the second character following the unnamed woman’s failure. Where her monomyth pauses, Zacharias’ begins, continuing to age in the overworld and assuming his Journey much later in life. Although katabasis has been the thematic undercurrent of both The Stone Door and Down Below, anabasis feels like an almost impossible feat for Zacharias and the unnamed woman, as she waits in dreams for him to cross Mesopotamia to meet her. When neither of the characters are going up or down, neither katabasis or anabasis, what threshold is sought to be crossed when they seek to join in the middle? Carrington displays true surrealism within the dimensions of writing by creating a moving diorama of magic that opposes and transcends the stagnancy of the monomyth– singular in its unique approach, but always plural.

The First Doll is a Jew seeking “Fire, who is also a Ram, a woman.” Following Zacharias’ introduction in chapter four, the book begins to deepen its exploration of polarity across multiple thresholds than simply meeting in the middle of Mesopotamia at the Stone Door: the meeting of masculine and feminine energy; the overworld and underworld; the land of the dead and land of the living; the dreaming and waking world; logical and illogical; primitive and embryonic; Fire and Air; Aries and Libra.

The two astrological signs Aries and Libra are the keystones to the prophecy.

Zacharias is a boy from Hungary sent to boarding school who has frequent nightmares, plagued by indecipherable dreams. Symbols and objects are passed between characters in The Stone Door with little context like the batons in a relay: the first meeting of the clandestine lovers is when they are children in a dream, where Zacharias gives her “five iron nails, a stick of cinnamon and a skein of black wool.” She is singing a song:

“Buj buj Zöldag Zöld Levelecske. . . . Open, Open little green leaf, Open, Open great stone door, You are the black ram, I am the black ram, it is dead so I am no longer I but you are I and I am you. Secret Enemy, we have quit the first house and have entered the fifth in the dark water.” (The Stone Door, p. 61)

In many Hungarian villages, the annual traditions surrounding the Pentecost include choosing a Pentecost King and Queen, and also the Zöldágazás which is a symbol of the renewal of nature. The festival also includes children’s games of song and dance, such as Buj buj Zöldag where children form a “golden gate” with their arms that others pass through. Carrington adds this folk song to Zacharias and the unnamed woman’s love story to further prophesise their meeting.

This song returns when Zacharias is much older, travelling across the overworld and Hungary (that “shares a frontier with Mesopotamia) with five horsemen:

“Sweet Love, Dear Love, Eternal Love, listen to my rhyme, Buj buj Zöldag, Zöld Levelecski. [...] Stone, ivory, milk, wood and iron but where My Love are Fire and Air?” (The Stone Door, pg. 89)

Carrington, unsurprisingly, was an Aries– the “black ram,” “Fire.” Chiki Weisz was a Libra, “Air.” Carrington had a keen enthusiasm for astrology, and in The Stone Door describes her commitment and marriage to Chiki, following an intense journey fleeing WW2 and the asylum, as having “lived through the twelve houses.” “Through the twelve houses we will pass,” is her way of describing living through all phases of life together.

In utilising astrological archetypes as opposed to any logical categorisation, Carrington’s characters reach Apotheosis: the revelation of the Hero’s highest self as they break “free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes.” For the unnamed woman, her highest self can’t be achieved in solitude, which is why the Stone Door in Kecske will not open for her:

“Wise King open the stone door, now I understand the black parrot’s dying words. Man must open the door for I am impotent. Alone I am a pitiful and incomplete creature.” (The Stone Door, p. 71)

What Lies Beyond The Stone Door

The Master of Two Worlds and The Fool

“Mesopotamia, huge arid cemetery, whose cities are tombs, whose trees are shaped lions and astrological artifacts. Holy, Holy Land, so holy that it is infested with prayers in the form of black butterflies swelling to the size of turkeys’ eggs and forged with the life of the Mesopotamians; for seven decades their vitality has been sucked down the gullets of black butterflies. Even the wind is dead, leaving the prayer wheels motionless; the prayer wheels which once spun like tops. Facing this embalmed country across the mountain and ravine you lived, My Love, in a country of trees and snow. “The stone door is closed against me, let me in, Oh my Love, let me in.”

I reach the dubious end of my own Hero’s Journey at the point where interpretation begins to collapse beneath the weight of Carrington’s multiplicity. The final frontier of the analysis of The Stone Door lies in its conclusion. Up until this point, I have attempted to organise a large portion of Carrington’s oeuvre into coherent structures: threshold crossings, katabasis and anabasis, the architecture of the monomyth. Whilst I cannot stress enough how sincerely and seriously this undertaking has been, the irony of applying any semblance of order to Carrington’s work is not lost on me. Her work resists containment. I have been bested.

Jonathan Eburne wrote of Carrington’s own sincerity, and when contrasted against my own ambition, makes me out like The Fool, or even the figure in her painting The Juggler:

“Even at her most seemingly sincere, Carrington’s tongue is always in her cheek; this ironic distance suspends the magical thinking [...] whose instabilities render it virtual rather than propositional.”

I jest a lot that The Stone Door is both “my favourite romance novel ever” and “the final boss of Carrington’s writing,” and my journey in decrypting this body of work is summarised astutely not only by Eburne, but by the writer of the afterword Anna Watz:

“Indeed, the nonlinear, fragmentary, intertextual, and Möbius-like structure of Carrington’s work undermines readings that attempt to lock the symbolic imagery into fixed and unified meanings.”

This resistance is most apparent in the conflicting endings of The Stone Door as it crosses between translations. In French, the novel concludes with the invocation, the threshold remaining suspended in possibility:

“Ouvre-toi, Porte de Pierre. Open, Door of Stone.”

In English, the door opens at the end, only to slam shut once more:

“A hot wind charged with dust, cinnamon and musk blew behind him from the country of the dead. The great stone door, Kescke, swung rumbling on the wind and closed with a crash. Zacharias, rowing with all his might, followed the sheep west.” (The Stone Door, p. 110)

The ending for each of the protagonists subverts from the monomyth: Zacharias who rows after a flock of sheep, and the unnamed woman who remains stranded behind the door. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, there is the re-crossing of the threshold, to which signifies the closing act, but The Stone Door does not end with the anticipated synergy of the two protagonists in either language. Katabasis and anabasis may be present in Carrington’s writings, but neither version of The Stone Door grant the catharsis that the monomyth demands. Where does that leave her?

The question is no longer whether the Stone Door opens; in Carrington’s cosmology, meaning does not reside in resolution but in multiplicity– a ‘multimyth’ that exceeds Campbell’s framework. The possibility of opening and closing, ascent and descent, liberation and entrapment, are all simultaneous. The monomyth is dependant upon progression– departure, initiation, return– but Carrington destabilises linearity as time folds inwards, realities split and multiply, overworld and underworld overlap, and narrative becomes less a path than a shifting star that looks different in every sky.

As Marina Warner writes, “Through the journeys and the sufferings her writing transcribes and transforms, Leonora Carrington held on, sometimes laughing wickedly, sometimes fighting mad.”

Beyond the monomyth lies a realm accessible only to Carrington herself: a space where painting and writing, myth and memory, and autobiography and hallucination converge. She becomes what Campbell might call the Master of Two Worlds, whereas I remain a fool, Master of None, juggling mismatched puzzle pieces, fighting mad before the stone door and listening to her laugh from beyond it.

Read more of my work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magus, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

More writing on Mary Oliver:

Previous quotation study:

I’m listening to the kookaburra’s laughter on a late autumn afternoon with lamington crumbs all over my shirt, thinking about prose written by poets; a sublime and beautiful convergence; the kind of writing I aspire to create and live to read.

Mary Oliver’s selected essays in Upstream read more akin to a prose poem than an article, which sounds contradictory, but could not be closer to the truth. Instead of simply telling you, let me walk you through all five sections of this book.

“The prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels,”1 and yet Oliver’s writing not only balances both, but synergises them. Despite being more widely known as a poet, Oliver’s writing is not precarious; it is a most precious undertaking. She writes from a perch of observance and interplay– the five sections in Upstream are mosaic, a hybrid between prose and poetry.

Oliver references her admiration of Emerson, who wrote The Poet, an essay that was based on one of his lectures in 1842, published in Essays: Second Series in 1844. Emerson defines the poet as the only individual that is capable of articulating the transcendent nature of things, the poet being one who can identify “symbols” and “emblems” of the world.

Emerson writes of the poet in this essay as one who “stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing of metamorphosis… his speech flows with the flowing of nature.”

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named, yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature […]

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.2

Really, all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem. Like stanzas, unravelling the sections in Upstream piece by piece create an insightful view of Oliver’s views on the microcosms and macrocosms of writing, poetry, inspiration and the natural world.

Emerson’s essay The Poet reveals to us the true prophetic and sublime powers of the poet and their metamorphoses; Oliver takes it a step further in Upstream, admitting us to a “new scene” – the prose that could only come from the mouth of a poet, and one step nearer to the inner workings of my favourite poet of all time.

The first section is an ode to reading and writing.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes Oliver in the first essay, to imply that reading and writing are only possible when we look beyond ourselves.

Form and structure, storytelling and beauty– these pillars of language do not exclusively exist when we talk of literature, but also nature:

“I quickly found for myself two such blessings– the natural world and the world of writing: literature.”

My lamington crumbs and I understand these joys intrinsically, especially when Oliver refers to them as the “gates through which I vanish from a difficult place.”

To Oliver, the “beauty and the mystery of the world” exist upon to planes, both material and immaterial: “out in the fields [and] deep inside books.” Currently, I am looking out to hills and hills of West Australian bushland in Wadandi Boodja, the Saltwater People’s country, mulling over my thoughts on this book, and nodding my head in agreement.

This section continues as Oliver writes about how writing, literature and nature offered deep companionship amidst a difficult childhood. From these origins, she writes about the developmental learnings of creative work (writing and reading) as being “intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always.”

Reading both her novels and prose are a holistic journey, covering all corners of experience: intellectual, spiritual, artistic. Sometimes, certainly, always, definitively. “You must never stop being whimsical,” she says. I laugh with the kookaburras as if I’m totally in on the joke.

Observing nature is the primary focus of section two, but the structure of Upstream must also be acknowledged momentarily; both sections two and four detail Oliver’s acute sensory, spiritual and creative observation of the natural world through different lenses. We will begin with the macroscopic observations of section two, where Oliver takes an almost omniscient, bird’s eye role. Oliver was known to walk and write simultaneously, this idiosyncrasy was her method of developing a relationship with the cosmology of the natural world and her place within it. In section two, she speaks of the landscapes that surround her; the deep sea, the gladness of catching a fish (or not!); of blue herons “carved by Giacometti”. We learn of her first sighting of wood ducks in 1977, the spring morning of 1985 at Blackwater Pond, or the single hooded merganser that appeared one morning in March 1991.

In stepping back and observing nature fully, Oliver means to “enjoy, to question– never to assume or trample […] to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.

“Wherever I’ve lived my room and soon entire house if filled with books; poems, stories, histories, prayers of all kinds standing up gracefully to heaped on shelves, on the floor, on the bed. Strangers old and new offering their words bountifully and thoughtfully, lifting my heart. But wait! I’ve made a mistake! How could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life– how could they possibly be strangers?”

When Oliver asks in section two how “one can understand such timing, what curious sense does it make, in all happenings of the universe?” she answers in section three through the inquisitive, explorative nature of reading closely.

Drawing upon kindred literary souls like Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth, Oliver explores a new frontier within the realms of literary analysis, not only showing passion, exuberance and expertise, but an intimate look at her literary influences and inspirations. I, too, am repeating this pattern, in writing of Oliver so much that I have begun to regard her as a literary companion. After all, she once described the eyes of kookaburras as “the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs,” and from my spot beneath the gumtree, I think she’s right.

The third section of Upstream is sandwiched betwixt macroscopic and microscopic of the natural world, marking a distinct shift in the collection of essays. In section four, Oliver reveals more of herself to the readership through a compendium of smaller stories about the natural world which feel personal and intimate, as if she and nature are the same entities. These writings have more narrative structure and moving arcs, with a primary focus on one animal at a time: a spider building her web, a seagull at the end of its life, a bear in the town.

Oliver writes with empathy, choosing to clean everywhere in the house she shares with the spiders except for their home beneath the stairwell. When she brings back a young, injured black gull home from the beach, she “grew fond […] grew into that perilous place.” On her way to the owl’s nest, she “sees many marvellous things” but the barred owl is seen once, and once only.

In this section, the animals feel human. To Oliver, they become more than companions, they become new eyes from which she sees the world, whether from a large oak tree, beneath a stairwell, or upstream.

The final section, quaint as it is, is solely dedicated to Provincetown with a singular essay.

“I don’t know if I am heading to heaven or that other, dark place, but I know i have lived in heaven for 50 years. Thank you, Provincetown.”

It is a sweet ending, full of sentiment only a poet is capable of.

Sometime whilst writing this, the birdsong has simmered, the sun is below the horizon, and my lamington crumbs have blown somewhere far away in the wind. When it comes to poets that write prose, I lose myself completely to the undefinable soul of the universe.

I think I ought to have another lamington, or as Oliver would say:

I think there ought to be a little music in here.

That’s what happens when poets write prose; something musical; something as sonorous and joyous as laughter.

Read more of my work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Previous newsletter:

More writing on mental health and depression:

When the magnesium tablets and the sleeping pills stopped working, I annotated all thirty-six poems in A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver. It was during these sleepless nights at the beginning of my PTSD treatment that I truly came to understand her when she said:

I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.

Published in 2012, the poetry book explores “with startling clarity, humour and kindness, the mysteries of our daily experience.”
But to me, A Thousand Mornings speaks of salvation; within this quote, poetry and the beauty of the natural world become synonymous entities, the culmination of how Oliver “found the entire world, in looking for something.”

Oliver’s poems seem to counterweight the pills that I’ve developed a tolerance to. Insomnia and vivid nightmares are the unfortunate consequences of antidepressants and PTSD, which have become persistent bedtime antagonists that no amount of medication can abate. Her poems never outrightly state any hopes for deliverance or theological pleas for redemption; Oliver quietly observes the world, and in writing about it, is saved by it. In writing this analysis, perhaps I, too, long for the same thing. Or maybe a good night’s sleep.

A thousand mornings equates to roughly three years. I wonder, who is saved more– poet or reader? Oliver who “tried very hard to love the mangroves”, or myself, who tries even harder to love in spite of my diagnoses?

In Oliver’s poem I Happened To Be Standing, the final stanza reads:

But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be 
    if it isn't prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

Wrens are a key chorister in the dawn chorus symphony.1 Mornings, especially after a sleepless or terror filled night, are when my depression feels the most debilitating. But even from my own “sad, depressed, difficult place,” when I am annotating, I am listening.

What could this be if it isn’t salvation? Poetry. The beauty of the world. Hope that waking up on the thousandth and first morning becomes even a little bit easier.2

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Notes On Gratitude

In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare Music
Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep, 
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
                             I am grateful.

“It is all poetry, and not just one’s own accomplishment, that carries one from this green and mortal world– that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise– then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervour and desire beyond the margins of the self.”

– Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook

Two realities can exist at once; I can love the world and I can dread it. In A Thousand Mornings, Oliver does not objectively state what a good morning or bad morning is, and instead addresses the complex middle area that we must all come to terms with. In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare Music is the first poem I’d like to discuss that includes the reader in Oliver’s observations of a thrush passing through the forest. She migrates beyond the “margins of self” to imply that feelings of gratitude amongst the fleeting nature of time are universal. “I” is as much Oliver as it is reader– the rare music is in “our woods”. This is a comfort that makes me believe that when she is saved, so am I.

“I am thrilled, I am grateful,” the poem marvels. When was the last time I felt the same? When was the last time I stopped to notice?

This poem is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush3, where the title refers to a frail, old bird that surprises the speaker whilst he is walking with the gusto behind its song, despite there being nothing joyous to sing about. In both Oliver and Hardy’s poems, the thrush draws upon the motif of the singing bird in Romantic literature. This bird, “only passing through. His voice deep,” (Oliver) and despite being “shrunken hard and dry” sung in “a full-hearted evensong of joy illumined” (Hardy). Both poems address the fleeting yet hopeful nature of the thrush, of “some blessed Hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware.” (Hardy).

Walt Whitman, J.R.R Tolkien, T.S Eliot are all figures that reference this bird. Whitman uses the thrush as an extended metaphor for a grieving poet4, Tolkien uses it as a messenger of hope and link to listening the natural world5, and Eliot symbolises it as a catalyst for renewal.6

The thrush always seems to sing at the darkest of times, but Oliver removes us from the narrow blinds of self pity, and reminds us that gratitude comes from both presence and absence, shifting the narrative of the thrush and whether our perspectives skew negatively or positively.

The poem continues with a shift in the second stanza:

Then, by the end of morning,
he's gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.

There is a tonal arpeggiate between the first and second stanza that mimic the transition of day into night– where the first lifts like bird song, the second replaces it with the silence that follows. Listening to the thrush’s pitch increasing captures the singular feeling of gratitude rising in our chest, which is then replaced with a sense abandonment, mimicking the desolation of Hardy’s narrator. But where Hardy’s narrator resigns to their woes, Oliver challenges us in the third stanza– nothing lasts forever, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing:

And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler,
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone.

We accept the “sometimes” and the “rare” of the thrush’s song in the title for its fleeting nature, wherein it personifies the shift between balancing gratitude and accepting impermanence. Oliver reminds us, by alluding to composers like Verdi and Mahler, that like listening to the same music “every day, all day,” not only would it “exhaust anyone,” but it would lose meaning. Liminality is the reason why when we are grateful it feels like a crescendo.

In Our Words, Sometimes A Rare Music reminds us that low and high moments are in tandem with each other– the thrush singing and leaving the tree, ennui and gratitude, morning and night.

The Hermit Thrush by Thomas Wilmer Dewing is a painting that reminds me of the poignancy and wisdom of this poem through its composition: despite the title, the two women stand listening to the hermit thrush sing in the morning– there is no thrush to be seen in the painting. This purposeful exclusion and the careful selection of the title creates a painting that is about listening, not about seeing. In the same way, In Our Woods, Sometimes A Rare Music is about being still enough to notice the birdsong, not afraid of the silence once the thrush has flown away.

What We Choose To Pay Attention To

A Thousand Mornings
All night my fear makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing.

Every morning, I wake up with a decision to make: what will I choose to pay attention to? The birdsong? Or the dread in my throat?

Taking notes on Oliver’s motif of birdsong made me look forward to hearing the birds outside of my window in the mornings. Where I live in Western Australia, the song of willy wagtails in particular is my favourite.

A Thousand Mornings is a short but honest poem that not only I, but I’m sure many others can relate to; Oliver writes about uncertainty and spiralling in the evenings with such brutal honesty, that the arrival of the redbird singing is like washing my face with cold water right after I wake up. It’s sobering. It’s obvious. When we do and notice things that are good for us, are we ever disappointed? When I’m in the throes of depression and manage to take myself out on a walk to birdwatch, I tell myself: “why didn’t I do this sooner?” as I scope out the swans eating duckweed across the lake.

Choice and autonomy become the weapons that Oliver wields in this poem to notice things during our dark hours like the thrush’s singing in the glowing woods of the previous poem: the “light deepening” and the “wind easing” before delivering the song of the redbird with an air of finality that almost feels like Oliver is saying ‘I told you there is good in the world, you just need to notice it.’ This sentiment reminds me of the fourth stanza in her poem Sometimes from Red Bird that I reference a lot:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

The colour of a redbird has a vibrancy that is so stark against the night and set ablaze by dawn. Oliver does not attach an article (the or an) to redbird, it rules over the poem as the final word, a symbol of permanency against the shifting night into morning and the passing breeze.

A new dawn will always break on the horizon. Birdsong always follows. Pay attention! Be astonished!

Through all 36 poems, Oliver writes about how none of the thousand mornings will be the same. I hope that in three years, I wake up to notice the birdsong before my woes. But these poems collectively create a symposium for living; on some days I will listen to the willy wagtail’s song, and on others I may be too lost in my melancholy to notice. Such is the nature of taking each day as it comes. In writing about the beauty of the world, Oliver describes to readers this conundrum, comes to terms with it, but also jests with it, reminding us not to be swallowed by it.

This poem is about hope for a new day. It is that hope that eventually lulls me to sleep, pen in hand, dreaming of redbirds in place of nightmares.

Oliver’s redbird is far more forgiving than her personification of the sea in I Go Down To The Shore. This poem captures a different type of observance within nature’s indifference towards us, and honestly snapped me out of an intense brooding due to its honest, almost humorous callousness:

I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall–
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Where we decide to place our thoughts and feelings is a choice amongst all moving parts of the world. As the first poem of this book, I Go Down To The Shore sets the record straight: poetry about the beauty of the world doesn’t mean getting lost in the concept of ebb and flow, it means intentional movement. The shore in this poem does not “roll in” or “move out” without rhyme or reason.

Similar to A Thousand Mornings, Oliver writes about uncertainty, but the sea’s personification grants the assuredness of the redbird without the grace– “excuse me, I have work to do.” The image I have here is of Oliver, anxiously flitting between “what shall” and “what should” (a feeling denoted by the line break and caesura that catches the sentence midway) and her worries being dismissed by the ocean as if they are trivial. Perhaps this is Oliver’s way of saying what I mentioned earlier regarding the struggles I’ve had (and continue having) with my mental health; that the only way is through; the only way through is in the deep end, to a place where we can look back and jest with the version of ourselves laden with sorrow.

“Doing the hard work” and “putting in the hard yards” are concepts that I’ve only recently come to explore: my beloved friend, after I shared how difficult treating my PTSD was, described it as “the most vulnerable work of [my] life.” And she is certainly not wrong– depression and PTSD are crippling diagnoses in tandem with each other. But when I think of the ocean’s quip to the miserable Oliver on the shoreline, it’s bluntness in response to her stumbling, I think to all the times I’ve thought I wouldn’t get through something, and yet now look back on the other side of it. Neither of her questions are asked nor answered, because deep down, Oliver knows. Time passes anyway.

And so I continue to do the work; to do things that scare me; to do things I don’t want to do; to do things that disrupt my fragility.

I do it depressed; I do it anyway– it is my choice to make. Birdsong always follows.

On The Contrary: Being Gentle With Ourselves

Today
Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the beet in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

Since having to take a break from writing the past month, part of my melancholy is a sense of failure, of failing to show up for the things I commit myself to. I don’t only mean writing– I also mean getting out of bed, showering, eating– doing the things that I know are good for me. Where I Go Down To The Shore is quite blunt, Today is a gentle reprieve that Oliver regards as a necessity.

As well as writing extensively about mother nature, Oliver returns to the bees, the fish, and the gnats often as motifs that contribute to her reflections on humanity. Oliver joins them in their daily actions, using “flying low” instead of the colloquial term for solitude '“laying low.”

Today is devoid of guilt or the mirth of the ocean in I Go Down To The Shore. It lays out simplicity akin to the “bees […] rumbling” and the “fish leaping”– common verbs associated with these animals– to imply that rest is natural, as natural as the workings of the world around us.

Oliver takes on a persona akin to a bird that travels great distances. She infers taking a break from migration. “I’m taking the day off” is a relief to read and a reminder that my journey with PTSD and depression is not a major shift that must be undertaken in one go.

But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.

Rest in the final stanza becomes not only restorative, but productive. “Hardly [moving]” isn’t the truth. Oliver, in allowing the “voodoos of ambition to sleep” travels “terrific distance”. Feathers, the act of flying, and traveling long distances are ambitious feats of freedom, but the image of a bird resting in the middle of a great movement suggest that sometimes, the best thing we can do to propel ourselves forward is nothing.

I’m the kind of person that really struggles to properly wind down and relax unless I’m given “permission” to do so. This poem is just that: the world goes on, yes, but today, I rest so that I can try to fly tomorrow. Terrific.

There is another small poem that showcases Oliver’s whim that made me see the humour within my inner turmoils. After I Fall Down The Stairs At The Golden Temple encouraged me to continue chipping away at this piece at my own pace this past month whilst I had taken a break, to continue writing after ‘falling down’:

After I Fall Down The Stairs At The Golden Temple
For a while I could not remember some word
        I was in need of,
and I was bereaved and said: where are you,
        beloved friend?

Returning to my writing, even amongst my ennui, is like returning to a beloved friend and remembering the words I am in need of. I’m starting to understand how Oliver was saved by poetry.

The Stormy Trajectory of Healing

In truth, this is not my first rodeo with depression. This relapse has felt much more tumultuous, and my annotations of Hurricane felt like the trajectory of my mental health was being read back at me:

Hurricane
It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand 
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.

“It” is elusive. Oliver, who normally attributes importance to nature, begins this poem with an unnamed source whose behaviour is unprecedented. Wind tearing at trees, rain falling for days “slant and hard” are evocative explanations of a hurricane, but in the middle of the stanza, Oliver introduces a violent image: “the back of the hand to everything.” It is from this line that we as readers begin to think of this poem as a double entendre. The introduction of a body part means this is personal. Beneath the undercurrent of a hurricane, Oliver is talking about that it– something else entirely.

The beginning of the next stanza confirms this, where “one hurricane” is compared to “the other one”:

This was one hurricane 
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and 
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to 
everything. 

I don’t think Oliver is speaking about just an actual storm. She is talking about a return of something “of a different sort.” In the first stanza, Oliver is an observer to this natural phenomenon (“I watched”) but in the second transitions to beholder (“I felt”). This shift in perspective denotes depression: “my own leaves giving up and falling.” I know very intimately what this feels like.

And that’s when she repeats “the back of the hand to everything” in italics. A violent act, an act of betrayal, an ignorance, a denial. Depression feels like all of these things, especially when experienced a second time. This is familiar territory, where a year ago, my depression returned with double the intensity and on the bandwagon of an added PTSD diagnosis. This set back felt like my own mind was betraying me, like what that was backhanding me was my own hand.

But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Was she talking about the trees in the first two stanzas to begin with? No. She was writing of the other. That which is difficult to name, taboo in some conversations and confronting at the best of times: that “sad, depressed, difficult place” that sometimes even the red bird’s singing can’t penetrate.

In the final stanza, Oliver overcomes this betrayal through a shift in perspective. “Listen now to what happened to the actual trees,” she encourages, lifting us from our limited worldviews. In its final lines, Hurricane reveals to us that it is not a poem simply about our dark, difficult places, but about the transition out of them. There is a resilience and inevitability of Spring, and in writing about the transition of seasons after an intense storm, Oliver writes about healing. The trees “pushed new leaves” despite being in the wrong season, they “looked like telephone poles and didn’t care.” Even when they aren’t meant to, the flowers bloom carefree and inevitably. Despite what my depression tells me, there is no wrong time to start healing.

The leaves have gone through a journey in this poem, from “crawling back in the earth” in the first stanza to blossoming in the final stanza. What Oliver dreams of for herself is the blossoming after a storm.

Me too.

The transition of the seasons being a metaphor for depression and healing can also be observed in An Old Story:

An Old Story
Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake
in the valley of midnight or three a.m.
to the first fragrances of spring

which is coming, all by itself, no matter what.
My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have.
My body says, will this pounding ever stop?

My heart says: there, there, be a good student.
My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle
those soft white flowers, open in the night.

This poem introduces multiple elements that feel intensely familiar as someone that struggles with their mental health: waking up in “the valley of midnight” or that liminal space at three in the morning, the heart and body telling two polarising stories, and the inescapable desire to break free from these patterns.

PTSD very much feels like a fight between mind and body. Panic attacks at three in the morning have that effect, where my heart says: there, there, you don’t have anything to be scared of. (Or at least tries to.) My body on the other hand says: I’m not so sure about that.
The poem addresses this to and fro, and the natural inclination for our body to take over during difficult times, through the repetition and structure of a conversation. The body acknowledges the pounding heart, even if the heart attempts to soothe itself.

“Let me up and out,” the body in the poem says. “I want to fondle those soft white flowers, open in the night.” To me, this reads at our intrinsic desire to want good things for ourselves, even when it doesn’t feel like we do.

It reminds me of Oliver’s poem [] where she says:

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

I love white flowers, especially lilies. Depression is a dark place, but I can think of many beautiful flowers that only open at night: night-blooming jasmine, queen of the night, angel’s trumpet, moonflowers. It is a privilege to be awake at the same time as them.

In Conclusion: The Last Stanza of Hum, Hum

I will only transcribe the final stanza of Hum, Hum, because in closing, this poem needs to be heard from the source to really be understood. Oliver’s personal reading explains enough, as does the raucous applause when she finally looks up.

Listen to the full poem at the 7:41 mark here:

They were awfully little, those bees,
and maybe frightened,
yet unstoppably they flew on, somewhere
to live their life.

Hum Hum is a poem about the remarkable endurance of small things and signifies a shift in A Thousand Mornings. The observation of the mystery and joy of the natural world, that in which saved her, is replaced in this poem with a direct confrontation to the severe childhood trauma that Oliver faced. The natural world becomes a tool for expressing Oliver’s survival. When I speak of salvation, Hum Hum is the poem that articulates her words the most clearly.

Oliver uses parallels of a swarm of fleeing bees to her child self. They are small, scared, fragmented, and yet driven by the unstoppable instinct to find a home. They are singing and searching, fragile things that are naturally fortuitous even in the darkest of circumstances.

Joy and healing– salvation– is not something that needs to be earned, but sought out against all odds. This desire is as natural as the bees humming, as filling their little bellies with nectar and carrying it into the unknown. What an act of bravery, to carry the sweetness of joy and the blessings of existence in spite of fear.

When Mary Oliver says that she got saved by poetry and the beauty of the world, she does not deny a difficult life. Hum, Hum confronts the difficult and the frightening directly and reminds us that healing, joy, and living our lives are very much possible.

If the bees can do it, so will I, even if it takes me a thousand beautiful mornings to get there.

Read more of my work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar

Foreword

Apologies for the last two emails in your inbox! This reading list is the beginning of resuming to my normal publishing schedule (every Sunday)– I accidentally sent out incomplete articles a couple of times, oops! This burnout is really getting to me!

When April comes around, I always experience major shifts as a Taurus rising. Practically every year, nothing goes to plan, but also a lot of things also come to fruition. Usually, by the time May comes and the autumn weather seeps in, I manage to find my footing.

This year is no different. April was not a reading or writing month– I didn’t finish a single book and I didn’t publish any writing on Substack because this transitory period called for my attention elsewhere.

But I still found time to read in the pockets and containers of moments where it didn’t feel like the world was burning, which means I still have thoughts and things to discuss in this reading list.

We will be taking a different route, where I am excited to discuss the running thoughts on what I’m reading at the moment.

Happy reading,

Jada

Everything I’ve read so far in 2026:

My April 2026 Reading Forecast

Reading is a river, not a well

‘To be read’ lists and fulfilling numeric reading goals are an aspect of reading culture that feels never ending– why are we in such a rush to finish books? These quantitative aspirations see reading as a well to be filled, emptied, filled. It’s exhausting.

Reading is not a linear activity, it is an eternal companion; a bookmark or a dog-eared page is an open invitation, not a deadline. Instead of seeing it as a container to be filled, I like to envision reading as an act of fluidity, an ephemeral and transient medium that moves in unprecedented directions. I’m tempted to regurgitate the words ‘ebb’ and ‘flow’ here as the means of a better explanation, but let me instead expand on this analogy in a different way:

The physical act of reading is directional– left to right, right to left, top to bottom– but it is also a metaphysical one. Apart from the structure behind letters forming words, words forming sentences, sentences forming paragraphs, the transmutative act of reading lies in interpretation, going beyond the rigid framework of pouring and emptying– “reading between the lines”. I like to think of it more as a river; at times still but never truly stagnant; an eternal undercurrent moving faster and slower; water as a continuously streaming river that rejects the limits of a metaphorical, productive container.

In the fourth century, Chinese poet Su Hui wrote The Star Gauge (璇璣圖, Xuánjī Tú). This poem supersedes direction and arrangement, showing how expansive as opposed to restrictive structure can be. Within a 29x29 character grid, each line can be read forwards, backwards, horizontally, vertically or diagonally, totalling almost 3’000 different readings. When I think of reading as a medium instead of a singular act, the vast prowess and potential of the Star Gauge also comes to mind.

A star gauge is a spherical instrument used to calculate the motion of planets and stars. In the same way, how can we attempt to measure reading? We can’t! That’s why reading is a river, not a well; it takes on many directions, interpretations, iterations and transformations. Reading is something that can’t be restricted to ticking off a to do list, and in the example of the Star Gauge, it becomes so much more than that.

This month, reading as voraciously as I had previously alongside my responsibilities was an impossible juggling act, and so I just let it be. I had faith I could return to my books whenever I saw fit. There is always the potential to be lead in new and exciting directions when you take the time to stop by the river, fill your waterskin and check your map.

Parasympathetic reading and medieval fantasy

My nervous system was shot this month. I attempted multiple times to pick up the books I was reading, but when having my annual April/May existential crisis, words felt like they’d make my head explode.

Studies show that reading regulates the nervous system, but considering how stressful April was, I struggled to create an environment or headspace that was conducive of any relaxation. I have come to understand a personal symptom of burnout for myself is when my capacity to read plummets.

A massive part of my personal reading habits include annotations and analysis. When the body is in fight or flight mode, this is not happening. Luckily, I was drawn to an alternative: reading manga.

What I did manage to finish this month was all 14 volumes of Dungeon Meshi (ダンジョン飯) or Delicious in Dungeon and 16 volumes of Witch Hat Atelier. These are two medieval, high fantasy comics.

Where annotation was too overwhelming when in a sympathetic (fight or flight) state, Japanese comics created room for my parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system to connect to visual language. instead of complex literary materials, manga was a lighter medium that eased my nervous system. This impact was due to how the visual language of manga is connected to sensitivity and creativity.

I have written about balancing being both a visual artist and writer, and manga is another medium that mimics the ‘equilibrium’ that I was seeking. This month, I read 30 volumes across two different fantasy series. Dungeon Meshi and Witch Hat Atelier were fantastical, symbolic and magical stories with equally as magnificent artwork to match. Both of these series contribute unique elements to fantasy that becomes even more accessible through art. Where medieval fantasy as a sub-genre of fantasy is characterised by magic, knights and quasi-feudal societies, these series are also stories about autonomy and moral ambiguity. It was refreshing to access these themes alongside incredible art.

For the first three months of this year, my reading focused on literary fluency, but in April, my lack of reading words and instead reading pictures allowed me to focus on visual literacy– a lower stakes approach to storytelling.

(Still) reading about alchemy

Despite taking a sabbatical from reading, I was still inextricably pulled in the direction of alchemy. At this stage, picking up novels by authors who are also painters and occultists is not a coincidence anymore, and I was recommended Leonora Carrington by a bookseller, I knew to allow myself to be lead down whatever direction this conversation would lead me.

“I think you’d really like Leonora Carrington!” she said.

“I do, I’ve read almost all of her work.”

“Have you heard of Ithell Colquhoun?”

She initially recommended Colquhoun’s travelogue The Crying of the Wind: Ireland when I mentioned I enjoyed reading about landscapes, but Goose of Hermogenes was calling to me. I didn’t even read the blurb. The rain had just started to fall, and only when I got in the car to log it on Goodreads did I realise that it had been on my TBR since September of last year.

Goose of Hermogenes is a fictional and surrealist account of the stages of the alchemical Magnum Opus. It seems it is fate that I will always be pulled in the direction of alchemy.

Books I Read This Month

Books on my nightstand that I haven’t read enough to form an opinion of:

• Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot by Lon Milo DuQuette

• Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis

• Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

• Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector

• Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

• The Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin

Books still in progress:

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

• Goose of Hermogenes by Ithell Colquhoun

• Upstream by Mary Oliver

Completed/up to date:

• Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui

• Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama

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My Reading Thoughts & Reviews

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

For our book club, my partner and I picked up Project Hail Mary after we watched the movie for date night. In his words, he enjoys watching movies with me because he “witnesses the entire spectrum of human emotion.” Project Hail Mary made me laugh and cry in equal measure. The book is no different, with an added layer of personality due to the first person point of view structure.

From the same author that wrote The Martian, Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace who wakes from a coma on a one-way interstellar mission. How did he go from being a science teacher to an astronaut? The sun in our solar system is dimming due to “astrophage”, an alien microorganism that is infecting nearly every solar system. Tau Ceti is the only exception, and the Hail Mary ship that Grace wakes up alone on, is heading there to find some answers that could save humanity.

This is a story about communication, hope and humanity, and whilst the science and math tidbits lose me a little, it makes up for it with page-turning storytelling. It was most certainly a book made to be a movie.

And yes, I have very intense maternal feelings for a rock.

“♪ ♫ ♪!!!” he says. I’m pretty sure that was a squeal of glee.

Current reading progress: 55%
Reading experience so far: Amaze, amaze, amaze!

Goose of Hermogenes by Ithell Colquhoun

Esoteric journeys undertaken by female characters are my favourite tales, and Goose of Hermogenes ticks many boxes in my personal canon: it is a surrealist, symbolic and alchemic feat. My interest in alchemy lies in its representation of spiritual journeys and transformations, and this 1961 novel is structured around the 12 stages of alchemy that create the Magnum Opus. Goose of Hermogenes is a term from medieval alchemy for the Philosopher’s Stone, or the ultimate elixir that produces immortality. The association lies with the goose that laid the golden egg, symbolic of the culmination of spiritual and material perfection.

Within the context of Ithell Colquhoun’s classic fantasy novel, this structure serves as a metaphor of the journey of self discovery. Trapped on an enchanted island by her uncle, a young woman passes through the 12 stages of alchemical transformation to escape, denoting both a physical and psychological journey.

The fantastical and surreal nature of this book is placated within the first couple of chapters; so far I have encountered monks with wings and hybrid bird women, and compared to works by Leonora Carrington, I have found Colquhoun’s writing much more digestible. I suspect the more I read, the more multilayered this tale will become.

Current reading progress: 31%
Reading experience so far: Visionary, dreamlike, feminist fairy tale

Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama

Witch Hat Atelier follows Coco, a young girl that has been obsessed with magic ever since she was a little girl. After purchasing a magic book with her pocket money at a festival from an unknown vendor, Coco’s curiosity has grown ever since throughout her childhood, which has turned into an intense fascination with the arcane arts. Unfortunately for Coco, magic is kept under lock and key. For her entire life she has looked to the magic book with longing and separation, for only those born witches can cast magic. That is, until she happens to witness a witch casting magic, and realises that this whole time, the book she has cherished and all of the symbols inside can be drawn!

Whilst this series is still on going, I have been avidly reading chapters because of my interest in how this coming-of-age story explores creative responsibility, with a unique take on the term “knowledge is power.” Magic is seen as artistic creation, and Coco’s role as the main character challenges tradition and dogma, whilst also questioning the ethical implications of magic in the face of economic and political reasoning.

I am loving following along Coco’s journey as a witch’s apprentice, but also exploring the moral and ethical themes behind magic. Shirahama excels in writing a fantastic cast of characters, a well thought out magic system, and strong worldbuilding.

Reading experience in three words: Endearing, magical and hopeful

For you if: You want to fill the magic school gap from boycotting Harry Potter, enjoy metaphors about creativity and are in need of a coming of age story

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui

Delicious in Dungeon is one of the best fantasy stories I have ever read, and in my opinion on par with my obsession with Lord of the Rings. After failing to defeat a dragon that consumes a member of their party, a group of adventurers venture back into the dungeon to save them. Lacking funds and supplies, they survive navigating deeper into the dungeon by cooking and eating the monsters that dwell within, hoping to reach the dragon before the fallen party member is digested.

This series offers a unique twist to the fantasy genre– where it starts comedic and adventurous about the premise of surviving in a dungeon, the deeper their descent and the longer I read, the more I realised that the story evolves into more sinister themes about the moral ambiguities behind immortality and magic. Despite this, there were so many moments where I was clutching my stomach from laughter.

The story does not “reinvent the wheel” per se. Kui propels her story from common tropes and races within the fantasy genre such as orcs, humans, dwarves, dragons, griffins, chimeras, monsters and dungeons.

Reading experience in three words: Hilarious, offbeat and unique

For you if: You enjoy books like Dungeon Crawler Carl (minus the misogyny and racism) or play Dungeons and Dragons!

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Afterword

Not a day went by when I wasn’t thinking about the newsletter! Thank you for your patience whilst I took an unexpected break in April and accidentally sent out so many unfinished essays by accident.

But! I have been slowly chipping away at my essay about A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver and other writing that I am hoping to resume publishing as normal. I have wanted to continue my writing about mental health, which became more important than the newsletter in April (as I navigated my depression and PTSD.)

I have continually said to my loved ones that (alongside treatment) reading and writing is the way through.

Coming to your inboxes soon! In the meantime, be gentle with yourself, and thank you for reading,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar

Foreword

At the beginning of the year, I renewed my commitment to my newsletter with the goal to spend more time writing about what I’m reading:

“I don’t want to read a specific number of books, I want to remember what I read, ingest it, question it, answer it, sit with it, be excited about it, mull over it.

In a reading month, my goal is to spend as much time writing about reading as I do reading.”

I close March with ten books and upwards of 10’000 words sent out to people from across the globe, which feels fitting, as this month’s reading focused heavily on translation.

Here’s the rundown for March’s reading:

• Narratives revealed by translation: Getting through the International Booker Prize 2026 long list and reading works translated from six languages.

• Women & Writing: All of the books I read this past month were exclusively written, and predominantly translated, by women.

• Surrealism beyond the paintbrush: An exploration of the bounds of surrealism in writing as opposed to visual mediums, with a focus on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo in particular

• A wide exploration of genre: Mulling over poetry annotations, giggling at children’s picture books, knee deep in translated fiction (as usual) and swimming in new waters with a saga.

As this is my third Reading List for 2026, I am beginning to understand even more the important of continuing dialogue with books beyond the last page. One of the essays I wrote in March heavily featured quotes and unravelled notes from Why Read The Classics? by Italo Calvino, which was featured in last month’s Reading List. I am following a dynamic process of reading, reviewing, and writing that feels inherently natural to me– a desire path of sorts.

The conversations and ideas from reading and reviewing, summarised in these reading wrap ups, are preliminary conversations to even wider thinking. Who knows how my reading this month will influence my writing for April?

I can’t wait to find out. Happy reading,

Jada

2026 reading lists:

More writing about reading:

My March 2026 Reading Forecast

Surrealism beyond the paintbrush: Painters who write

In preparation for my essay Femme Surrealism and the Mystery of Creation, I did an extensive amount of reading about surrealist artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. In these two women, I found kindred souls as not only are they both painters, but also writers. (For those that don’t know, I am also a collage artist!)

This month, my reading explored the boundaries of surrealism in writing as opposed to visual mediums. With a particular focus on Leonora Carrington’s works Down Below and The Stone Door, I ultimately came to the conclusion that like her paintings, there were none.

Apart from analysing her paintings, listening to interviews, and reading essays about her, the only writing of Leonora Carrington’s that I had read was The Hearing Trumpet a couple of years ago. Back then, the dots didn’t seem to connect as vividly as they did in my analysis of her painting The Giantess. When seeking out her words once more, equipped with a new found understanding of her artwork, I described my reading experience of Down Below, and subsequently The Stone Door, as “now knowing what it feels like when my third eye opens. Nirvana.”

The reason behind this experience feeling like I had taken a blindfold off and could see, analyse and read surrealism with greater clarity and vigour was due to context. Down Below is Carrington’s memoir; albeit a bit left-of-field from what readers and viewers of her paintings are used to. She reminds us that at times, the most surreal and shocking experiences actually come from truth, from our inner insanities, from the inexplainable and traumatic things that happen to us.

Remembering her time documenting her psychotic breakdown, institutionalisation in a Spanish sanatorium, and eventual escape in 1940, Down Below recounts a world of survival:

“After the experience of Down Below, I changed,” Leonora remembered. “Dramatically. It was very much like having been dead. It was very clear, I was possessed. I’d suffered so much when Max was taken away to the camp, I entered a catatonic state, and I was no longer suffering in an ordinary human dimension. I was in another place, it was something quite different. Quite different.”

Medium is important here; where she was used to painting about her fantastical dreams, Down Below is equally a mental descent as it is a physical, a suffering so severe that it could only be fully realised in writing. Carrington still has her usual sway between fiction and non-fiction, and despite being known for painting dreamy apparitions in fantastical landscapes, the images written in Down Below recall a terrifying reality of war trauma and how women that were rendered ‘insane’ were treated only eighty years ago. How would someone go about explaining a suffering that superseded “ordinary human dimension”? In writing.

Context continued to inform my reading the further I read. Having experienced a katabasis of sorts– a descent into hell alongside Carrington– when reading her memoir, I was better equipped to keep my head afloat in what has been describe as her “most difficult” book. The Stone Door is a surrealist feat, and became a reading experience that challenged and inspired beyond painting. Surrealism within the dimensions of writing created a moving diorama of magic, and an ever evolving narrative that opposes and transcends the stagnancy of paintings.

Whilst I wanted to give Remedios Varo’s Letters, Dreams & Other Writings as much attention alongside this deep dive of Carrington, I have to wait for it in the mail. In the meantime, a lovely subscriber I was in conversation with about these two incredible women recommended Alchemy of a Blackbird by Claire McMillan. This historical fiction created a more grounded and realistic portrayal of these two women, narrating their friendship and experiences when they reunited after fleeing Europe, settling down in Mexico City. After hours reading their works and writing my essay on femme surrealism, reading Carrington and Varo as characters in a historical fiction was another way to interpret the magic these two women created together, bound together by the author’s inclusion of tarot in between chapters, nodding to the integral influence that the major and minor arcana had on their friendship and ultimately art.

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Narratives revealed by translation: Getting through the International Booker Prize & the other translated fiction I read

I am eternally grateful for translation allowing me to discover some of my favourite writers such as Olga Tokarczuk and Mathias Énard. Both have featured multiple times in the International Booker Prize list previously, which I am following closely this year.

From this year’s longlist, I read three books: Women Without Men, Taiwan Travelogue, and The Wax Child. Translated fiction provides a greater accessibility for narratives beyond my worldview, age, and living circumstances.

“Encapsulating a range of international experiences, with many drawing on real moments from history, the six books transport readers from Japan-ruled Taiwan in the 1930s to Nazi-controlled Europe during the Second World War, from magic and domesticity in suburban France in the 1990s to the turmoil and after-effects of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, from a brutal prison colony in a remote corner of Brazil to a strict patriarchal community in the Albanian Alps.

A diverse cast of richly realised characters including a suburban witch, a morally compromised filmmaker, a bloodthirsty prison warden, a sworn virgin with a new identity, a young novelist and her interpreter who share a passion for food, and a multigenerational family of Iranian emigrants.

The books are by a majority of women: five of the six authors and four of the six translators are female. The authors include an award-winning actor, a former youth worker and a writer of manga and video game scripts.”

– The Booker Prize’s statement re: the longlist

Only Taiwan Travelogue made it into the shortlist, which I unfortunately decided to DNF 20% through. Despite not finishing it, its composition, structure, and themes remain especially relevant with a unique take on the genre: Taiwan Travelogue is “disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer.” For translator Lin King, the translation of this book was a meta process. In an interview with Hairol Ma, King herself as the translator is able to provide a voice to explain this:

“The original novel has the fictional premise of being a historical text translated from Japanese into Mandarin, with Shuang-Zi as the translator, and therefore already has a lot of footnotes. With the original Taiwanese publication, Shuang-Zi even got into a little bit of controversy with some readers who’d thought the book was a genuine translated historical text rather than being entirely fictional. Because there was already a “translator” in the story, the structure allowed me to interject myself as a translator in the text in a way that’s not normally done in English-language translations, where there tends to be an emphasis on “seamlessness” that makes readers forget that they’re reading a translation at all. Adding on to Shuang-Zi’s footnotes, I was able to make the translation almost academic in a sense, and therefore a lot more precise. And because the story is about an aspiring translator, it feels like there’s more room to get really specific about technicalities like romanization with accents or including different pronunciations of the same words. There’s more room for translation.”

Whilst the story didn’t hold me, I thoroughly enjoyed diving even deeper into translation and the exchange between authors and translators. Translated fiction provides variety and accessibility in storytelling. I have written about my love of translation before:

“Translated fiction is a celebration of storytelling because readers are not only transported through the portal of a story, but also one that supersedes language and cultural differences. Reading has a linear trajectory for the reader, but translated fiction adds another layer through the conversion of language– diction, syntax, and culture. I cannot think of a more fitting celebration of literature for both writer and reader than with the added presence of a translator, where all of the above are expanded, challenged, and stretched.”

Sorry for all the massive quotes I’m interjecting here, but you get my point.

Other translated works included a spritely children’s book, Sato The Rabbit and an ARC copy of The Perfect Circle. These books brought my tally to reading six stories I previously wouldn’t of been able to, translated from Italian, Mandarin, Danish, Japanese, French and Farsi.

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Analysing all 36 poems in Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings: The power of close reading and annotating poetry

In an attempt to sleep better, I got into the habit of annotating poetry every evening as a way to wind down. Mary Oliver is my favourite poet whom I share a love of geese and swans with, and by the end of this month, I annotated every single poem in her poetry book A Thousand Mornings.

Mapping out my understanding of poems is akin to working out a mathematical equation. This is a process that happens as I am reading, and continues with each reread until either the page is full, or I’ve ‘worked out’ the poem.

“The idea must drive the words. When the words drive the idea, it’s all floss and gloss, elaboration, air bubbles, dross, pomp, frump, strumpeting.

– Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

This process, and reading poetry, was very on topic this month, as I wrote about the art of close reading. Most would be familiar with close readings in relation to poetry, as it is perhaps the most accessible way to close read. As I wrote in Reading Beyond Reviewing:

“A close reading changes the position of a reader from one of passivity (simply enjoying a book) to proactivity (engaging with a book). It is both a process whilst we are actively reading a book, and an act of transmutation afterwards.”

Expanding upon idea is the keystone of close readings, and when Oliver says that “the idea must drive the words,” this shows that meaning can be farmed from poetry. Unlike mathematics, there is not one definite answer, but infinite amounts of interpretations.

“Don’t close the poem as you opened it,”

she says. The person I was before annotating each poem, and the person I became after successively completing all 36 poems, are different. I did not close this book the same person as when I opened it.

In my review below I have included a link to her recital of A Thousand Mornings in 2012 at The 92nd Street Y, I highly recommend you check it out!

Books I Read This Month

• Down Below by Leonora Carrington

• The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington

• Alchemy Of A Blackbird by Claire McMillan

• All The Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie

• The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

• Taiwan Travelogue by Yan Shuang-Zi

• Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

• The Perfect Circle by Claudia Petrucci

• A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

• Sato The Rabbit by Yuki Ainoya

My Reading Thoughts & Reviews

Down Below by Leonora Carrington

“We have to hang on. Even if the angel cries, ‘Let me go, let me go.’ We don’t listen. No. We have to hang on.”

– Leonora Carrington in conversation with Marina Warner

Leonora Carrington’s description of her favourite story in the Bible, where Jacob wrestles with an angel until dawn denote struggle, an image of wings desperately wanting to take flight but being held down by the sheer grip of Jacob. ‘Let me go, let me go,’ is a repeated plea, a motion of trying to break away and pulling back, hanging on amidst an ‘angel[‘s] cries’ a recoiling. In a colloquial sense, Carrington superimposes herself and the reader (“we”) in the narrative to describe struggle, perseverance, of seeking flight amidst the weight of suffering.

Down Below, Carrington’s memoir, also acknowledges this struggle through the titular and narrative process that suggest the portion of her life between fleeing Europe and settling down in Mexico City, that dubious middle area between escape and destination, was as much a mental katabasis as it was a physical one.

This memoir is written in the form of a diary, for how else can readers truly understand writing as an act of remembrance, preservation and salvation if not from the source directly? Memoir becomes a secondary genre, still trumped by surrealism and in the blurry line between fiction and truth. Described as a “lucid retrieval and hallucinatory madness in a record that is the persevering work at the same time as the haphazard record of a patient,” Down Below is Leonora Carrington’s personal written account of her escape from her confinement in a mental institution in Spain.

This memoir is a container for multiple descents: into insanity, imprisonment, derangement and torment, but also, ultimately, freedom and survival. It also signifies a divide into a “plurality of self” – who are we, or what is left of us, after trauma?

Down Below sets readers up to continue with Carrington’s written oeuvre. A contextual primer in the form of a memoir that rejects the memoir as we have come to understand it.

As I said earlier, she reminds us that at times, the most surreal and shocking experiences actually come from truth, from our inner insanities, from the inexplainable and traumatic things that happen to us. How else can we transmute such horror, except in writing?

Reading experience in three words: Harrowing, katabasis, female madness

For you if: You enjoy Leonora Carrington’s artwork and want to know the context behind her paintings, experiences, and begin delving into her writing.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington

For fans of Carrington, The Stone Door is the final boss of her writings. It is a difficult, but rewarding read that combines intricate esoterica, symbols and alchemy we are accustomed to in regards to Carrington’s works, and lengthens them across a novella. What bolstered my reading experience and deepened my recognition, understanding, and forgiveness of difficulty was reading Down Below as a precursor. As stated before, Down Below is a fitting ‘contextual primer,’ in which helps the reader stay afloat amidst this surrealist book.

The Stone Door was “a noisy puzzle whose solution is in another puzzle,” wherein the more I analysed, the more I realised how vital an understanding of Carrington’s context was. This book was as surreal as it was hyperspecific; Carrington wrote the fiction she wanted to, not the fiction she desired others to understand. Which, as both a reader and writer that was challenged in this read, I can actually really respect. Her internal canon is one of ancient civilisations, magic, voyages between life, death and dream, and natural material.

I wrote an extensive amount of notes and annotations when reading this because of the sheer amount of pieces in the puzzle, but the core narrative of The Stone Door, actually follows a simple trajectory: the convergence of the two main characters, Zacharias, and an unnamed woman as they cross physical and metaphysical lands to reunite, inferred by Carrington as a surrealist representation of her escape from the mental asylum and eventual marriage to her second husband in Mexico City, Chiki Weisz.

The book is a winding navigation an occult, surreal and saturated overworld between Hungary and Mesopotamia that is full of both symbolic, natural and geographical obstacles that converge at the titular stone door. The book explores polarity and comparison, with allusions to the first civilisation and ancient cultures, Greek mythology, and astrology. Symbolised in the two main characters is the meeting of masculine and feminine energy, the land of the dead and of the living, Aries and Libra, rivers and mountains, dreams and waking, time and space, logical and irrational, primitive and embryonic, underworld and overworld.

Akin to Down Below, The Stone Door serves as a fictional and alchemical katabasis; one character ventures through dreams and the land of the dead, whilst the other ages in the overworld and assumes his journey much later in life. This poses the question, which way is a katabasis, when neither of the characters are going up or down, but seeking to join in the middle? Ultimately, The Stone Door is a vast landscape of eventual unity.

This was a sublime read that I am excited to analyse further in a (what will most likely very long) essay.

“It is more fruitful to approach her work as a mythical imaginary construct all her own… a unique symbology.”

– Gabriel Weisz Carrington

Reading experience in three words: Symbolic, esoteric, (oddly) romantic?

You should read this if: You would like to delve even deeper into Leonora Carrington’s works and life, want a challenging read to pick apart, and enjoy esoteric, religious and historical symbolism.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Alchemy Of A Black Bird by Claire McMillan

Sorry, I’m still not finished writing (raving) about Leonora Carrington!

In Alchemy of a Blackbird, the friendship between Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington following their reunion after fleeing Europe during WW2 takes centre stage. Claire McMillan writes historical fiction like no other, motivated by the whimsy and magical inspirations that the two women lived by with a fitting homage where their friendship is a catalyst for discussion about women breaking away from the surrealist movement. This transition is portrayed through Remedios Varo as she escapes France, finds her own personal voice through studying tarot, and becomes inspired to pursue painting what she wants to paint instead of selling fakes or working under commission.

But beyond making a point about femme surrealism, Alchemy of a Blackbird paints a portrait of artists supporting each other through companionship, mystical wisdom and encouragement. The deck referenced is the Rider Waite set designed by Pamela Colman Smith (who makes a cameo in one of the chapters!) and I loved reading about the two women doing tarot readings for eachother.

For beginners of tarot, this is a fun introduction to archetypes of the major arcana. McMillan’s inclusion of a description of the major arcana in-between chapters is vital to this story, as both women were heavily guided by the cards for artistic inspiration. Carrington actually went on to create her own major arcana deck, and Varo used a lot of tarot-adjacent imagery in her work. Tarot exists as a framework for the journey through life, and in Alchemy of a Blackbird, is utilised as a driving force that symbolises the trajectory of Varo painting commercially and being held down by her male contemporaries, to ultimately being equipped with companionship, alchemy and magic to reach new heights in her artwork and begin creating the “mystical work” she had always dreamed of.

Magic and art are not supposed to be exclusive like the surrealist movement’s segregation of women, it is supposed to be communal; this book shows there really is enough inspiration to go around for everyone.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“… From the river of moth dust we float on at night 
Hand in invisible hand saying 

Go and be 

Build your impossible fort full of secret magics 
Designed to let others in” 

– Epigraph in Alchemy of a Blackbird by Janaka Stucky

Reading experience in three words: Female companionship, tarot study, historical fiction

You should read this if: You enjoyed my Femme Surrealism and the Mystery of Creation essay! Jokes aside, you should read this if the height of female friendship sounds like making art and doing tarot readings together. (Literally me and my friends, it’s an added bonus that I love these two women’s art so much!) Those that like tarot, or are curious about archetypes, will especially enjoy this.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

All The Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie

Another unique historical fiction for March was All The Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie because of how this book layered composition, genre and tone. In her own words regarding the publishing journey, Tolmie is a “non-genre-conforming writer.”

My interest in this novella is two-fold as it is written as both a saga and a frame story. Sarah Tolmie layers these compositional elements with the fable of how horses came to Iceland, set in the ninth century. A frame story provides important context and key information for how a narrative should be read, essentially being a “story within a story,” and a “saga” is a form of medieval literature that translates to “what is said” in Old Norse. These stories “blend historical events of exaggeration and myth, focusing on the experiences of early Norse settlers in Iceland, genealogies, and various themes such as love, adventure, and conflict.”

A separation from travel as a narrative construct. The in-between of places and movement of characters is not the primary focal point. My curiosity about this aspect of the book led me to a fantastic and eye opening interview of Tolmie by Bryn Hammond:

“The book is explicitly in saga style. This means some telescoping of action, not the kind of detailed description of travel you get in travelogues or in today’s historical fiction. Travel in itself is not of interest in sagas: it’s a means to an end, and that end is making money. So it’s trade protocols, laws, ceremonies, personalities, all those things that facilitate strangers getting to know one another and working out their relations that they tend to concentrate on (those sagas about “wide-travellers” like Eyvind at least).”

Accompanying the horses in their journey back to Iceland are magicians, ghosts, apparitions, and hopefully, “non-genre-comforming-readers.” Unfortunately, All The Horses of Iceland is not my flavour of genre-nonconforming, but I can most certainly appreciate Tolmie’s rich research efforts and medievalist knowledge.

Reading experience in three words: Spectral horses, myth vs history, this song:

You should read this if: You enjoy medieval fiction and are interested in Nordic history and mythology, saga-style works and books that challenge genre expectations. (Or you are a fan of the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim role-playing game!)

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ (3.25 stars)

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Halloween came early, and even though March in Perth was scorching, The Wax Child by Olga Ravn was a chilling page turner. Gimmicky book review speak aside, whilst I am not normally a fan of horror as a genre, this book was a welcome expansion to my repertoire.

The curiosity and unnerving aspect of this book mimicked my experience reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind.

“I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and fingernail pairings from the person who is to suffer. I was borne by my mistress for forty weeks under her right arm as if I was a proper child, and my wax was softened by her warmth. After this time, she took me to a pastor; it was night, the church was dark and still, and he christened me, the wax child. I was an instrument [...] My wax mouth cannot be opened.”

In the first paragraph, Ravn writes of a narrator that cannot open their mouth. A wax child that speaks to soil, a conduit that tells the befallen tale of its creator Christenze Krukow, a real Danish noblewoman who was accused of witchcraft three times.

Witch trials are breeding grounds for superstition: blame, solidarity, truth, scrutiny, suspicion. This child inhabits all with an unnerving omniscience: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

For single and widowed women, North Jutland is a patriarchal society that is unafraid, and perhaps even bloodthirsty, to accuse women of witchcraft.

The narrator of this book becomes a representation of “he said, she said,” and fragility of solidarity, witnessing its creator seek community, only to be betrayed by it. Because of its abstract and obscure nature, readers never truly become privy to what the women were actually up to. What do we believe from whispers in the dark? When a man’s accusation of witchcraft is pitted against a woman’s plea of innocence, which party comes out on top? Was it witchcraft, or women attempting to break away from the patriarchy?

“They consulted their books of demonology, and there read: The woman is more easily tempted by Satan, for she is weaker than the man in body and soul … When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil …”

I think you already know the answer. Olga Ravn writes witch trials, channeled through the wax child, with the voice of a higher power witnessing visceral atrocities against women like no other. The demise of Christenze, and the other women, is a haunting recollection of a 17th century reality. The wax doll’s occultness creates a separation between truth and fiction, but I think about the eyes that actually witnessed women at the stake.

Reading experience in three words: Visceral, abstract, curdling

You should read this if: You enjoyed The Crucible or reading about witch trials, enjoy unreliable or dubious narrators.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ

The books I don’t end up finishing still have important stories to tell. Whilst Taiwan Travelogue failed to capture my attention due to its repetitiveness, it is a feat of translation as stated earlier, and I believe fittingly on the International Booker Prize 2026 longlist and the should be commended as the first Taiwanese novel to make the list.

Taiwan Travelogue is a “bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power.”

I won’t give this book a rating, as I did not read as far as to gauge if the dynamic of the friendship between the two women changed. Whilst I understand this book questions and challenges colonialism through the lens of interpersonal relationships, I found the characters to lack any interesting or unique aspects and instead were containers for colonisers and the colonised. The characters served their purpose in being representative of these opposing forces with the idea of being brought together through companionship and sharing food (each chapter is modelled after a dish in Taiwanese cuisine), but beyond that purpose, they felt empty.

My interest in the characters, their friendship, and what author Shuāng-Zǐ wanted to comment about colonialism was unfortunately lost in translation.

Reading experience in three words: Deconstructing colonialism, female friendship, food envy

You should read this if: You enjoy female friendship, food being used to dismantle colonialism and enjoy slower, slice of life style reads.

Rating: N/A (DNF at 20%)

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

An incredibly relevant and important book to read in 2026. Also included in the 2026 International Booker Prize, Women Without Men is an act of defiance against censorship. Written by Shahrnush Parsipur, this book was originally published in Farsi in 1989. Parsipur, a writer and producer of Iranian National Television and Radio, was imprisoned twice by the Islamist government: the first without formal charges for five years, and the second shortly after Women Without Men was published due to her frank account of women’s sexuality in Iran.

In this book, five Iranian women with distinct life experiences and circumstances are placed within coups and revolution, before converging together at a garden and “shedding their old lives like snakeskin.”

The “tale of modern Iran” employs magic realism to describe a circumstance where these women end up living together under a roof with no men. Parsipur writes about how women internalise patriarchal systems with a series of vignettes of each character.

This book lost points from me because of how explanatory it was, to the point of being too frank. The magic realism, alluding to Iranian mythology, was something I wish I could have appreciated more during my read of Women Without Men.

Reading experience in three words: Magic realism, politically relevant, female freedom

You should read this if: An author’s determination and the importance of talking about women within patriarchal systems inform your reading over the cohesion of narrative aspects and you’re interested in storytelling that not only calls out violence against women, but frankly shows how they could respond to the political and societal situations around them.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ (3 stars)

The Perfect Circle by Claudia Petrucci (ARC)

The Perfect Circle by Italian author Claudia Petrucci reads like an endless downwards spiral that makes us question: “how did it come to this?”

Whilst reading this novel which is set in Italy, I was reminiscing on lunching in Roma this time last year, trying to stare through the buildings from my spot on a piazza. Nosing a glass of riesling and nibbling absentmindedly on some cheese, I couldn’t stop wondering what was behind the shuttered windows left ajar to let in the height of the midday sun; watching the shadows grow on the symmetrical archways, cut up by iron bars; sitting on the stoop of grand wooden doors that looked as heavy and ancient as marble. That is the appeal of Rome: crooked cobblestones and curiosity. At home, cheese boards don’t quite feel like this. Here, in the afternoon sun, reading Irene’s story begin in Rome felt like my own round circle moment, perfected by memories of the promise of a riposo.

But this book was not a respite. I read it in the very early hours of the morning before another scorching hot day in Perth, where the heat keeps you indoors and unable to nap unless the aircon is assaulting you in the face. A mixture of dystopia, drama, intrigue, mystery was achieved through eerie and spacial writing that granted the reader the detachment of being a bystander alongside the intensity of being a witness, like watching a fire break out and feeling the heat on your face. The artful prose of Petrucci’s writing created a story that shocked me into contemplating a near-future version of Milan shrouded in fog, devoid of sunlight because of the festering effects of climate change. Of an alternate (but perhaps very real) reality where the next time I visited my family in Rome, I would be able to see behind those closed doors in exchange of never seeing the sun again.

In The Perfect Circle, readers are not given any answers as to how the world has come to be like this, but told a story of how regret, betrayal, greed and selfishness linger in physical spaces; the climate crisis’ impact on Italy is superimposed to a smaller scale in the round house on Via Saterna, Milan that sports a central skylight designed to shine three floors down. But Milan is shrouded in a chthonic, orange fog, and instead, the now useless skylight is the centre of a deeper narrative about time, death and repetition

What of a time when you could see the sun through the skylight? Unfortunately, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Until there is no sun, no home, no point of buying houses in darkness. Two narratives about two women separated by time, but connected by the house, alternate and circle each other throughout the novel. Eventually, like a spiral, the two stories converge in the middle.

Irene, a real estate agent based in Rome, returns to Milan when she is commissioned to sell a house on Via Saterna, a Palladian square housing a perfect circle at its centre. To avoid the scrutiny of her architect father, whom questions the morality of selling cultural patrimony to foreign bidders, Irene busies herself by avoiding her not-boyfriend in Rome, contemplating motherhood in this world, and scouring the house from top to bottom to achieve the impossible feat of selling it.

My curiosity sitting on the piazza is satisfied here, where Irene’s discoveries are told in chronological order, and the unfolding tale of Lidia, the house’s previous occupant, is told in reverse. The inverted narrative reveals what is behind the closed doors of the piazza: how and by whom the house on Via Saterna was built, and the mystery behind its odd layout. If the skylight wasn’t rendered useless by a sunless sky, it would have shined on the spot where Lidia fell to her death.

The entire narrative and composition of Petrucci’s writing is concentric. I was thoroughly impressed with how every single theme was added to this elusive whirlpool of mystery. The book begins with Irene’s return to Milan and Lidia’s death, and it transpires with the skylight as the radius closes in, further and further, like fog, fire and water; like a planet heating up; like the blaring quiet of an abandoned house. Except, in a crisis like this, abandoning Earth is not an option. So what of Via Saterna?

“The future is frightening without a home.”

I am thoroughly obsessed with this book, which will be published this week on April 7. I was also so pleased to find out that the author is based in Perth, and am hoping to connect with her so that I can continue writing about this book!

Thank you to the publisher, World Editions, for providing me with an advanced reader copy!

Reading experience in three words: Dystopian, round-circle-moment, legacy

You should read this if: You enjoy Italian drama, architecture and wonder what a world without the sun is like.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ½ (4.5 stars)

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

“The life I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.”

– The Red Book, Carl Jung

Mary Oliver’s poetry is perhaps the closest thing to divinity. The best way I can review this collection of poems is by describing the aftermath: I analysed and annotated all 36 poems and I look at every bird, every leaf, every ripple of the lake with Oliver’s words happening right before my eyes. I take stock of the water levels, I point out how high the river grass is growing to my partner, how many signets and ducklings survived the summer, how the jacarandas will remain green until October, where they will (briefly) turn purple.

Some of my favourite poems included:

• After I Fall Down The Stairs At The Golden Temple

• Poem of the One World

• The First Time Percy Came Back

• The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

• Hum, Hum

• The Way of the World

• Tides

• The Morning Paper

• On Traveling to Beautiful Places

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
– Upstream by Mary Oliver

I have just gotten a copy of Felicity, Blue Horses and A Poetry Handbook, so this review is very short because I’ll be writing about Oliver and poetry in April!

Reading experience in three words: Awe, grief, nature

You should read this if: You want to cry and laugh and lie on the grass watching the sky all day

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Sato The Rabbit by Yuki Ainoya tr.

Yes, I read a kid’s picture book. Yes, it counts. Yes, I loved it. No, I am not going to elaborate. Instead, you should totally read this article by .

Reading experience in three words: Comforting, cute, wholesome

You should read if: You do or don’t have children. Nurture your inner child, exhale, and remind yourself to be grateful for the little things in life. Put that extra sugar in your tea!!!!

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Afterword

I can’t believe there are 2400 people interested in what I read every month. I can’t wait to share this month’s writing with you all! This reading list actually knocked me out; remind me to write the reviews as I read the books, not all at the end.

As always, thank you for reading

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

My relationship with book reviews is the literal embodiment of “your biggest hater is someone you know” because I write book reviews and loathe them at the same time.

Don’t be fooled by this essay, this opinion totally comes from inadequacy. I still can’t figure out how to write a book review, try as I may!

Across my writing about how we enjoy books, I have discussed note-taking, written quotation studies and essays and also reviews. What encapsulates all of these modes of writing about reading is, in my opinion, reading closely. Close reading is a skill I explore in this newsletter: what does writing about books look like beyond a star rating?

This essay is for those that have an interest in book reviews, want to get into literary analysis and engage deeper with their reading.

Happy reading,

Jada

More writing about reading:

Previous newsletter:

On Book Reviews

For the longest time, book reviews have eluded me. I struggled to find worth in giving a book a rating within the parameters of five stars because it felt facile and constrictive; any less than five wasn’t quantifiable, but any more would spread my thoughts too thin. What constitutes a one star from a five star rating? What does the minuscule gap between four and four point five stars actually achieve? The current model and sheer simplicity of book reviews was unappealing to me as a reader because I was not the reviewer. Reading is a holistic experience that draws from multiple factors not shaped wholly by the words themselves, but by unique factors that form our own, personal literary landscapes; how books give shape to our future experiences; how they mingle with the past and our contexts; our personal paradigms for beauty1, enjoyment and value; the particular timing of when a book is read; our inclinations and idiosyncrasies.

My head begins to spin. The deceivingly simple framework of rating and reviewing books, of saying “this book is good,” or “this book is bad,” or “this book is not for me” becomes extrapolated, overwhelming, and dare I say meaningless.

I am relatively new to the review writing space, and so this confusion is born out of overthinking, but also from being a bystander, an outsider looking inwards. Since challenging myself to write reviews for every single book I read, I’ve reached a point where I have one foot in and one foot out.

In George Orwell’s 1946 narrative essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer, Orwell (who wrote upwards of 700 book reviews in his lifetime) states:

“[…] what meaning is there in the word ‘good’?

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, is […] to give long reviews– 1000 words at bare minimum.”2

The essay has a lot of humour and at times scathing opinions on the nature of book reviews in 1946. Eighty years later, I find myself with a similar discernment and chuckling in agreement with Orwell.

Every time I’ve sat down to write a review, an essay has come out instead. I have written short form reviews in my monthly reading lists, but it is the longer ones that capture my heart.

As an amateur reviewer, what I do know is this: a review that gives a star rating, a quip comment and a regurgitated summary of the book doesn’t achieve anything.

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A Reading ‘True North’

Italian writer Italo Calvino’s reading taste, in translator Martin McLaughlin’s words, was “omnivorous”:

“What Calvino read was often metamorphosed creatively, intertextually, into what Calvino wrote.”

“These essays demonstrate how Calvino consistently appreciated the five literary qualities that he regarded as essential for the next millennium: lightness (Cyrano, Diderot, Borges), rapidity (Ovid, Voltaire), precision (Pliny, Ariosto, Galileo, Cardano, Ortes, Montale), visibility (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert), multiplicity or potential literature (Borges, Queneau). Perhaps, then, a further definition of what a classic is could be added to the fourteen definitions put forward in the elegant title essay Why Read The Classics?:
’A classic is a work which (like each of Calvino’s texts) retains a consciousness of its own modernity without ceasing to be aware of other classic works of the past.’

– Translator’s Note by Martin McLaughlin, Why Read The Classics?

Why Read The Classics? is a 333 page, 14 clause list and 36 essay response to why it is important to read classics. Calvino provides acute literary criticism and personal analysis of some of the most fabled stories in human history with essay titles such as “The Odysseys Within The Odyssey,” a focus on “The Sky, Man, the Elephant” in regards to Pliny’s Natural History and Voltaire’s “Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity” to name a select few. Alongside this literary criticism is an interrogation of what we read, but also how we read it and why we enjoy it.

McLaughlin’s anecdote about Calvino’s reading patterns show a penchant towards lightness, rapidity, precision, visibility and multiplicity. For Calvino, these make up his reading true north. To add to this, Calvino’s essays also show a wide variety of reading with seven on English texts, ten on Italian literature, nine to French works, four to classical authors, and two each from Russian and Hispanic writers. He “held a high aesthetic regard for brief texts (of no more than one hundred pages)” and in the collection’s introduction, writes:

“[Reading can be] literally formative in that it gives form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which [..] operate in us.”

In this quote, Calvino acknowledges how reading “operates in us” and creates a comprehensive profile of what being a reader is– our contexts; experiences; memories; comparisons; what we find beautiful; how we organise the world; what is important to us. And so, reading (and therefore writing about reading) becomes an amalgamation of the above, combined with our personal reading tastes and resonances.

That is a reading true north. The invisible current that we will always be drawn towards and what it reflects back at us.

My Reading ‘True North’

‘True North’ is an idiom and metaphor not about physical direction, but internal, moral compasses. It is our personal orienting point; our fixed point in a spinning globe. Despite being popular in the 1990s in business and leadership contexts, when we observe writing about reading like Calvino’s and interrogate the current model of book reviews, its ideas around calibration and alignment, of following what feels right to us, can also be applied to reading.

My personal profile as a reader, and therefore how my reviews and wider writings are structured, begin through noticing a combination of syntax and thematics. These are the two driving factors behind my annotations, my own reading north star.

I like books with shorter chapters; I like books that make me feel hopeful; I like books that read like poetry; I like books about books; I like books with quirky old women as the main character; I like books written by women; I like books that are translated; I like surrealism; I like magic; I like literary criticism; I like polysyndeton; I like writing that challenges language; I like mythology; I like epics; I like meditations; I like geese and swans; I like space and the great unknown; I like wonder and awe; I like iconography and symbolism.

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Go down the rabbit hole, read books in thematic or energetic pairs, create mindmaps and research, open a concerning amount of tabs on your computer! Through curiosity and noticing what we are reading, how we are reading it, and why we are reading it, our own personal reading ‘true norths’ can grow akin to that of Calvino’s.

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”

– Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Going Deeper: On Close Readings

So, where does all of the above leave us as a reader? We are positioned at a crossroads: to write the witty, no-substance review, or to look a little bit closer with our reading true north in our back pockets.

Literary criticism, analysis, and engaged reading are a funnel. Book reviews sit at the top, but delving even deeper into the question “how do we read?” allows us to process our feelings and perspectives. When we pair the how with the why, a transmutation takes place that elevates the reader, reviewer and writer to engage in conversation about books beyond reviewing.

To read beyond reviewing, we must first change how we read.

So how should we read? Closely.

A close reading changes the position of a reader from one of passivity (simply enjoying a book) to proactivity (engaging with a book). It is both a process whilst we are actively reading a book, and an act of transmutation afterwards. This method of reading, and writing about reading, shifts reading beyond comprehension and the box of star ratings into the realms of analysis and interpretation.

One book read closely has far more value than ten read normally, which is why taking the time to write about what we are reading afterwards is important.

This explains my toil with the current surge of book reviews on Goodreads, Fable and Storygraph, because they feel like mere observation. Close readings allow readers to witness the process of creativity and provide them with a framework to experience the world.

In order to read closely, we must observe:

• Ideas and themes

• Representations

• Values

• Interpretations

and their relationship with diction, syntax and/or literary devices. Character, dialogue, plot, setting, and rhetorical devices all become magnifiers for interpretation, enjoyment, and reading closely.

For example, in “The Odysseys within The Odyssey,” Calvino is drawn to the framework behind journeys and how Homer’s epic, through memory, homecoming and the risk of forgetting, creates a universal tale of loss, and ultimately, return. He writes about this central idea by examining Odysseus’ antagonists and their relationship with forgetfulness, and also how storytelling serves the role as a medium for survival. This is the lens from which Calvino reads, and how he interprets and ingests The Odyssey. Homer’s poem, in this way, is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (despite it being a difficult read at the best of times) but to Calvino, it is an exploration of nostos (homecoming) and about defining oneself against the dangers of oblivion:

“Perhaps The Odyssey is the myth of all voyages? […] He simply recounted the same experience now in the language of reality, now in the language of myth, just as for us even today each journey we undertake, big or small, is still an Odyssey.”

The closing paragraph, and in particular, sentence of this essay illustrates the point of close readings better than I could explain it. It is “the question of attention.”3

When we read, are we paying attention to things beyond good and bad? Beyond us?

But HOW?

I will acknowledge that I haven’t really provided a framework or structure on close reading. Two-thousand words in, and I haven’t taught you how to close read, but simply declared that book reviews suck and that you should. Close readings are not a framework to follow, but an encouragement to develop critical thinking and “appreciate the aesthetic use of language; evaluate perspectives and evidence; and challenge ideas and interpretations.”4

This can be achieved in multiple formats because close reading is a method, not an instruction manual.

Noticing our reading true north allows us to resonate with specific ideas and themes within a text. Why are we drawn to this? Or even the opposite: why are we not?

Consider analysis as a funnel:

1. The idea, theme, or understanding you would like to focus on

2. Noticing your annotations and underlined passages that relate to the idea (this is your starting point)

3. Do these annotations (or, evidence) belong to any literary devices?

4. How are the pieces of evidence, both individually and collectively, contributing to the idea?

5. What does the author achieve by using the above?

6. How do you feel about it?

Through the process of reading closely, writing about reading can then take on many other forms of discussion: quotation studies, critical analysis essays, comparisons, presentations and above all else conversations. That is what a review should be: dialogue between readers.

A strong book review utilises all these elements to create discourse and discussion about the books we are reading. It is through discussions like these that, like Calvino’s interpretation of odysseys, we begin to have more expansive contemplations.

I’m not going to tell you how to write a ‘good’ book review, because that is entirely not the point; writing about books, in any and all forms, is as natural as the cycle of life and death. Yin and yang. Sun and moon.

Why I Write About Reading

“While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning the flute. ‘What use will that be to you?” he was asked. ‘At least I will learn this melody before I die.’”5

When I write about reading, I want to suck the marrow out of life; out of the indescribable combination of literature and words and ideas and reading with curiosity and zeal; to analyse and share and discuss with the same vigor, so that ultimately, reading may be as infectious as laughter.

I want to be laughing until I’m weeping and weeping until I’m laughing. Is that not the ultimate melody, when we read, write, weep and laugh together? Now that is an odyssey.

Afterword

I haven’t been writing on schedule this month; Sunday rolls around and I turn whatever draft I have written upside down and inside out. What I have been doing is writing much longer essays that require more research and time.

Turns out my scathing opinions re: the model of book reviews goes beyond venting and actually has some sauce to it. I had another essay planned in reference to Italo Calvino and Why Read The Classics? but felt compelled at the last minute to include it here because of relevancy. I have written about Calvino before, and will most certainly continue because I have even more notes and thoughts about WRTC? aside from this article.

So expect more writing about reading and more writing about Calvino from me in the near future.

Above all else, when it comes to writing this newsletter, I’d rather do it imperfectly as opposed to not at all. Thank you for reading and sharing this space with me; during my last newsletter I was celebrating 1000 readers and now there are (currently as I write this) 1700 of you!

Thank you for sharing this space with me and see you next Sunday (if I can get my schedule organised and stop posting a day late),

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work here

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

My How To Start Journaling guide was the most charged and passionate writing I had done in a very long time and the catalyst that propelled me back into the newsletter space. In publishing it, I really solidified what the crux of what my newsletter is. Every month, one out of the four pieces I publish will be about journaling as a topic plus prompts.

There was this energy I had when I first started my newsletter that got lost in the fray. For a long time, when it pertained to the blog, I had an identity crisis because I was struggling to define what my newsletter meant to me. Sharing my love for journaling (amongst my many other artistic interests!) seems to have rekindled the flame.

Happy journaling, I’ve saved the most whimsy suggestion for last!

Jada

For more journaling prompts:

Previous newsletter:

Crossing The Threshold Between Routine and Ritual

Routine and ritual are two parallel lines that mirror each other; material that is cut from the same cloth but made into different garments; analogous; the “two supreme deities of habit.”

Different functions incur different consequences. In her essay The Difference Between Routine and Ritual, Maria Popova distinguishes the difference between routine and ritual through the following:

“... While routine aims to make chaos of everyday life more containable and controllable, ritual aims to imbue the mundane with an element of the magical. The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalises us.”

I would even go so far as to argue that it is ritual over routine that requires greater attention due to the presence of intention, deliberation and presence. The magical aspect of ritual comes from how it harnesses our energy, senses and environment. Hence, the routine of writing in a diary turns into the sacrosanct ritual of synergising our inner and outer landscapes through words.

Journaling paraphernalia are symbolic of this process. Many writers, readers and journalers have a writing practice that is assiduously aligned with objects that invoke the senses: candles, incense, mugs, teas, hand cream, jewellery. Renate Dulsie shifted the trajectory of the online journaling space by sharing a video of her journaling ritual, which began with applying lipstick, wrapping a scarf and dabbing perfume. These objects deify the practice of journaling through a reverence towards touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing; the senses that allow us to interpret and transmute the world.

But what greater steps can we take to cross the threshold between routine and ritual? In place of physical symbols, I have compiled a list of five energetic anchors, paired with some journaling prompts, to channel more whimsy into your journaling practice.

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Rituals and Prompts To Add Whimsy To Your Journaling Routine

1. Define your next journaling ‘season’ with a colour and a theme

When the focus of journaling lies exclusively in productivity spheres, pressure mounts and it begins to lose its magic. No longer is journaling an enjoyable experience when it has the familiar weight of obligation.

✷ Prompt: If you could define this season of your life with a colour and a word, what would it be?

The act of transforming thought into writing, regardless if it is truth or fiction, is at its core a conceptual process. Ideasthesia, or “sensing concepts,” is a psychological phenomenon that we can build off of and utilise as an energetic anchor because it allows us to recenter and reject hyper-productivity. Ideas, and therefore meaning, can trigger experiences where the concept activates a response. In the context of this ritual, attributing a colour and a word/theme to our journaling practice allows access to our creative capacities to connect and combine the abstract into something that is deeply personal. The process of pulling these elements together creates a more holistic understanding of our personal introspections.

Attributing emotions to colour is a phenomenon I have already written about. In journaling and writing, consider combining it with chromatic and thematic reflections to stave off the voice at the back of your head that desires productivity from every task. Through this process, the concept of journaling transforms to one of personal meaning.

✷ Prompt: Discuss how your colour and your word are connected.

Reflecting on your chosen colour and theme is already an introspective experience. But I leave you not with the question “What is your colour and theme?” but instead:

What does it mean to you? (If you struggle to articulate this, that’s the point. Sometimes channeling our inner whimsy is all about being comfortable and inspired by the indefinable!)

2. Use different pen colours when travelling

Piggybacking off of the above suggestion, another whimsical journaling ritual is inspired by the excitement you feel when you’re about to embark on a trip– a unique way to mark the occasion and signpost a change in your physical location is to change pen colours for the duration of a trip. This energetic anchor shifts the modality of your journaling practice and creates a refreshed association with an exciting experience.

✷ Prompt: Write about the highlight of your last trip and choose a pen colour to match

There is so much more variety beyond the standard black, blue and red ink. Whoever said that you had to journal in one of those three colours? In the same way you put intention behind choosing a colour and theme for your journal, choosing a pen colour exclusively for a specific trip is another way to strengthen your mind’s creative and conceptual eye.

Perhaps a memorable road trip is marked by a pen that is the colour of the red earth that combines sediment, rock and sand on the tires and the sides of the care, or a trip to an ocean town is marked by teal, inspired by a conversation you had with a friend where you asked them if the sea was blue or green. Perhaps all trips you take with a loved one are a romantic maroon colour. What if all museums you visited were written about in an archaic sepia? Next time you go camping, you could match the colour of your pen with your tent!

✷ Prompt: Write about a destination that’s on your bucket list

Before your next trip, even if it’s a small one, have a think about what colour pen to get. Sometimes, that bit of whimsy you need is as small as the colour of the ink you choose to meet the page.

3. Play a solo journaling game

When I think of the word whimsical, other words also come to mind: magical, creative, fun. A unique ritual that renounces the need to exclusively journal for introspective purposes is using our journal for mediums that encourage play. Accessing the more whimsical parts of ourselves are sometimes not found in writing about our realities, but in exploring fiction.

✷ Prompt: What archetypes are you naturally drawn to and why? Create a character that is inspired by this and write an entry from their perspective.

Solo journaling roleplaying games serve as a medium akin to that of magic realism– despite the austere, wacky and whimsy directions these games can be taken in, they make acute observations about the world around us and how we interact within it. Whether they are used as a self-insert to stretch our imagination, or we build characters with qualities and aspirations similar to our own, journaling games ritualise our writing practice because they prioritise self discovery through the mediums of joy and creativity.

“What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake.

On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, On Fantasy

✷ Prompt: Make a list of characters you relate to and their personality traits.

The journaling roleplaying game that inspired this suggestion is Koriko: A Magical Year. Games like these add interesting tools to journaling such as dice and tarot cards. The way these objects interact, paired with a story unfolding, allows us to seek comfort, as opposed to confrontation of meeting ourselves on the page.

✷ Prompt: Write about your current consciousness as if you were a fantasy character embarking on a quest. How does the fantastical reflect your reality?

4. Baptise your journal in water

Water can be an aspirational energetic anchor that we can not only learn a lot from, but embody in our journaling practice. Take your journal to any body of water– it could be the sea, a pond, a lake, a quarry, a waterfall, a river, a brook, a stream. If possible, choose a focus for your journaling session, and go for a swim. As you float in the water, meditate on your focus. When you get out, dry off naturally; it is okay to hold your journal and pen with wet hands.

✷ Prompt: What can you learn from your favourite type of body of water?

If you’re feeling extra brave, dip the corner of your journal into the water. (Don’t worry, it will dry.) In this way, you don’t need to worry about your handwriting not being neat, writing between the lines properly, or presenting your journal in pristine conditions– not when your journal has tasted salt and risk.

Journaling with water in this way creates a twofold impact: the first being its unpredictability, the ebb and flow of its behaviour. When we sit down to write, who knows what will unfold?

The second is that it fights our inner perfectionist. When we take our journals outside of our homes and into the wider world, particularly near water, its fragility and vulnerability become apparent.

Finding ways to become comfortable with the combination of water and paper allows us to channel the carefree attitude that is often associated with whimsy. It reminds us to go with the flow, not be so rigid, and take it easy.

✷ Prompt: Set a timer for ten minutes and write a stream-of-consciousness entry with no full stops.

Water exists in a transient state, it is never truly still. Tides change, swell, and rip. When we accept emotions and thoughts as they arrive, events as they unfold, and the link between it all, we remain curious, lucid and in alignment with both change and stagnancy. Automatic writing is a private conversation with our subconscious that creates transparency in the same way water does to paper when wet.

5. Write with the phases of the moon

Moon and Water by Mary Oliver

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one

but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely
with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

Mary Oliver’s poem Moon and Water positions the moon as an eternal companion that wanes and waxes, appears and disappears, that we can learn from and be independent from.

“She wants me to refold myself into my own life” – the moon becomes a conduit in this poem for introspection, with the caveat that whilst she cannot figure out everything for us, we can use her celestial symbolism akin to the advice of a good friend. In personifying the moon as an eternal companion, this poem reminds us that the most potent energetic anchors can be found when we look beyond ourselves. The moon has an unmatched profundity; “row[ing] with her white arms through the dark water,” a light in the darkness, a natural time keeping device, a ritualistic symbol that we have connected to since the dawn of time.

In astrology, the moon is the heavenly ruler of our emotions. Moon journaling aligns our internal states and feelings with the different phases of the moon. The most whimsical ritual of this list requires a calendar to track the moon, and a curiosity to commune with the sky during the four phases of its cycle:

New Moon
The side of the moon that faces Earth is not yet lit up, feigning disappearance from the sky as it conjuncts the sun. But a new moon still has presence, heralding new beginnings or a fresh start. It is opportunity, rebirth, beginning and hope.

✷ Prompt: Write a letter to the moon about your hopes, ambitions and dreams.

The Waxing Moon
The moon’s light builds, turning to themes of expansion, movement and growth. This is the phase of the moon that is aligned with vision and what we wish to cultivate. I find that reading poetry such as Mary Oliver’s Moon and Water allows me to build inspiration and begin making moves.

For inspiration, here is a curated list of Mary Oliver poems about the moon:

The Sweetness of Dogs
Twelve Moons (Poetry Book)
Worm Moon

Other poems about the moon:

The Moon & The Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath
I Watched The Moon Around The House by Emily Dickinson
Full Moon & Little Frieda by Ted Hughes

✷ Prompt: Annotate a poem about the moon

Full Moon
Swollen and at her brightest, the full moon is at the height of her power as she directly opposes the sun, shining like a beacon in the night sky. This phase is one of harvest and plenty, but it can also be an overwhelming time as our emotions are heightened by the pull of the moon. A full moon is a sound opportunity to redirect this emotional intensity, and choose what we illuminate with our energy.

✷ Prompt: Describe a round-circle, serendipitous moment you experienced recently that brought you joy.

Last Quarter Moon
The final quarter of the moon denotes release. Part of using the moon as an energetic anchor means knowing when to let said energy go. Take a long breath in and out– the last quarter moon encourages introspection, but also release and forgiveness. Like in Moon and Water, the moon “like everyone, has her own life.” In Mary Oliver’s words, during this phase the moon could “no longer be listening” due to the need to return to the self.

✷ Prompt: In pencil, write down your woes and worries. Then, with an eraser, create a blackout poem.

Whimsical Journaling Prompts

1. If you could define this season of your life with a colour and a word, what would it be?

2. Discuss how your colour and your word are connected.

3. Write about the highlight of your last trip and choose a pen colour to match

4. Write about a destination that’s on your bucket list

5. What archetypes are you naturally drawn to and why? Create a character that is inspired by this and write an entry from their perspective.

6. Make a list of characters you relate to and their personality traits.

7. Write about your current consciousness as if you were a fantasy character embarking on a quest. How does the fantastical reflect your reality?

8. What can you learn from your favourite type of body of water?

9. Set a timer for ten minutes and write a stream-of-consciousness entry with no full stops.

10. Write a letter to the moon about your hopes, ambitions and dreams.

11. Annotate a poem about the moon

12. Describe a round-circle, serendipitous moment you experienced recently that brought you joy.

13. In pencil, write down your woes and worries. Then, with an eraser, create a blackout poem.

Afterword

Apologies for the late post this (last?) week! This weekend, I was celebrating reaching 888 subscribers, which was a fun goal I had set myself for my newsletter… And then we reached 1k on Monday. I’m still in shock! I’m elated! I’m inspired! Thank you!

A warm welcome to all of my new readers as this will be our first meeting in your inbox. Thank you for reading and engaging with my work, I am really excited to build a community surrounding a reading, writing and journaling life. It has been brilliant connecting with you all in the comments and DMs.

In this newsletter, I was super stoked to share some curated art that I love– in particular, Scarecrows, The Great Disguising and The Lantern Bearers. These rituals are all things that I do in my own personal journaling practice, so I sincerely hope you get some inspiration from it.

Thank you for reading and see you this Sunday,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work here

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

One of my favourite books is Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. It is all things wacky and womanly; witchcraft-ian, speculative, apocalyptic, absurd, magical. I posted the cover (pictured above) on my Instagram story once with the caption:

“Now this… This will be my final form.”

My words are an aspiration I share with many women. Oh, the yearning to be looming, bird-like figures that stomp around barefoot in our pillowy dreamscapes!

International Women’s Day seems like a fitting occasion to start sharing my writings on two of favourite female surrealist artists: Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. This article is for people interested in Surrealism, art analysis, female artistry and how art answers our deepest questions.

Happy International Women’s Day and happy reading! This piece is dedicated to my mom, who taught me how to paint and write. <3

Love,

Jada

More writing on Leonora Carrington:

Previous newsletter:

Creation is our Great Mystery: where do we come from? How were we created? Why were we created? What came before us? What comes after us?

Creation of the Birds (1957) by Remedios Varo and The Giantess (1947) by Leonora Carrington are two femme-surrealist works that attempt at an answer, using alchemical elements, spiritual symbolism and a metaphysical exploration of creation to suggest that the artistic and philosophical pursuits of women are integral to the discussion surrounding the origins of the universe. In conjunction with the Great Mystery, these paintings represent the crucial role of Femme Surrealism in elevating women from the femme-enfant and transmuting their experiences and domestic lives, exploring themes such as identity, autonomy, motherhood, mental health and personal trauma. The result of this artistic shift was women being initiated as prolific meditators of the great mysteries we aim to answer through science, religion, philosophy and mathematics, and instead doing so through art.

Carrington and Varo achieve this synergy of internal experience and existential contemplation through transmutation. Both artists viewed creation as a process characterised as being both incomprehensible and unexplainable except through magical, prophetic and artistic means.

Carrington stated that she was “as mysterious to herself as [she] was to others” and that even if others didn’t believe in magic, “something strange is happening at [these] very moment[s].”

Where Carrington uses ‘strange’ to describe the indefinable, Varo expressed similar sentiments as ‘mystery’:

“I deliberately set out to make a mystical work... in the sense of revealing a mystery, or better, of expressing it through ways that do not always correspond to the logical order, but to an intuitive, divinatory and irrational order.”

Perhaps the answer to ‘revealing’ the Great Mystery lies in how these two artworks pursue harmony and contradiction; Varo deemed the yin and yang as “the most beautiful symbol of all” and even titled one of her works Useless Science or The Alchemist. Even the title of this work creates a paradox between two opposing forces, and makes us question: is the pursuit useless? What does contemplating our greatest mysteries achieve? How do we learn to live with the incongruity of not knowing?

For both artists, alchemy was an important philosophical and pseudoscientific method that inferred their work. Creation of the Birds and The Giantess are two paintings that are testimony to this, in the way that they bridge the gap between logical and illogical, rational and irrational, reality and fantasy– an alchemical process of a metaphysical nature.

“I am trying to find the invisible thread that unites all things.”
– Remedios Varo, 1956

In their most basic definitions, alchemy and transmutation reference transformation, the process of turning a base material such as lead into noble metals like gold. Alchemists sought answers to creation and existence through the combination of proto-science, philosophy and mysticism. Within the context of art, Surrealism, and these two artists, a sublime metaphorical alchemy takes place upon these paintings, rising above the desire for the Philosopher’s Stone or for gold, and instead, seeking answers to the questions we ask the sky.

On Creation of Birds by Remedios Varo

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1 kilo of horseradish; 3 white hens; 1 head of garlic; 4 kilos of honey; 1 mirror; 2 calves’ livers; 1 brick; 2 clothespins; 1 whalebone corset; 2 false moustaches; hats to taste.

The above list is Remedios Varo’s recipe on How to Produce Erotic Dreams, not only demonstrating a penchant for humour, but also an attraction towards how synergy and conflict combine; a clashing of science and magic in the production of art. Like Leonora Carrington, Varo was also a writer, and this list has signifiers of her style whilst simultaneously signposting common themes she explored in her artwork, and how they were mixed, contrasted, complemented and therefore alchemised.

Creation of Birds is oil on masonite, painted by Varo in 1957. In it, Varo elevates the status of women through painting them as creatures engaged in an esoteric quest for knowledge, and also ponders on the nature of our existence.

Like the list, Varo uses the contrast of symbols to portray her opinions and desires as an artist. For Varo, the highest aspiration was achieved through a combination of colour, light, art, science and magic. There exists a harmony within these opposing forces; Varo does not simply compare and contrast, but Creation of Birds becomes a canvas for a profound elemental mixture wherein hard science is placed directly next to, and interplays with, esoteric mysticism.

In Creation of Birds, Varo interrogates a common archetype for wisdom, the owl, and superimposes Woman as creator, with the painting depicting a hybrid owl-woman sitting at a desk, creating birds that are flying off into the night. There are multiple suggestions within this image: women as scientists, artists, alchemists. The painting has an almost biblical undertone, with the title reminiscent of The Creation of Adam/Creation of Man by Michelangelo. Perhaps Creation of Birds is Varo’s own take on Genesis:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them
– Genesis 1:27

Whilst Varo was not religious, her mother was a devout Catholic and she grew up in a strict household. She often used religious iconography in direct contrast against the scientific and spiritual symbols in her work.

Alternatively, Creation of Birds mimics the mythology of Daedalus, who not only designed and sculpted the labyrinth that would enclose the Minotaur, but also created wings for himself and his son, Icarus, with feathers, thread and beeswax. Pygmalion also comes to mind, who through prayer to the goddess Venus brought his sculpture to life. All of these readings infer creation of outstanding and fantastical means, whether through natural material, spoken word or godhood. Multiple mythologies and beliefs can be interpreted in Varo’s works because of her diverse symbolism, and when we consider this, Creation of Birds becomes her own personal rendition of the birth of the world.

The owl-woman (an archetype of wisdom) holds a magnifying glass in her left hand from which light from a distant star is refracted, bringing birds from their nest on paper to life as they take their first flight. Bird-woman and bird-creation suggest being made in the same image, deifying the figure in the painting. Varo was also interested in the work of astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle who wrote The Nature of the Universe (1950), which is about the creation of the sun being from stardust and gas; alchemy of a celestial degree. Varo channels this through the magnifying glass into a much smaller, but equally as important subject, the birds.
Birds are commonly associated with freedom, and the red bird in the upper right of the canvas flying into the night suggests the bravery of transcendence into the unknown, an undertaking that all life experiences. In the same way the devout would suggest that we have been created in the image of God and thrust upon an unyielding world, so too does this painting reveal a woman wielding the cosmos and having to release her creation into the night. Femme Surrealism was often motivated by the personal experiences and autonomy of women, and perhaps Varo creates an intricate allegory for birth in this painting, showing us a mystical portrayal of the alchemical womb.

The organic element of birth and the birds is contrasted by the process of refraction, where when light passes through a magnifying glass (from air to the density of glass), it slows down and changes directions. This process gains a resemblance to Newton’s Triangular Prism, suggesting that the powers of women are equally cosmic as they are mathematical. In Newton’s Prism experiment, he discovered that white light is not pure, but a mixture of colours. Yet another instance of transformation in this painting.

In her right hand, the owl-woman holds a paintbrush to paper, next to a paint palette that has red, yellow and blue. Varo introduces another triadic symbol alongside the magnifying glass. All colours can be made from primary colours, they are the foundation of all paintings, and therefore, the pursuit of creation is a scale that balances artistic and mathematical pursuits. Varo contemplates the origins of our universe in Creation of Birds and suggests that the presence of the artist is foundational to this idea; with the magnifying glass in one hand (science) and the paintbrush in the other (art), these dual forces combine to create the birds. The duality that Varo describes when she “expressing [mystery] through ways that do not always correspond to the logical order, but to an intuitive, divinatory and irrational order” is shown as the owl-woman uses both her left and right hand, corresponding with each side of the brain. The left side of the brain, responsible for logic, and the right side, responsible for creativity, conjoin quantitative and qualitative forces.

Varo then adds a third variable to create a triadic equation of creation with the placement of the violin on the owl-woman’s chest from which the brush is drawn from. Alongside science and creativity, creation also becomes a matter of the heart.

In her library, Varo kept a copy of The Alchemists: Founders of Modern Chemistry by F. Sherwood Taylor. Notably, next to the owl-woman’s desk is alchemical laboratory equipment. Paint is a form of chemistry that transforms into a painting, which serves as a visual representation of the transmutation of thought and idea. Like the central figure being a combination of animal and human, and the birds being created from glass and light, the chemistry equipment is also a unique combination: it is both mechanical, mimicking glass tubes and pipes, and organic, due to the egg-shaped containers that house the paint coming out of three glass ‘veins’. These opposing associations combined into the equipment create a unique synergy as Varo endeavours not to compare them, but merge them, further denoting the paradoxical nature of alchemy and creation. In using eggs (a symbol of fertility and birth) as alchemical equipment, Varo suggests that creation is a combination of even more opposing forces, showing the process of creation as it transitions from chemistry, to colour, and then ultimately to form.

Creation of Birds combines the organic, mechanical, intellectual and metaphysical to suggest the ultimate alchemy and explore all opposing energies of creation. The painting assumes the artist and woman into a mythopoeic role as maker of worlds. Whether this refers to fantasy or real worlds is up to debate, to which Varo refutes:

“The dream world and the real world are the same.”

In painting this dream world, Varo notes to the real world, and the Great Mystery of all worlds.

On The Giantess by Leonora Carrington

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Whilst I finished writing about Varo with eggs, that will be our starting point with Leonora Carrington.

The Giantess, painted five years after becoming a resident of Mexico, also utilises the iconography of birds, eggs, and bird-women to a similar effect as Varo’s Creation of Birds, but expands upon the idea of alchemy and paradox through the visual composition and the materials used. Carrington used egg tempera, an emulsion of yolk, vinegar and raw pigment, which was popular before the rise of oil paint. The idea of chemistry and mixing by Varo in Creation of Birds is exemplified in The Giantess through medium. Egg tempera is a fast-drying medium that creates a matte finish. Due to its opaqueness, layering techniques are responsible for that luminous and ethereal look that Carrington’s Giantess has. When laid onto a wooden panel, tempera dries into a powdery surface that is “well suited for ineffable entities.” What adds to the luminosity is the halo effect around the head, due to the giant woman’s grain-like hair, which was often observed in Byzantine icons adorned with nimbuses, also deifying the central figure and elevating the representation of women.

In Carrington’s words in a letter to the collector Edward James, the painting is:

… a sort of giantess with a moonlike face in a field of wheat which is also golden hair. Her cape is white and she has a russet red dress with panels in which birdlike people are conversing. Out of the cape come wild geese which encircle her. She is standing against a sort of turquoise sea in which are small islands.

The alternative title for this painting is The Guardian of the Egg. Said egg is not only the titular but also the visual centerpiece of this painting, and despite being one of the smallest elements in the painting that is cradled in the Giantess’ hands, its message concerns contemplations of a grand scale:

“The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small.”

In her 1943 memoir, Down Below, Carrington describes how both the Big and the Small are reflections of each other. This has been observed by many, for example in the way that the spiral of the Milky Way can also be found on the smallest of seashells. Carrington’s egg allows us to question creation and the universal symbol of life on such a small scale that it encompasses all things and becomes larger than itself, once again, showing the paradoxical nature of alchemy in relation to creation.

The alchemical egg (or cosmic egg, world egg, mundane egg) is a mythological motif and symbol of the round universe. It is the beholder of all potential: the cycle of creation and rebirth. When we pair alchemical synergy suggested by Varo with Carrington’s mythology of the egg, woman as creator becomes cosmic and all-encompassing. The composition of painting the egg in such a miniscule way that is beheld by a large, goddess-like woman, is Carrington’s way of expressing this; a symbol not only of fertility, but of the cosmos itself, the ‘unhatched’ potential of all life. It makes viewers think of both unity and incubation, and nature’s fantastical and unexplainable phenomenon of a chick hatching from seemingly innate matter.

Focusing on the alternative title, the word ‘guardian’ encourages a protective role for the Giantess. This is reflected twice in the painting (often missed and also painted very small) where between the Giantess’ feet stand three women. Other figures at the bottom of the painting are reminiscent of Paolo Ucello’s Hunt in the Forest (1470), suggesting that the women are being protected by the Giantess.

‘... the father was the planet Cosmos, represented by the planet Saturn: the son was the Sun and I the Moon, an essential element of the Trinity, with a microscopic knowledge of the earth’

Later, with full lucidity, I would go Down Below, as the third person of the Trinity. I felt that, through the agency of the Sun , I was an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost [...] Leonora Carrington, and a woman.

Akin to Varo, Carrington had an interest in triadic symbolism. The three women at the bottom of the painting can also be read in multiple contexts: the Three Fates/Moirai, (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos) as personifications of destiny; the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother and Crone) which is an archetype for the distinct stages of life; the Three Witches in Macbeth that predict both his ascension to kinship and his downfall; the three women present at the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Individually, all of these supersede the role of women as being femme-enfant. These contexts instead portray them as heralds for the cycle of life, of divinity, of resurrection. Perhaps the most similar instance of three women that can be inferred with this painting is the Norns. Urðr(Past/Fate), Verðandi (Present/Becoming), and Skuld(Future/Necessity) shape destiny by weaving fate at the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil, which the Giantess has a likeness to.

Sun, Moon and Trinity are all symbols of the creation of the cosmos that exist in The Giantess: her hair resembles the sun, her face the moon, and the trinity is reflected in the three women.
Regardless of interpretation, the smallest parts of a painting sometimes hold the most profound. The egg, the three women, when contrasted by the grandiosity of the Giantess, is Carrington’s way of saying that the microcosms and macrocosms of our universe are all intertwined. This painting is about the relationship between big and small to discuss creation.

Carrington uses birds unlike Varo and instead as “metaphorical amanuensis” in transmuting and communicating difficult experiences; an internal, psychological alchemy. Carrington believed that everyone had their own “inner bestiary,” and in a catalogue for a 1979 exhibition, she described the relationship between animals and experiences as:

“[having] painted organic Subterreanean Entities, Chthonic faunae in jubilant contrast to [...] summarised sentential reason.”

During her childhood, she was enamoured by animals and her Irish nanny read her Celtic fairytales. This context explains why Carrington’s work is saturated with animal and folklore motifs. In The Giantess, the avian imagery of geese fleeing her robe are a nod to the frequent association between Celtic goddesses and birds, which symbolised otherworldly connections and prophecy, and may also allude to her personal trauma when fleeing from war-torn Europe. The geese fly into the distance, an indiscernible mixture of sea and sky with no horizon. But geese can also represent homecoming and migration.

In the same way Carrington uses the egg as a symbol of the macrocosm and microcosm, the geese and the background suggest a push and pull when reading this painting– are they fleeing, or are they migrating?

That is the joy of art. Like the origins of creation, we may never know.

The Answer?

In a 2005 interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, when asked to define Surrealism, Leonora Carrington describes it as “an approach to reality we do not understand yet.” The evasiveness of this answer and a lack of definition was common for her:

“I didn’t think of myself as a Surrealist … I try not to think of myself as anything.”

What I have failed to mention thus far is that Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington met in Paris and became close friends after both seeking refuge in Mexico City. Alongside Kati Horna, they are commonly referred to as ‘the three witches’ and were grouped by a feminine consciousness. With their prophetic understanding of paradox and union, their work not only freed women from repressive patriarchal hierarchies in the Surrealist movement, but allowed deep exploration and contemplation of the making of the world.

“I do not believe that in its essence it [Surrealism] can decline since it is a sentiment inherent to man... Surrealism has contributed to art in the same way that psychoanalysis has contributed to the exploration of the subconscious.” (Remedios Varo)

I finish this essay with more questions than answers, and perhaps that is the entire point of Femme Surrealism. Creation of Birds and The Giantess combine into the eternal allegory for birth and creation, and that it is a profundity too microscopic and macroscopic for any definitive answer. When babies are born, when the sun rises, when plants grow, when mountains rise, before we ask why, we marvel at the mystery; we cry, cheer, gape, swoon.

Is it dooming that I will never know where we came from? I don’t think so. The Great Mystery does not exist to be answered. Femme-surrealism reminds us to seek wonder above all else; to witness, contemplate and create.

For this writer, artist, woman, that is enough.

Afterword

Happy International Women’s Day! I received a lot of interest in this article, thank you so much for reading.

Today, we also hit 500 subscribers! It feels so fitting to celebrate my writing and womanhood with what is perhaps my most ambitious and longest essay yet.

I am so grateful to cultivate this space, and can’t wait to write more about art. Let me know if there are any paintings you would like me to analyse next!

What is your favourite femme-surrealist artwork and writing?

Following publishing this behemoth, I have a copy of Remedios Varo’s Letters, Dreams & Other Writings ready for me to start tomorrow morning. If you haven’t read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I highly recommend! I can’t wait to talk about these artists again in my monthly reading wrap up, because I did so much reading and research for this article. (Full bibliography/wider reading list coming soon!)

Thank you for reading,

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of my work here

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

Welcome to this month’s reading reflection! This month includes:

• 🕯️Reading cosy fiction as a balm for a bad day

• ⚖️ The benefits of rereading books

• 📰 Answering the question: why do we read?

• 🪑 Finding reading communities online & in person

• 🏷️ Reviews for the 10 books I read this month

As usual, this wrap up is divided into two parts. The first is my reading forecast, where I explore the themes, tangents, patterns and habits that formed my reading. This segment continues from last month’s as I generate new understandings of ideas I’m forming. This is the reading version of following a ‘desire path’.

The second segment includes the reviews of the books I read this month. If you’re looking for quick recommendations, a star rating, or potentially your next read, then feel free to scroll to this section. I also post my reviews on Goodreads, and write quotation studies to expand on my reviews.

Happy reading,

Jada

Last month’s reading list:

Previous newsletter:

My February 2026 Reading Forecast

Feel-good fiction as a balm for the blues

‘Why do we read?’ is a question that one day I’ll have an answer to. The problem is how expansive it is; the adoration I have for books seems indescribable at the best of times. This month, three books reminded me of the one of many answers: reading as a balm for a bad day.

Feel-good fiction is characterised by the following: cosy, whimsical and joyous. Unsurprisingly, all my recent reads under this umbrella term are Studio Ghibli adjacent– I was delighted to discover that two of my comfort movies, Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service, are based on book series!

Kiki’s Delivery Service was published in 1985. I’m twenty-four, but can always return to Kiki’s story when I feel a bit overwhelmed or like I don’t know what I’m doing in life. Only the first book in the Kiki’s Delivery Service series has been translated into English, but Penguin Random House are releasing the second book, Kiki and the New Magic, on August 25. It seems like there are plans to continue to publish the light novels with translator Emily Balistrieri.

The Howl’s Moving Castle series by Diana Wynne Jones is a loose trilogy, with the third book, House of Many Ways, described as a “companion piece” to the first book. Because of this, I decided to skip the second book because the premise didn’t interest me. The great thing about companion pieces is you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything– Howl’s Moving Castle provides a solidly rich and magical story by itself.

House of Many Ways may have not been the best book I read, but even when a book is just ‘fine’, it can still make me laugh. Sometimes, those fleeting reading moments are just as important as the entire reading experience.

Rereading books

Before now, I was unenthusiastic about rereading books. In February, a couple of books made me seriously reconsider this.

The first was Howl’s Moving Castle, which I initially read when I was sixteen. A massive reason why I’ve started writing these monthly reading reflections, book reviews, and quotation studies was because of the feeling that there were a lot of books from my past that were eroding in dormancy; despite recommending Howl’s Moving Castle to countless friends, my reasons for loving this book so much were a phantom feeling that I remember having, but couldn’t articulate.

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The second book that spurned me to revisit my relationship with the books of my past (and rereading as a mode of reading) was Italo Calvino’s Why Read Classics?

In particular, this quote in the introduction:

“Books […] exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.”

Calvino addresses the act of rereading as one in which new impressions and a deeper understanding are discovered through the resurfacing of the unconscious birth of taste in our youth. This sentiment I came to fully understand in the eight year gap between reading Howl’s for the first and second time:

“Youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us.

I also reread Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own, finding a copy that sixteen year old me had highlighted. I find it really funny my reading at both sixteen and twenty-four are indexed by these two books.

To pick apart Calvino’s quote: my reread of Howl’s was very much my “literary formation” where I discovered a “paradigm of beauty” (my love of fantasy and magic.) My reread of A Room of One’s Own allowed me to “rediscover [my] inner mechanisms.” When I was sixteen, I was still in high school, living with my family, and my career as a writer was still unknown. Reading Woolf at twenty-four, after having lived by myself and being a published writer with a newsletter, created an inherently different experience– the “scale of value” as a young, female writer who began to flourish when she had a room of her own.

Meta-reading, continued

Calvino’s Why Read Classics? also spurned me to continue following the curiosity I felt after reading Every Day I Read last month. In a way, they make a complementary reading pair, wherein two authors reflect on their love of reading. But as is the nature of complementary colours, they are very different.

I would describe Hwang Bo-Reum’s writing as a buttermilk yellow. She writes with an infectious sentimentality and brightness that encourage people to read in broad, exciting and joyous ways. Calvino’s critiques and analyses of his favourite classics, in contrast, are a mulberry purple; intimate, deep, ornate, intellectual, passionate, selective, personal.

Both approaches to writing about reading are important. This month, I began to think even more about reading about reading, and how this translates in a myriad of ways for different authors.

To answer my earlier question, “why do we read?” many authors have their own personal version of this answer; books about other books; books about reading books; books about writing books; books about bookstores; or as is the case with another one of my February reads, books about collecting books.

Following the trail of meta-reading led me to Unpacking My Library, where Walter writes about collecting and owning books through the lens of memory:

“…Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig Stockturm, where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Siissengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of lseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me.”

This geographic minefield of memories where Walter had collected books reaches a climax where at the end of this winding adventure through memory he exclaims:

Oh, the bliss of the collected, bliss of the man of leisure!

Whether written by Bo-Reum, Calvino, or Walters, the conclusion about meta-reading that I have come to is that the answer can be found in reading more books! O, bliss to the reader of books!

Another attempt at a book club

Don’t ask me how many times I have tried to start up a book club. I am yet to succeed. Recently, I emailed my local bookstore about joining and instead got put on an ambiguous wait list. I still don’t know what place I am in the queue, and it’s been two months.

But in February, I did accidentally start a book club without realising it: I got my partner an e-reader for our anniversary. Now, our Sunday morning is blocked off for our book club date for the book we are reading, which in February was The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien! We read together most evenings as part of our routine.

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Part of our anniversary celebration was a fourteen-hour back-to-back screening of the extended version of the entire Lord of The Rings in cinemas. I was frothing at the mouth, since I am as old as the trilogy itself and was almost four months old when it was released in cinemas. We absolutely loved it, so it was fitting that our book club start with The Hobbit. Given how the entire LOTR series is 1200 pages, I think we are going to be occupied for a while. I’ll give you another update next month.

The reading community on Substack

When I was discussing my excitement to my precious (that is what I’m calling my partner henceforth) about why I was so happy about our little book club, I eventually figured out that the undercurrent to my reading this month (and in general) was a desire for community.

I love a good cuppa and conversation, especially about books, and have translated this ethos into more social aspects. My relationship with reading is also a relationship with writing, and therefore writers, so this month, I commented on every article I read, and got in touch with some readers to have even more great discussions! It was important to me that I engage in the articles I was writing as well by not only saving them in my digital commonplace book, but also directly letting the author know my comments and what parts of their writing resonated with me, either via email, DM or commenting. I also started my own subscriber chat!

Books I Read This Month

Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono tr. Emily Balistrieri

“Kiki’s Delivery Service was inspired by one of my daughters drawings,” writes Eiko Kadono in the introduction to this esteemed classic. “If I wrote about a witch like the one my daughter drew, I could see the world through the eyes of a bird. I knew I would fly as an author, because writing fiction made me feel as though I had wings. I chose to make the protagonist witch a twelve-year-old, just like my daughter at the time.”

Kiki’s Delivery Service, the much beloved Ghibli movie released in 1989, is based on this book published in 1985. I completely believe that many of the beloved qualities about this coming-of-age story, including its wholesomeness, slice-of-life sceneries, and endearing characters, originate from the sheer exuberance, excitement and child-like passion from which author Kadono writes:

“As I wrote and revised, wrote and revised, I discovered that I loved writing. As long I created stories, I could live an exciting life with new discoveries every day. And I decided that, if nothing else, I would continue writing as long as I live. I’ll never forget the peace of mind I felt at that moment—I sensed the magic inside myself. I’ve come to believe that everyone has some type of magic inside them. If a person can find their magic and lovingly cultivate it, they’ll truly feel alive every day.”

Even as a children’s book, there is magic in these pages especially for adults.

Warm-hearted, whimsical, and precious.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

In the dedication of Howl’s Moving Castle, Jones explains that the book was “suggested by a boy in a school [she] was visiting to write a book called The Moving Castle.”

Jones delivers on this promise with one of my favourite books of all time, and arguably the best romantasy ever.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, Howl’s Moving Castle follows Sophie Hatter, the eldest of three daughters who is turned into an elderly lady by a witch. Following the death of her father, her step-mother arranges all of the daughters’ affairs: whilst her other two sisters are sent off to work and study, Sophie remains as the inheritor of the hat shop passed down by her father. For being the eldest means misfortune should she ever seek anything beyond home. In the hills is wizard Howl’s castle, always shifting and looming over the town. Sophie realises that she cannot stay in the shop sewing roses to bonnets and veiling to velours, and leaves her ill fortune behind to break the curse.

This book reminds me that we have so much more control over our fate than we might think; you are what you say you are. Sophie’s character is witty, hilarious, and honest. Her journey reminds us to give ourselves permission to love, experience, and create magic. I will be writing a full character study of Sophie for my newsletter in the near future, but for now, I highly encourage fans of the Ghibli film to read this for fresh eyes on some of the most endearing characters.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

House of Many Ways by Dianne Wynne Jones

Unfortunately, it is incredibly hard to follow a book like Howl’s Moving Castle, and it seems that the series lost its magic by the third book. House of Many Ways is described as a companion piece to Howl’s Moving Castle, and being set in a neighbouring kingdom to Ingary, it expands on the world that Jones has created, but falls flat in creating the excitement, adventure and curiosity of its predecessor. The only reason why I finished this book is because I was craving more cameos of Howl and Sophie.

Charmain Baker is an avid bookworm that dreams of working in the Royal Library. After sending a letter of enquiry to the king, she is tasked to be the caretaker of her Great-Uncle-William’s house whilst he is being cured of an unknown illness. Only, her Great-Uncle is a wizard, and a wizard’s house has complications: bags upon bags of dirty laundry, piled up dishes, a stray dog, no hot water, and doors that lead to an endless amount of rooms. For Charmain, who has lived a sheltered life and has no independence, this proves to be a challenge. House of Many Ways is a book about finding our way in the world as a young person, and the stepping stones of growing up.

Except, doing a lot of dishes and laundry took up the bulk of this book, and it was a bleak reminder that I had my own dishes and laundry to do. Jones also had a habit of tying up her stories incredibly fast in the last few chapters. Whilst it worked in Howl’s, it needed a clean up in this book.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ½ (2.5 stars)

Twig’s Travelling Tomes (ARC) by Griffin Murphy

For fans of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, a kindred soul can be found in this light, cozy read. From a genre standpoint, Twig’s Travelling Tomes ultimately achieves what it sets out to do; this book is an addition to the romantasy genre that ticks a lot of boxes for readers— tea, a travelling bookshop, eclectic cast of characters, magic and a slow (yet predictable) burn with a ‘man with a wolfish grin.’

Enjoyers of romantasy, quest storylines, found family, and roguish male main characters will enjoy this book, however I was hoping for a title that added unique elements and depth to the romantasy genre.

Read my full review here.

[Thank you to the publisher, Cozy Quill, and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced reader copy]

Rating: ✷ ✷ (2 stars)

Why Read The Classics? by Italo Calvino

The essays in Why Read The Classics? “chart the development of an increasingly sophisticated literary critic” whose reading was “often metamorphosed creatively, intertextually, into what [he] wrote.”

These essays span seven on English texts, ten on Italian texts, nine on French works, four to classical authors of the ancient world, and two each of Russian and Hispanic writers, creating a prolific and behemoth personal canon. The intensity of Calvino’s considerations show great dedication to literature.

To begin with, Calvino answers the titular question Why Read The Classics? by defining classics and the mode in which they should be read– in accordance with one’s personal canon:

“11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.

“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us, and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”

The titular essay is succeeded by Calvino’s appreciation of the five literary qualities that he considered essential:

“…lightness (Cyrano, Diderot, Borges), rapidity (Ovid, Voltaire), precision (Pliny, Ariosto, Galileo, Cardano, Ortes, Montale), visibility (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert), multiplicity or potential literature (Borges, Queneau).”

Having read Calvino’s fiction before, his essays are incredible. What a prolific collection of great classics (which he does note that should not be read under obligation.) Based on this, I took stock of my favourite essays: nothing beats a writer writing about their favourite books.

These essays felt like a 290 page reading list, and highlight the joys of reading a text closely. At the end of this book, I was left with two questions:

1. Which of these classics to read first?

2. What would my personal canon be?

For now, I’ve got one answer: this book is part of my forever library.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (5 stars)

Unpacking My Library by Walter Benjamin

Hardly a book at 23 pages, but I read the digital version on my e-reader and felt like I’d hit a goldmine. If it isn’t apparent from reading Calvino and my earlier notes, I am obsessed with reading on reading.

What convinced me to pick this up was the very first line:

“I am unpacking my library. Yes I am.”

In the past two years, my own library has been culled because of moving apartments. Even now, whilst I wait to hear if my lease is being renewed, I dream of my own library. Reading this essay made me feel even more passionate about collecting books, especially as I endeavour to create my own personal canon on my shelves.

“For a true collector, the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”

This essay published in 1931 tells of a time where collecting books was much more antiquated than it is now. Contemporary reading looks very different, but Benjamin’s attribution of books being attached to sentiment, memory, feeling, and place, are still incredibly relevant.

If the first quote didn’t convince you to read this, maybe this sentiment will:

“Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about-not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig Stockturm, where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Siissengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of lseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me. O, bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!”

As said earlier– o, bliss of the reader of books!

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ¾ (3.75)

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

For fans of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (which I reviewed last year), this sci-fi equivalent is equally as eerie and leaves you feeling existentially hopeless, but also grateful for what you do have. Everything You Ever Wanted follows Iris as she renounces her life on Earth to live on the planet Nyx.

This novel does dystopia well because it shows a before and after, a gradual transition until you’re left at the end thinking: what did I just read? At first, reading about Iris’s life and crappy job seems relatable, and then reading about her deteriorating life on Nyx makes you realise you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

A rejection of a normal life, how do we come to terms with that being all there is, and what we make of it? Transplanting our woes and worries from Earth to a new planet, new sun but same shit. TLDR: never trust the billionaire that wants to send you to another planet and broadcast it as a TV show, no matter how much you hate your job.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ½ (3.5 stars)

A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi

Kinga-A owns Mondays. As the ‘leader’ of the seven Kingas, each of which are responsible for one day of the week, A New New Me chronicles each of the Kingas as they unravel a mystery: the man tied up in their closet by Kinga-G. But Kinga-G won’t be able to explain herself until Sunday, and what follows instead is a cast of idiosyncratic character(s), each with their own opinions, idiosyncrasies and viewpoints about what happened.

Helen Oyeyemi writes the linear progression of Monday through to Sunday, Kinga-A through to Kinga-G. Despite this seemingly simple structure, where each Kinga is attributed a chapter, the disjointed ‘inner’ monologue(s) of Kinga create an incredibly unique voice that could instead be regarded as a symphony.

From a wider perspective, this book utilises a character with DID as a narrative about self doubt, trust, and perspective. The Kingas range from matchmakers to window cleaners to perfume muses. Only, what does Kinga-G do on Sundays– or, what has she been doing on Sundays to cause such great suspicion from Kinga-A?

“Almost a year ago—on March 6, 2023, in fact—I woke up with a rosary wound around the fingers of my right hand and a King James Bible clutched to my chest with my left hand. There was a bookmark stuck in the Bible, and when I opened it up, there was Matthew 12: 43–45, vehemently underlined. Yes, the “seven unclean spirits” passage.”

This book reminded me of someone playing mafia/werewolf, except they’re the only player. What a fun, wacky, unique read.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien

The prequel to the Lord of the Rings is a lighthearted, fast-paced and at times comical story that tells the tale of how the ring resurfaced in Middle Earth, and Bilbo Baggins’ adventures with Gandalf the Grey and the Dwarves of Erebor, venturing to reclaim The Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug. It is a story of kinship, inheritance, greed, and going beyond the hill of our comfort zones and into uncharted territory.

I firmly believe Bilbo Baggins is one of the best literary characters of all time. He is a hobbit who enjoys creature comforts like the sound of the kettle whistling. His character development, against the fantastical backdrop of Middle Earth, is a reminder that I too can do unexpected things!

Like Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, I will most likely be writing a character study soon of Bilbo. He is truly one of my favourite characters ever.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ½ (4.5 stars)

Design Your Life by Erifili Gounari

I'm not normally the type to gravitate towards reads like this, which shows why it has a lot of value to readers because I finished it with a pep in my step. I admire author and entrepreneur Erifili's work a lot– originally having come across her Substack– and in particular, loved the chapter about personal branding. Erifili breaks everything down, backed by research and interviews, in a really digestible way.

This was a great read to endorse my knowledge as a Gen Z, whilst still giving me some pointers about things from a different lens and fresh perspective. I felt really motivated after reading it, especially because reading this was born out of wanting to put myself out there more and really push the limits of what I'm capable of!

is also here on Substack with her newsletter Crystal Clear, which I also highly recommend.

Rating: ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ (4 stars)

Afterword

What a month!!!

As I was finishing up writing this newsletter, the Booker International Prize Longlist was released. I have been sitting at my laptop, watching the countdown like fireworks on NYE.

I imagine much of March through until May will be spent going through the list, as I would love to read all of them!

I fear these monthly reading reflections are getting longer and longer. I would love to hear about what you are reading and writing, so some parting questions for you:

What did you read this month?

Have you been in a book club before, and what was your experience like?

What are your favourite feel good reads for a bad day?

As always, thank you for reading

Jada

✷

@fujijada
jadadeluca.com
deluca.jada(at)gmail(dot)com

Read more of her work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

Blue is not nearly one of my favourite colours, but I have felt entranced by Horace-Benedict de Saussure’s Cyanometer for a long time.

This piece is about community, connection, and overcoming depression. “Feeling blue” is a common phrase to explain when we’re feeling down, but what other feelings could it describe?

Thank you to Australian publication WhyNot for making this piece happen as part of their Interwoven campaign.

Happy reading,

Jada

More writing on symbolism and emotions:

✷ Allegory of the Spiral
✷ Saudade: Longing For Forgotten Things

The sky of 1760, pierced by the summit of Mont Blanc, was an incomprehensible shade of blue for twenty-year-old Horace-Benedict de Saussure. His skyward wish was not to conquer the highest mountain in Western Europe, but something far more evanescent: to measure the colour of the sky.

“I’m feeling blue,” I texted my best friend upon leaving my therapist’s office. Like Saussure, I was twenty. When she asked me what kind, I scrutinised a chart of hundreds of blues and settled upon Morning Blue: the colour of a depression diagnosis that felt most harrowing at dawn.

The term ‘feeling blue’ has been in use as early as 1826:

“Let no melancholic victim of ennui complain of feeling blue till he has felt the pelting of the pitiless storm.[1]”

With the human eye’s ability to observe up to seven million hues, transmuting emotion into colour is intrinsic.

“We love to contemplate blue,” Johann Wolfgang von Goeth wrote in The Theory of Colour, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.[2]”

Compelled to the summit of Mont Blanc twenty-seven years later with pieces of paper painted Prussian Blue mixed with white and black, these fledgling drafts would become the fulfilment of Saussure’s wish– the birth of the Cyanometer.

On a circular paper with the centre hollowed out, the Cyanometer displays 52 blues to be held up and compared to the sky.

“Ce phénomène m’avoit souvent frappé. This phenomenon has often struck me.” Saussure noticed that the blue became deeper akin to an inverted ocean the higher he climbed, and now he finally had a way to measure it.

But our planet’s brilliant elemental hue is not merely a chromatic phenomenon. The sky and its blueness allows us to express a plethora of emotions– in Saussure’s case, ambition, and in mine, sadness. My text message resurrected Saussure’s cyanometer as a symbol for something just as intangible as the vast colours of the blue yonder– the universal and transcendent language of connection. Where the Cyanometer unlocked a greater contemplation of our horizon, colour symbolism and figurative language revealed a new way to connect with my feelings and share them.

I think of the colour of dawn on New Year’s Day, a cluster of friends and I witnessing the first sunrise of 2025. Beneath a Uranian Blue sky, we swam in the waters of the seventh celestial body from the sun. The sea was a bountiful reflection of a sky still moon-reigned as we collected shells and sea-glass. This particular blue witnessed a triumvirate of celestial, nautical and human bodies laughing, splashing, floating. Shells and stars and eyes and hands and moon and sun, all converging in the companionship of Uranian Blue.

Goethe’s words ring true when throes of picnickers in standing ovation gaze wordless, transfixed by dusk across the Swan River. I was compelled to share, facetiming my family across the sea so that they too could see the colourful gradient rising from the Beau Blue dregs of a summer shower evolving into something otherworldly. Together, we marvelled at the striking intrusion of the empyrean, as if the highest part of heaven, the realm of pure fire, had bowed down to us. There was a reverence to so many strangers marvelling at the same thing.

Saussure only witnessed the blueness of the sky, but what of the Marian Blue tears that missed my family? The Byzantine Blue that streaked the sky as my partner comforted me? I was drawn to feel, the people picnicking beside me drawn to marvel, and my partner drawn to embrace me in comfort as the night settled into Indigo Blue.

Now, three years later, a depression free Morning Blue rises. The pitiless storm has cleared. Blue may not be the only colour on the wheel – it isn’t even my favourite colour – but it paints a beautiful picture of a life well shared. Whether I’m standing atop Mont Blanc, watching the sunrise from the beach, or walking in the park at dusk, I am drawn to the sky in the same way I am drawn to others. This is the phenomenon that has often struck me – every type of blue elicits new connections beneath the same sky.

[1] Confessions of a Country School Master. Boston Monthly Magazine, 1826.

[2] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Theory of Colours. J. Murray, 1980.

Afterword

A major inspiration behind this piece was one of my favourite Substacks, Eat Flowers, Drink Paint by previously called Colour Stories. Katy writes colour like no other, and her work really inspired me to look at the presence of colour in my life in a more abstract way. When I pitched this piece to Why Not, I aspired to write about colour in such a beautiful way!

This was actually written in February of last year and then published in October. It feels really good to take this newsletter out of hibernation and breathe new life into old writing.

Thank you for reading,

Jada

Read more of her work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

After not knowing how to describe my love of long winded lists in literature, I finally discovered polysyndeton shortly after reading Mathias Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants.

The following essay is what followed.

Happy reading,

Jada

Previous newsletter:

The word ‘and’ is the most prolific and profound word in literature. It is not the most used word in the English language however; ‘the’ takes up about 6% of everything we will ever read, write or say. But ‘the’ is a mere definite particle, an introduction, a signifier, whereas ‘and’ acts as a binding agent of uncontainable potential, gluing stories, ideas, syntax together. Although, stringing an endless amount of words together with ‘and’ sandwiched in the middle doesn’t seem the most eloquent.

That is, until it is done right.

Polysyndeton is a literary device that describes the use of coordinating conjunctions (like the word ‘and’) in close succession, especially where some could otherwise be excluded. The word polysyndeton comes from poly (πολύ), meaning "many," and syndeton (συνδετόν, meaning "bound together with”, essentially meaning “many things bound together.”

It is a stylistic scheme that takes my breath away (both literally and metaphorically.) Where normally, commas would signpost the rhythm of a sentence, the use of polysyndeton places each listed item on its own pedestal. How we choose to read this impacts cadence and rhythm; slowing down how we ingest writing through the small hiccup of the word ‘and’ creates an almost biblical reverence to the tonal quality of our reading, whereas increasing speed manufactures feelings of hurry, overwhelm and urgency.

Lists in literature have an unmatched profundity, both through the use of commas and (especially) the use of the word ‘and.’ That biblical undertone is not mere coincidence– some translations of the bible use polysyndeton heavily. Where some translators would simply input commas, some purposefully repeat the word ‘and’ in scripture to a dramatic effect:

“And the rain descended (on the roof),

and the floods came (at the foundations),

and the winds blew (at the sides),

and beat upon that house:

and it fell not.” (Mark 7:35)

In Othello, Shakespeare creates a similar effect with the word ‘or’:

"If there be cords, or knives, or poison, or fire, or suffocating streams, I'll not endure it".

But it is not the bible nor Shakespeare that has elicited this inspiration or thought for me. In one of my favourite reads of 2025, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, author Mathias Énard achieves my most annotated and highlighted book ever in a mere 140 page novella. This is because of his incredibly prosaic lists; a marrying of objects, materials and miscellany.

In 1505, Ottoman Sultan Bayed II invited Michelangelo to design a bridge following Leonardo da Vinci's more ambitious design being rejected. Michelangelo declined the invitation.

"You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal, like your David." Énard writes a compelling and immersive answer to the question: what if he didn't?

This book was constructed by real historical fragments. The beginning pages show a picture of a 500-year-old shopping list that is owned by the Casa Buonarotti museum, written/drawn in Michelangelo’s hand in 1518 for an illiterate servant.

Michelangelo in Istanbul is prosaic, atmospheric and an irrelevant falsity. In contemplating such an event, Énard writes about convergence of East and West in sporadic, short chapters with a lot of description and a lot of lists. At 140 pages, this could probably be read in one sitting, but I found myself hanging on to Énard's listicles, a marrying of objects, materials and miscellany that signposted Michelangelo's experiences:

“Three bundles of sable and mink fur, one hundred and twelve panni of wool, nine rolls of bergamo satin, the same quantity of gilt Florentine velvet, five barrels of saltpeters, two crates of mirrors, and one little jewellery box: that is the list of things that disembarked with Michelangelo Buonarotti on the port of Constantinople on Thursday, May 13 1506.”

Within an appreciation of lists, Énard writing feels like [recording] “treasures”. Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is my most quoted book– ever. The writing feels like an "endless accumulations of various objects, accounts, expenses, supplies; clothes, menus, words, simply words."

Even though I love the word ‘and’, I also wanted to acknowledge my discovery and the impact that asyndetic listing has. This device refers to a list broken up by commas. I could go on comparing polysyndeton and asyndetic, but in the end they both achieve the same thing: an immense and divine reading experience. Lists are equal parts prose, poetry, and description, a continual turning and churning, an unfolding of metaphor and unfurling of imagery– and then, and then, and then!

Whether using conjunctions or punctuation, lists create an atmospheric reading experience. Another example is a catalog poem, which also uses the practice of listing (with a bit more flesh) through a collection of linked items. In essence, the above quotes could be considered a catalog poem. This form allows more description, digression and thematic development of both the individual item and the collective:

“Often, catalog reveals likeness between seemingly unrelated details, referents, contexts, sounds etc., or challenges commonly accepted systems of definition.”1

There is an added satisfaction for a writer when the above is achieved, the sheer admiration achieved that we exclaim: “I wish I wrote that!”

These are perhaps our deepest metaphors that grapple with our understanding of words and stretch our reading palettes– there’s a reason why synonyms for “miscellany” all sound salivating (albeit a bit juvenile): potpourri, hodgepodge, salmagundi, smorgasbord, mixed bag.

As childish as these sound, they do speak to how tasteful and exquisite an experience a well written melange can be.

“Words, simply words” are “treasures” to Michelangelo in his stained notebook. The treasure of literature lies in lists, conjunctions, commas, catalogs that glue miscellany together.

“Michelangelo does not draw bridges. He draws horses, men and astragals.”

“May 19: candles, lamp, two small coins; pottage (herbs, spices bread, oil) the same; fried fish, two pigeons, one ducat and a half, plates and cutlery, one small coin, wool blanket, one ducat. Clear, cool water.”

Commas and semicolons become signifiers that the readership are about to be caught up in an atmosphere that appeal to the senses:

“May 20: peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, camphor, dried peppers, saffron pistils, rupture wort, agrimony, powdered cinnamon, cumin, euphorbia and mandrake from the Orient, all at just two asters for four full ounces.”

Or express the homesickness, longing and doubt of a fleeing artist:

“May 22: cipolin, ophite, sarrancolin, serpentine, canela, delfino, porphyry, brocatello, obsidian, marble from Cinna. So many names, colours, materials, whereas the most beautiful, the only one worth anything, is white, white, white without veins, grooves or colourations. He misses marble.”

This is the most accurate list that could ever express the hypothetical of Michelangelo accepting the Sultan’s invitation.

The most profound list in this book comes from the quote that the title is inspired by. In the opening quotation from Kipling’s introduction to Life’s Handicap, the mixture of polysyndetic and asyndetic listing tells us equally about the grandiose and the simple, the ultimate list, my most favourite ‘and’:

“Tell them of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants and angels, but omit not to tell them of love and suchlike.”

‘And’ that urges breadth and depth, and the essence of love amongst the grandiose and evil; the ultimate list.

Afterword

I implore you to peruse Casa Buonarotti’s archives which hold the “richest documentation of Michelangelo.”

It felt amazing to put into words a sentiment I have long held, for polysyndeton is a writing tool I use a lot and love even more.

Thank you for reading,

Jada

Read more of her work

Italian-Samoan writer Jada De Luca is a visual narrator, storyteller and devout journaler. She writes about leading a reading and writing life, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes:

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Telling stories through both written and visual narration (she is also a collage artist) is her way of paying attention to the magical, surreal, and intensely personal landscapes that the arts offer. Her newsletter is a source of her entire writing career; her oeuvre; a commonplace journal of essays about literature, language, writing, travel and art.

Jada’s favourite novel is Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, her favourite tarot card is The Magician, and she likes her tea with an extra sugar.

Foreword

2025 was a brilliant reading year. I read voraciously, ritualistically– as many articles about philosophy, science, mathematics, cosmology, etymology and creativity as I could in the time it took me to finish my morning cuppa and a cigarette; essay collections and cronicas about the bridge between the mundane and the metaphysical whilst tanning at the beach; an abundance of women in translation in August; lucid and feverish stream-of-consciousness between sunset and sunrise; political fantasies about magic, words, demons and witches; long books, short books, in-between books; the highest volume of books I’ve read in my life.

From a statistics standpoint, last year I read the most I ever have at almost 40 books, essentially doubling my initial reading goal of 20 books.

Of that number, here are the best books I read in 2025. I would hope there is something for everyone on this list. Reading does not have to be prolific all of the time, sometimes a book is simple and exactly what we need; a balm for a bad day, a companion.

Recently, I re-watched Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which is titled 君たちはどう生きるか (How Do You Live?) in Japanese. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot.

My answer? I live a reading life.

Happy reading,

Jada

Previous newsletter:

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Act I - Reading Tools

The combination of electronic readers and physical books are a unique set of scales to balance for me as a reader. Two realities co-exist; I love the physicality of books, handwriting and dog-earing, but accessibility and ease of use is a priority that the more I feed, the more I read. I have found a comfortable equilibrium in both physical and digital reading by renouncing my previous scorn of digital reading, and have read more because of it.

E-readers versus physical books

Taking an e-reader everywhere means I am able to read everywhere. Instead of scrolling on my phone, reading morphed into an ever-present option during downtime, spare moments, and waiting periods. These liminal pockets of time automatically became filled with reading; I read on planes and public transport, in parks and on beaches, in waiting rooms and during difficult moments, in grief and in joy. Having access to my entire library in a light-weight form assists in consolidating reading as an eternal companion, which in turn caused me to turn to my phone less.

Despite this, I could never turn my back on the feel of a real book. The use of an e-reader refined my intentionality behind the curation of my physical library. Books would go through a ‘screening’ process where I would purchase only those that really resonated with me. As a result, despite my shelf being much lighter now, it is filled with books that matter to me.

A library is considered 1000 books. I’d rather slowly curate the 1000 books that defined me instead of filling shelves with… filler.

A portable, yet personal library

What I love about my e-reader the most is its clear case, as on the inside I have a collage that is a visual representation of my reading life:

• A polaroid photo of me taken when we were travelling from Rome back to New Zealand. Even at 24, I am still that child who loved being read to before bed. Every book I pick up, I am nurturing rosy-cheeked five year old me who loved to travel, write recounts and read into the night.

• A polaroid of my mom and I in Germany. I had flung my two front teeth when they’d fallen out into the water in Venice. I owe my love of reading and writing to my mom.

• An undated black and white photograph of my nonno, whom I reunited with after twenty years last February. One of the last and most precious memories I have of him is that, in spite of a lot of his body shutting down, his penchant for poetry remained vibrant and active. Nobody else in my family is remotely as adjacent to reading and writing as I am, it was really special to discover I wasn’t the only other wordsmith.

• An inked print of my soul cat’s nose and paw, whom was my reading companion for ten years before I had to say goodbye to him in November. In this way, I still get to read with him everyday.

Digital Highlights & Reading Logs

Making technology work for me is very important. I use the e-reader annotation and highlights in tandem with a reading log. My thoughts whilst reading are sporadic, disorganised and at times move faster than my hands, and so I have a folder in my notes app called “Marginalia” where I type snippets of reviews and dated logs of thoughts I have whilst reading, which are exciting to come back to so that in my reviews I can begin to connect ideas together.

There isn’t much structure here. Sometimes I have dated entries to track my thoughts and how they evolve, and other times I’m analysing quotes I enjoy. This becomes a tangible space to arrange and organise my thoughts and transmute before I begin writing reviews.

Some reviews and reading lists in 2025:

My Analog Annotation System

When it comes to reading physical books, keeping track of my thoughts in page as opposed to digitally meant that reading became a more dynamic process. I struggled for a long time to figure out an annotation system that worked for me; writing in the margins was never a problem, but remembering what I wrote and organising them was. Sticky notes and coloured tabs felt too cluttered, when all I wanted was pen, paper, and some semblance of organisation that I could refer back to.

I am the type of reader that ingests writing through both syntax and thematics. These are the two driving factors behind my annotations, which then in turn allow me to form my own opinions and ideas about a text. Literary criticism, analysis, and engaged reading are a funnel, and so I am grouping quotes as a reader by themes and ideas, and as a writer by the writing itself.

My annotation system in 4 steps:

1. Underline quotes, circle words, draw arrows that link them together, write notes in the margins

2. Attribute a symbol to the theme, motif, syntax or character to the quote or word and draw it in the margins

3. Draw the symbol inside the cover/front page and write the page number next to it

4. Rinse and repeat: as I read and draw symbols next to passages, continue adding them to the inside of the cover, creating an index of quotes

Act II - Reading Habits

1. Monographic Reading

I discovered my favourite book, and subsequently my favourite writer in 2025. I have written about Clarice Lispector extensively, and last year I read a lot of not only her books, but essays and chronicles as well.

In relation to an art exhibition, a monograph is when a single artist is exhibited. Reading an author’s entire oeuvre is a colossal undertaking and a reading challenge that I didn’t realise had become habitual until I had read (not finished) my eighth Clarice Lispector novel.