Most of July was spent with the coast in mind. Anticipating going to the west coast, being completely beguiled as always when I finally got there, and then lamenting having to leave its salted air and rough beauty for the city. One of my favourite parts about this now-yearly summer trip is the drive there and back. I am known for hating car rides and for getting carsick but the journey there takes you through landscapes that are almost monstrous in their beauty. The best part is when the road begins to wrap around the bases of the Three Sisters. Three mountains nestled together, looming over you as the car winds around and around. Their names are Aonach Dubh, Beinn Fhada, and Gearr Aonach. On the drive up it is hot and the sun is high in the sky. The rivulets of water are lit up and appear like slashes of brightness across the faces of each mountain. The various shades of green are bleached and yellowed in the sharp sunlight. The chiaroscuro painted by the cragged surface and stark light makes the caves look black and endless, openings that lead to nowhere. This is not my favourite weather for the hills. The drive home was misty and the clouds hung so low they swallowed the summits. This is my favourite. The colours deepen under the heavy sky and it all becomes so gothic and dramatic that it’s easy to believe any of the many myths and fables that this land has birthed.

I had pictured reading in the grass, on the beach, up on a big rock in the hills but my reading ended up being put on the back burner for the majority of the trip, and I really didn’t mind. I still read every night before bed as I usually do. Each night was late with conversation and so by the time we had finally got upstairs and under the duvet my partner fell asleep instantly. I sat awake for hours reading as the sky began to pale at around 0430. This month, for whatever unknown reason, it suddenly seemed like the right time to finally begin reading Middlemarch. Usually I will stand in front of my bookshelves for quite some time, swithering between titles, trying to decide which to pick up. Often I will read the first line and see if it feels like the right time for that book, maybe I think about which books feel like they sit right with the themes I am entangled with at that moment. But this time, I finished reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, slid it back into its space on the shelf, immediately picked up Middlemarch and took it to bed with me. I think by bypassing all the deliberation that usually precedes the beginning of any book it allowed me to bypass the intimidation I often feel attached to books like Middlemarch. By that I mean very long books that require a giving over of a considerable amount of time and books that are so loved and lauded by minds I consider Great—because what if I am not intelligent enough to make something of this book? But when I give this a second thought I realise that I actually love big commitments and I love a challenge.

My copy of Middlemarch is a gently used one I picked up at an Oxfam book shop. Its edges have softened over time and with use, it has a few creases on its cover and in its pages. I like this about secondhand books, I like their softness. Flicking through its pages, a postcard falls out. It has a photo of the Dorchester Knight Statue from the thirteenth century. An effigy of a knight drawing his sword from its sheath, legs crossed, and lively in tone despite its funerary function. I look into who the man this sculpture was crafted for but I can’t find a name. His form lies across his tomb so close to the altar within the abbey. I also become intrigued by the names scrawled in cursive on the back of the postcard: Cornelius, Sandra, and James. This also piques the interest of my boyfriend’s mum and we attempt to figure out who these people are. It is not at all fruitful but provides a fun conversation over dinner. A successful search for them would take more effort than we decide to give it in the moment. But I note that the view from the hospital ward the postcard was written from is described with distaste: those grizzly grey planks of ‘architecture’ called Canary Wharf. So, I assume I can date the letter as from the late 1980s/early 1990s if Canary Wharf is under construction at the time. I think about the tenuous thread of connection we have with one another and how I am now connected in some strange and very distant way with these people through my copy of George Eliot’s novel. Middlemarch has been a slow, sustained read. It is a constellation of people whose lives impact one another as the world around them transitions through political change. I hope I will have more to say once I have finished it, but for now it is a good companion for my nights.

The books I read this month:

The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd (1977)

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson (2011)

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003)

The Summer Book, Trove Jansson (trans. Thomas Teal) (1972)

Erasure, Percival Everett (2001)

It was a really good month of reading for me and I wish I had the space to write about every single book here. Shepherd’s The Living Mountain reads like a love song about her relationship with the Cairngorm mountains.

Plants then, as they go about the business of living, emit odours. Some, like the honey scents of flowers, are an added allurement to the insects; and if, as with heather, the scent is poured out most recklessly in the heat of the sun, that is because it is then that the insects are out in strength. But in other cases—as the fir trees—the fragrance is the sap, is the very life itself. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering.

Not long after I finished reading her beautifully and meticulously detailed personal history with the mountain range, it began to burn. Wildfires sprawled across the moors and woodland. The habitats of many animals have been destroyed. The fires linger and grow as the heather smoulders and peat that grew over many, many histories and lifecycles continues to burn. It’s heartbreaking to go from reading such ecstatic joy about a place not too far from home only to see climate catastrophe turn it into an apocalyptic scene. The word ‘living’ in the title feels painful now when I see daily updates via photos and videos of the scorched earth. Jeanette Winterson has written the afterword in the edition of The Living Mountain I have: “A bed. A book. A Mountain.” She writes about the importance of reading:

Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity. Reading is not a passive act. Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will. Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind both need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.

As a sick person, reading will forever be a huge part of my personal remedy. This edition was published in 2011 and Winterson’s afterword only seems more relevant than ever in the age of AI, a general disregard for having to use your brain, and a need for everything to be instantaneously understandable/achievable/accessible. There has been a flattening of culture and with it less space for nuance and intrigue.

The consequences of a homogenised mass culture plus the failure of our education system and our contempt for books and art (it’s either entertainment or elitist, never vital and democratic), mean that not reading cuts off the possibility of private thinking, or of a trained mind, or of a sense of self not dependent on external factors.

I have thought about this passage so much, it feels painfully relevant. It’s either entertainment or elitist, never vital and democratic. Reading and engaging with art allows you the space to form your thoughts and feelings into a response, it allows you to create an opinion. We need more opinions and less homogenised call and response reactions.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was, in hindsight, a perfect follow up to The Living Mountain and the real life disaster it is experiencing. Often regarded as a horror novel, Frankenstein, also reads as a philosophical exploration. Shelley questions what it would mean to divorce science from morality, to abandon one’s creation and shirk responsibility for what your own hands have brought to life. It has undoubtedly become the story cautioning humankind of the moral consequences of science. A moral narrative that is still deeply resonating over two centuries later. Climate disasters are rolling across the world, temperatures are rising, ecosystems are collapsing, and yet AI and tech billionaires are pushing their creations on us and an increasingly unstable planet with no regard for the repercussions. It is like seeing a modern Victor Frankenstein drunk on power and unwilling to deal with the consequences, but we are living amidst them as unregulated tech continues its insidious reach into our everyday lives.

I watched a lot of films this month—too many to mention. Here are some of the moments that have stayed with me:

When Walter and Phyllis meet for the first time in Double Indemnity (1944) and the flirting doesn’t miss a beat.

Every single shot in La Piscine (1969) and how achingly cool it is.

The masterful control Patrick Swayze has over his body in Point Break (1991). I could be satisfied watching that man simply walk.

Agnès Varda’s curiosity, her way of looking closer and giving a moment to the lives on the margins in Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000).

How life seems to be imitating Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) only the aliens are technology.

Every single thing about Possession (1981). A perfectly horrifying movie. I love it.

The inevitably climbing, searingly hot tension of Do the Right Thing (1989).

The visual language of the aliens in Arrival (2016).

Carol Kane’s perfect face in When a Stranger Calls (1979).

I want to leave you with a quote from Agnès Varda—from an interview about Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse—because her ability to observe, witness, and create always remind me of the malleability of life.

Yeah, anything could be art. Anything could be beauty. And let’s not be, “This is the ceiling rotted. And this is the museum.” The ceiling is rotten—it disturbs me, the leak. There is water coming—tack, tack, tack. But look, why should I go in a museum and say: Tàpies is beautiful when I have this on [the ceiling]? [In the film], I say, “my ceiling is a piece of art.” And that’s turning life into—You know, finding not only beauty—amusement, joy, fun. Finding fun where sometimes it’s just a bore; finding fun when it’s a burden. You can always make something look different. Which is a way of saying that I’m, in a way, protected from being unhappy. There is a big unhappiness in my life and big pain. And I’m protected, in a way. You know, I feel that even the dead people around me protect me.

June felt like it was rushing by me in a way that made me feel like I couldn’t catch my breath and that I was running out of time. I often find that time doesn’t really follow the suggested pattern it should. I don’t feel the regularity of a 24 hour day. The borders of my days are porous and don’t seem to have much discipline in holding their boundaries. Then the last week of June appeared and stretched itself for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time. The seemingly unending days coupled with a heatwave that turned the air into a hot heavy mist made time feel even stranger. This has been exacerbated by losing my ability to work as I used to. In fact, this year I haven’t been able to book a single job and it has left me feeling untethered and unsure of who I am. Some days this is all I can think about and it becomes a huge fight to scrape my attention off that subject and let it land anywhere else. I keep trying my best to find purpose in the everyday moments, the mundanity of life, even in the midst of sickness and pain and the indefatiguable exhaustion that seems to rule my life.

What I read this month:

My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley (2021)

The Tower, Thea Lenarduzzi (2026)

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit (2006)

Mrs March, Virginia Feito (2021)

Agnes Grey, Anne Brönte (1847)

The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch (2011)

The two books that really held my attention and shaped it with every sentence were Lenarduzzi’s The Tower and Yuknavtich’s The Chronology of Water. The Tower attempts to construct the story of a girl named Elizabeth Annie who was locked in a tower because of sickness and left there to languish by her family. The book is presented as a work of non-fiction but refuses to relinquish any truth as to what is real and what is fiction. As the narrator, T, untangles local stories and historical texts to stitch together the story of Annie, the reader is faced with a revelation of her life, a traumatic memory that the narrator feels is small in the grand scheme of life and its stories, but it is undeniable like a tiny splinter of glass you cannot remove. When I was reading The Tower, I kept thinking of cobwebs, their intricacy and fragility. The stories within this book feel wrapped in many gauzy layers, shedding themselves as they get closer to the truth. The truth being: ‘we don’t always tell the story we want to tell. We can’t always choose our place in it, nor how it ends, or if it even does.’ The binding of my copy of The Tower arrived very delicate, it had unglued itself from the spine and the pages began to come away with the lightest touch. This felt appropriate considering the gauziness of the material it held within its pages. The Tower had a quiet power within its gossamer-like web of construction, but The Chronology of Water is the howl of a lifetime—plunging its reader into the depths of a life in the making. The prose of Yuknavitch’s writing blazes across the pages, burning with the intensity of adolescence, determination, and brilliance. A memoir that denies being bound by any expectation or parameters. Water is a force of life for any of us, we need it to survive, but Yuknavitch’s relationship with this element is deeper than the average person’s. Swimming pools, rivers, oceans, currents, tears, every formation of water imaginable runs throughout the text. I read this book just as the heatwave that had been hanging heavy over us broke into a cloudburst of rain—another auspicious reading detail alongside the delicate pages of Lenarduzzi’s text. I sobbed at the end of The Chronology of Water. The formative years of life often hand us blueprints to what we might emerge as when we become adults. When you live through a tumultuous childhood, when life feels volatile and fragile when you are learning how to become a person, it can feel like the blueprints you are handed are inescapable—even when you dislike how the plan presents itself. Yuknavitch manages to give hope to those of us who might feel like our early years have projected an inky stain of a future for ourselves. She defies what trauma, loss, and grief might lead us to believe about ourselves. What we believe will corrode could have the ability to cleanse and what we fear might drown us could potentially revive us.

June’s prompt for the reading together project I have for this year was to read a book with an adaptation. I followed up reading Yuknavitch’s memoir with Kristen Stewart’s adaptation of the text. The editing was choppy and shifted easily like water. It felt like how memories flicker up to the front of your mind and how associations can be strong regardless of whether we want them to be or not. It was a heavy, beautiful, compelling watch of a life’s ups and downs that almost feels unbearable at times. It’s hard to believe this is Stewart’s first feature length directorial debut. The text is handled masterfully and transformed into a searingly shocking and beautiful film. I think there is an attitude towards earnestness that misidentifies it as naive or without substance. This film is heartachingly earnest, it refuses to shy away from baring it all and letting vulnerability stay at its core. It is lyrical and leads with the sensorial. To think that irony and satire should be held higher than an eager, earnest piece of work is a tired notion. There is so much power in sincerity and vulnerability and it is likely in their waters we will find what we need to sculpt and form the blueprints we are handed early in life or through grief or loss or whatever adverse experience causes us to recede into something we find life-giving.

I haven’t watched many films recently because I decided I would learn how to knit and that has been where my attention is focussed in the evenings when I would usually watch a film. Alongside the The Chronology of Water, I watched:

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

I had been wanting to watch The Night of the Hunter for so long all because of a single shot I had seen many times, a woman’s body sits in a car at the bottom of a river, tendrils of underwater vegetation swaying with the current. The film is beautifully composed. The use of light and shadow tells as much of a story as the dialogue, characters, and location do. Every frame feels crafted with so much care and consideration. I love watching Hitchcock films and the mood comes over me often that I need to watch one and nothing else will suffice. I swear I lament Technicolor at least weekly. Nothing looks that good anymore. Friday the 13th was chosen because we were at the height of heat and I think that is when horror lands best, when the heat is shimmering like the blade of a knife and you feel like everything and anything could go wrong at any minute. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was chosen solely for Ethan Hawke (me) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (my boyfriend). Two of our favourite actors in a tense situation where the stakes are far too high and things simply cannot go anywhere but all the way down. I watched Clockwatchers alone one morning feeling down about my lack of sleep and lack of hope about feeling better. I love these women, I love the colours, I love the composition, I love that it’s so obvious this film was made by a woman, I love the fuck you to corporations. A good reminder to watch films whenever I feel hopeless and finding it difficult to do much of anything.

When the heat moved into milder, more bearable territory, I sat on the slope of a hill one endless evening with my best friend as the sun slowly, slowly set. It was a last minute meet-up. He sat on the edge of the blanket he brought and I sprawled across it, letting the grass stroke my bare feet. He told me about the crush he had on a woman he met the previous week and all the potential lit up his face made me want to throw my arms around him and scream of course you deserve this! But I didn’t because it’s easier to play it cool instead of possibly getting someone’s hopes up. Kids on bikes raced down the hill and threw their bodies into the long grass on either side of us. Crushes are such a powerful force in life. I really recommend them. A couple of nights later I sat alone on the blanket box in front of my bedroom’s bay window at 3 a.m. and watched lightning flash across the sky. I have always loved storms and I especially love watching them alone whilst everyone else is sleeping. I often sleep with my bedroom window slightly open, and I felt a chill finally settle in the air as a breeze crept in. I shivered and watched the goosebumps erupt over my naked legs. A couple of days later, I am in pain on the bathroom floor crying about all the hours and hours of my life I have spent crying on a bathroom floor. I spend the night awake, terrified I will throw up. The next couple of days consist of minimal, timid movement, a fear of eating, pain shoots through my pelvis, it hurts to stand, it hurts to pee, nausea floods through me, a migraine settles behind my right eye, I cry and I cry and I cry. I am wholly fed up with myself. But today I got to breathe fresh air and walk in the park as it rained. I love how dense the colours become under a heavy sky. It is so green. I get to see the lichen stains on the trees I walk by, and I get to see the flowers become heavy and drenched with the rain.

Sara Wilby’s ghost is the first character the reader meets upon entering Smith’s Hotel World. She is moving through her final day in the liminal space between life and death. As she recounts the tragic incident that led to her death, it becomes clear to the reader that this was a life cut short:

The cage around my heart broke open and my heart came out . . . It broke out of my chest and it jammed into my mouth . . . For the first time (too late) I knew how my heart tasted.

This image illustrates the severity of Sara’s broken body after plummeting to her death, but it also hints at the first taste of love she had only just begun to discover. The scrambled anatomy mirrors how one physically feels when developing a crush. The feeling of one’s heart in their mouth is an expression that illustrates anxiety or excitement at the anticipation of something. The heart, regarded as the centre of emotions, has made its way to a place where it might spill out and over into words, unable to be contained. Throughout the first chapter, it comes to light that shortly before her death, Sara had developed feelings for the girl that worked at the watch shop, ‘. . . I couldn’t help it. I fell.’ Even once she is a corpse, Sara cannot help but share her developing feelings with her ghost. Sara’s death and her new love intertwine throughout the chapter, a beginning and ending meeting in the same imagery. The combination of grotesque imagery and sentimental information humanises Sara’s corpse and elicits sympathy from the reader.

Amidst the wreckage of her broken body, Smith focuses on Sara’s heart and the taste of it in her mouth. Sara is a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, finally following her desire for the first time. Her queer longing leads her away from societal and familial expectations, towards her authentic self. Sadly, her death cuts this desire short, her first taste of love being her heart in her mouth rather than the rush of a kiss with the girl from the watch shop. Smith refuses to shy away from highlighting the potential dark side of love, a darkness that is often projected from outwith. Love can carry danger, especially queer love within a heteronormative society.

An image of a ‘thumping’ heart finds a repetitive beat when Sara’s corpse tells her ghost about how she fell for the girl at the watch shop. This heart, alive and well inside her chest, reacting to the thought and sight of her crush, creates a bittersweet moment for the reader as they already know how her story ends. Her heart will soon stop, thrown into her mouth from the impact of her fall. A broken body with its heart in its mouth warns the reader, asking them whether it is better to speak up or die with unrealised desires. This image holds all the words Sara never had the chance to say. It symbolises her lost opportunity to share her desire, and so it is left within her; words dead in her mouth.

Another unnerving image of a mouth is crafted for the reader, ‘a mouthful of dust’, which assembles itself over long, rambling sentences. The build-up of images heaves with details, superimposing one on top of the other until they create a full sensory moment, effectively conveying Sara’s desire for physical fulfilment:

. . . rolled-up hairs and dried stuff and specks of what-was-once-skin, all the glamorous leavings of breathing creatures ground down to essence and glued together with the used-up leftover webs and the flakes of a moth, the see-through flakes of a bluebottle’s dismantled wing.

The intensity of her desire has turned what is repulsive and disgusting into something covetous and desirable. The description of ‘a mouthful of dust’ begins to feel like a mouthful of death as Smith lists lifeless debris, underscoring Sara’s lost identity as a living person. Stripped of her physical body and left with the limiting features of a ghostly figure, Sara confides to the reader that what she wants most in the world is ‘to reach out and touch.’ Without access to tangible, tactile sensations, she challenges the reader by directly communicating with them, ‘you could easily (for you can do such a thing whenever you choose, if you want to) smear your hand with dust . . . and then you could lick it off.’ By breaking the fourth wall and directly engaging with the reader, Smith viscerally intensifies her imagery. As Sara personally describes this action to the reader, their ability to engage with this activity through their own body is evoked, rendering the disgusting image with more sensory depth as the reader imagines their own finger running through dust and bringing it to their mouth.

Death is again an unlikely visual accompaniment to illustrate a young woman’s yearning, yet Smith uses it to powerful effect in Girl Meets Boy. Anthea wonders what she wants from life:

. . . and I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish.

Here, Anthea is lost in her thoughts, trying to figure out who she is now that she is back home. Her thoughts unspool in a poetic stream of consciousness brimming with imagery. The peculiar choice of the image—her body beneath the water, picked down to the bones by fish—holds poignancy concerning what Anthea wants deep down: love, connection and freedom. The word ‘unbound’ symbolises her feelings towards her current state of being—she feels trapped and longs for liberation. This sense of captivity spills out of her thoughts and into her physicality as she muses about her identity, ‘I sat down on the kitchen floor. I traced a square in the parquet with my finger’. Her thoughts are sprawling, but the feeling of overwhelm becomes apparent in her physical body—she feels boxed in. Smith directly shows her reader the trapped feeling society’s boundaries can produce.

Anthea feels her identity is tethered to her job, ‘That’s what I was. That’s who I was. Anthea Gunn, Pure Creative.’ The ‘unbound’ bones she wishes for symbolise her desire to break free from the weight of expectation she now shoulders as an employee at a commercial company. ‘I wish they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body’, here Smith combines two seemingly contradictory desires; connection and freedom. To be ‘picked clean’ down to her bones by fish represents a yearning to be free of the trappings that come with a human body stuck inside a capitalist system—in contrast to Sara’s ache to experience her human body once more—alongside the want of sharing this liberation with a significant other. These two bodies under the sea have traces of her grandparents’ relationship. Anthea’s grandparents died lost at sea. This romantic image of a couple who have grown old together, adventured together, and died together is the kind of love she aspires to,

. . . a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us deep down now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones a dark seabed.

Like Sara, love is a powerful force in Anthea’s life, and Smith’s use of dark, eerie imagery to symbolise this force reminds the reader that love is without boundaries and can manifest in many ways.

Later in the novel, Anthea’s lover Robin tells her the myth of Iphis and Ianthe. Anthea interrupts to ask, ‘Did their hearts hurt . . . Did they think they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves?’ The word choice is severe and consuming. Mary Ruefle’s3 notion that ‘direct obvious imitation often produces a sterile imitation’, explains the effectiveness of Smith’s imagery. Her writing unearths and creates mimetic sensations of desire without being cliché.

A lovemaking scene between Anthea and Robin is written as a series of images, morphing and mutating with each move and moment between them:

I was sinew, I was a snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke snake stake . . . were our hands black shining hoofs? were we kicking? were we bitten? were our heads locked into each other to the death?

This language, again, subverts the traditional and commercialised visuals of love and summons the ‘mingling’ ‘unbound bones’ that Anthea yearns to become. She wants to merge, transform, and push the boundaries of what love can feel and look like. Smith captures the fluid nature of desire throughout Girl Meets Boy, and this scene exemplifies its transformative power.

The details within the imagery Smith crafts in both Hotel World and Girl Meets Boy elucidate the intricacies of a young, desirous mind. For me, this cements Smith as one of the great writers who crafts fiction with strange, significant details that truly paint the image of what art and literature hope to portray—and genuinely convince us of—when they encounter the familiar or odd realities life presents us with. Smith’s unexpected and inventive images reveal the complexities and fluidity of human desire, rendering them individual, believable, and relatable.

The beginning of a new year naturally sends people into a reflective mood—what could this year look like/feel like, what do I want more of/less of. And with that, there is also a natural, and maybe less acknowledged, attempt to rewrite our narrative. So, it felt fitting that to begin our reading project for 2026, we read memoir. I wanted to see how writers organise and curate their life into a narrative at a time when so many of us are pushed to do the same as a resounding new year, new me envelops the beginning of the month. I am definitely not a new year, new me type of person, but the notion of constructing our lives through narrative is something I am extremely interested in. We exist as an amalgamation of our own narrative alongside the memories and stories others hold of us. Who we ‘know’ ourselves to be is simply who we are to ourselves. To one another we are a different version of ourselves we likely only have a slim sense of based on how our loved ones, friends, acquaintances behave towards us. Life is a constantly mutating and evolving narrative—one we have only a small hold on. At the opening of the year, people tend to step forward with a fresh perspective of who they are, they have refined themselves in the deep dark depths of December and enter January a slightly more clarified version of ‘me’. The internal writing of ourselves is inescapable. I’m currently receiving therapy from a psychologist at one of the pain clinics in my city, and in my session this morning she had me note down the familiar sentences I tell myself multiple times throughout the day. It was shocking to see such a torrent of negativity stretching itself across the page. This is who I tell myself I am: a disappointment. The awareness of self narrative may be heightened at the turning of the year but that awareness slowly dims and fades into the background as we move forward with the daily motions of inhabiting our life. For writers, however, there is a keen awareness of the self, and even more so for memoirists. They don’t just arrange, rearrange, and write their life internally, they commit it to the page and share it with their readers.

Memory is a slippery thing. It morphs and reconfigures itself with subtle—sometimes unnoticeable—variations each time it is called upon. Committing it to the page solidifies history in a way. It pulls everything together and insists a version be chosen. Emily LaBarge acknowledges the elusive, nebulous nature of memory in her memoir Dog Days. The text spools out from a traumatic incident that changes the writer profoundly. The narrative never tries to pin anything down with certainty, it allows the flexibility and fallibility of memory to be known. There is a grace in the space allowed for change and evolution of the self, regardless of the direction it might move in. In that sense, it makes the story so much more true than insisting on one singular narrative. She writes,

‘[t]he treatment of inconsistency, or lack of complete mastery of narrative, as fundamentally untruthful is a normative prejudice that burdens the narrator with warping constraints.’1

What is it that we, the reader, want from a memoir? What is its purpose? Is it to tell life exactly as it happened or is it a form that allows a writer a space for vulnerability and exploration of their history? To shape a narrative so that it allows the text to get closer to what they want to convey to their reader seems like a good use of the form. It isn’t a clinical, objective mode of writing, it tries to convey experience—again something that is slippery and difficult to pin down in a singular way. By allowing the possibility of inconsistency with real life and the very human fallibility of memory, the text becomes art—symbolic, expressive, seeking.

I also read Joan Didion’s Where I Was From this month. It’s a memoir cataloguing the history of a place and how it shapes not only the land but the lives that reside and pass through it. How does where we come from shape us as people? Even if the history of a place is so far removed in time from when we are living, do we bear its history? Maybe we bear the traits of where we come from subconsciously, an internal topography that mimics the textures, energy, and weather of home. A chronological unfolding of California moves Didion’s reader from her family first arriving to the west coast of the country in the mid-nineteenth century as she carefully picks her way through the history that follows until it catches up with herself. As the timelines closes in on her own life, the writing naturally takes on a different tone. Her register moves from reporting to something deeply personal. This is one of the things I love most about Didion’s writing; she can do both. She writes early in the book about how history is recorded and by whom it is reported:

‘Who witnessed this moment of departure? Was the camera on Joseph Cornwall’s mother, following her son with the last look? Or on the son himself, glancing back as he vanishes from sight? The gravity of the decisive break demands narrative. Conflicting details must be resolved, reworked into a plausible whole. Aging memories recorded as gospel. Children recount as the given of their personal and cultural history what neither they nor even their parents could possibly have known.’2

Here, Didion points out that our histories are often biased. We repeat what we have been told as children, passing it down to our children in the way it was selected to be told. But what about those who do not record history in the way we do? Their stories, lives, histories are erased or pushed to the margins, their figures become distorted to serve another’s narrative. Here, I wonder about how honest writers want to be when they write under the genre of memoir. Later in the book, Didion records her own reckoning with how the truth can be distorted, diluted, and then passed down for generations ‘as gospel’ as she notes how

members of [her] family had been moving through places in the same spirit of careless self interest and optimism [. . .] Such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefitted even those who reaped its most obvious rewards.3

She demonstrates how the power of narrative can conceal reality. It is easy to be seduced by story, it happens all the time.

I’m currently reading Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, a memoir that details how our lives can be shaped by those who give us life, raise us, and take the position of authority over us. Roy trained as an architect before becoming a writer and I feel this echo in the masterful structure of her writing. There is a very precise organising of text in her work. Again, like LaBarge, she asserts the nebulous nature of memory. Roy details how this translates to the page and how it influences how her text is written and how it is to be read:

I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim. But then, there can be no larger claim. Fiction is that strange, smoky thing that writers don’t entirely own, even if they think they do. Where does it come from? Our past, our present, our reading, our imagination—yes. But perhaps from premonitions of our future too?4

I love the messy tangle of real life and fiction, memory and imagination. Does it benefit the text or the art of literature to be more true to life than indulge in the imaginary? Why is non-fiction often viewed as holding more information and intelligent thought than fiction? Roy sums up the blurred lines when she describes her interest in the hazy margins of where real life and fiction merge and overlap and how it encapsulates something inherent about human nature:

[b]ut maybe it’s best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I’m all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I’m weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.’5

Some things in life can’t be reasoned into understanding, some things need the description for it to be felt and understood. Sometimes it can be a good thing to be seduced by story when we need to feel a little more, empathise with others, and live in a way that renders life in all its multiplicities, contradictions, and impossibilities.

I’m not usually someone who plans their reading, I like to be guided by mood. However, I know that a lot of people are seeking to read more in the new year and I thought it might be a nice idea if we could read together and create a space to share our thoughts with one another. This isn’t going to be too prescriptive as I think there is a need to foster our own curiosity, trust our intuition, and curate our own reading taste. So, whilst there is a plan, it’s a loose plan, a plan that gives you space to choose for yourself and share it with others. I’ve decided to focus on form and theme simply because I wanted to. I hope it encourages us to read widely and diversely, to find interesting voices, and brings books into our lives that shape them in either a small or significant way.

I hope to post a little piece of writing relating to the theme/form for the month and a little about the book I chose to read, but what I am really hoping for and looking forward to is reading your thoughts about what you have read in the comments.

2026 Reading Plan

January: memoir

February: classic literature

March: art criticism

April: nature writing

May: journal/diary/letters

June: book with an adaptation

July: cultural criticism

August: women in translation

September: an essay collection

October: a play

November: gothic literature

December: short stories

Here’s to a year of expansive reading,

Katie x

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper answer is to tell them to read it.1

To assume a short story is an incomplete novel is to ignore all that the short story form has to offer simply because of its brevity. The clear signifier that these two literary forms offer something different to their readers is the disparity in length. However, looking at a page from a novel and a page from a short story would not reveal any stark difference between the two forms, as both are constructed from sentences and paragraphs. The architecture through a local lens shows the same structures. It is when the lens is widened and the compression of form begins to become evident that readers notice something distinct about the short story on offer. Within those sentences and paragraphs, writers have wielded their language in a different way from the language found in the novel. As Flannery O’Connor states, the story is the way it is because it simply must be that way, and its form is utilised to its fullest extent. It does not add, stretch or wander; it is exact and precise. Unfortunately, many readers will instinctively relate the short story to the novel and perceive it as lacking in its condensed word count. However, it would be a mistake to think that it is attempting to be like the novel at all. The short story is where form provides constriction and limitation, allowing for writing that is more akin to poetry or art rather than being a failed, lengthier piece of prose. Within the confines of a beginning and an end lies a snapshot of a life, a moment, an experience, or an event for the reader to immerse themselves in completely, rather than a journey that they will dip in and out of over a longer stretch of time as with the novel. The brevity of form invites the reader to engage fully and to sit with the story in its wholeness. Tone and imagery are significant and defining features that distill what the writer is expressing within the tight borders the short story exists within. It favours suggestion and impression over explicit and causal effects deployed in longer pieces of prose work. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was considered one of the masters of the short story form by his contemporaries and is still considered so today after many years, amongst readers and critics. His work is often deceptively simple on the surface, with a pervasive melancholy threading its way throughout, but each story harbours profound human truths and questions within its pages. Chekhov’s work meets the reader without any fixed answers or solutions, allowing them and asking them to think for themselves. His stories do not yearn for more space on the page or feel like they have failed to express what it is they need to say.

The novel is often regarded as the pinnacle of literary achievement; it is a well-respected form that has endured considerable criticism over the years and continues to be of high literary importance. The short story, in comparison, has a history that often pushed it to the margins. It has had many lives to reach the form it is known and respected as today. The evolution of the form has spanned time and tradition, moving from religious narratives, biblical stories, and medieval sermons to folktales and fables laced with lessons of morality. Often, these stories have been passed down through the oral tradition, eventually finding their way to the page through the written word. However, prestige has not been afforded to this form in the same way it has been granted to the novel. This transition from oral to written story continues to evolve in terms of practice and style; the short story is an elastic form without a strict formula. Oftentimes, the narratives contained within these stories lean towards suggestive, provocative, and experiential rather than the chronological novel. Viorica Patea notes, ‘the story was ‘[s]een as ex-centric and at the low end of the hierarchy of arts’2, whilst the novel continued to garner deeper appreciation of craft. Whilst working in the same mode as the novel—prose—the short story has its own artistic method. Unlike the novel, it does not slowly construct a world with problems, rules, and solutions; it is more likely to pose a question, use impressionistic and lyrical language like poetry, and allow the reader space to breathe and contemplate the intense microcosm they have been entirely submerged in—often in one sitting. The short story invites its reader to be active and alert, engaging on a deeper level than the novel. Whilst the longer form may take the reader by the hand and guide them through its world, the short story pushes the reader from the edge and swallows them whole, asking them to make something of the experience.

Chekhov’s short stories centre around characters and situations that almost blend into the background of everyday life as he plays with the poetic and the prosaic. There is a blanket of blandness that conceals something deep-reaching. His narratives are moments snipped from the tapestry of someone’s life, the edges ragged with suggestion of who they are, where they have been, and where they might be going. But Chekhov is asking his reader to sit with this particular person in this particular moment. He often does this by painting an image that hooks the reader’s curiosity. For example, “The Huntsman”3 opens with:

A sweltering, muggy midday. Not a cloud in the sky… The scorched grass looks dejected and hopeless: even if there were to be rain, it is too late for it to turn green now… The forest stands motionless and silent, as if the tops of the trees are looking somewhere or waiting for something.

The reader is planted within a natural landscape through this deftly crafted image. The atmosphere is less than bucolic, with a melancholic tone and shimmering tension. The ‘sweltering, muggy midday’ evokes a sense of the sun at its zenith, smothering the land with its oppressive heat; this is no warm welcome. The second sentence trails off as if the narrator is still searching the sky, hoping that a cloud might float into view. However, any hope is cut short with a decisively miserable plummet from empty sky to ‘scorched’ earth. The tone of voice mirrors the ‘dejected and hopeless’ grass, with the acknowledgement that even if the skies did open and produce a deluge, it would be useless anyway. The final sentence of the opening paragraph suggests that something ominous might be about to enter, with the forest waiting and the treetops keeping an eye out for whatever might be encroaching upon the scene. Chekhov has set up an intriguing beginning for his story; the reader feels the weight of the heat, the parched earth, and the impending arrival. The story can be summed up as an exchange between two characters, where nothing really happens; however, what Chekhov has captured and distilled instead of action is mood. The peasant girl is infatuated with the huntsman she married years ago and was abandoned by. The story captures yearning and desire for a married life colliding with a need for freedom. With the lyrical setup in the introduction, depicting the landscape where these two characters meet, Chekhov has already foreshadowed the impossibility of a reconciliation or a satisfying love story. Instead, the reader is left to wonder at how a human deals with no acceptable alternative to their desire being offered to them. The story is barely longer than four pages, yet it holds ample human emotion within it, some of it tender, ‘Pelageya sits down a little way off in the full glare of the sun, and covers her smiling mouth with her hand, embarrassed by feeling so happy,’ some of it bitingly cruel, ‘Just supposing there was an order that I absolutely had to live with you—I’d either burn down the hut or take my own life’. Chekhov creates a whole story with one conversation, and just as the conversation ends, so does the story. It ends with the reader watching alongside Pelageya as the huntsman simply walks out of the scene. O’Connor’s notion that a story uses every word to convey its meaning is exemplified in “The Huntsman”. All of the information the reader might need is revealed within the exchange between the characters. The lyrical mood painting of the scene creates a tone and atmosphere that imbues the meeting with a sense of futility, which is consistently underscored throughout. There is no need to follow the huntsman down the road and into another scene; there is no need to turn back to Pelageya and witness her reaction to being left. It is all contained within the borders of those few pages.

There is a distinct lack of plot in Chekhov’s short stories. By turning away from what is often the central focus of the novel, the short story form tends to, as Suzanne C. Ferguson notes, ‘display in particular the foregrounding of setting, the reduction of physical action, and the elevation of mood changes to the status of plots’4. This removes action as the driving force of engagement, like in the novel, and allows for the elevation of mood. However, lack of plot does not equal lack of form. Like most short stories, much of Chekhov’s work often begins in medias res, meaning that the reader is dropped into the action as it unfolds. The story “Gusev”5 is set aboard a ship at sea. However, the reader does not witness the launch of its voyage. The story opens without explaining why they are out at sea; it simply drops the reader into the ship’s sick bay as the rough sea crashes through the night. Without the traditional form of a plot like the novel, the short story often builds its form from the inside out as the reader makes their way through its pages. One does not arrive at the beginning in a short story but is thrust into the heart of whatever the writer is exploring:

And again there is stillness… The wind is running through the rigging, the screw propeller is throbbing, waves are crashing, bunks are creaking, but the ear has grown used to this long ago, and it seems that everything all around is sleeping and staying silent. The three sick people who played cards all day—two soldiers and a sailor—are already asleep and delirious.

This paragraph provides the reader with a wealth of information without the need for expansion or adornment. Short stories often have extremely economical writing due to the compression of the form; an effective story utilises each and every word to convey the meaning of the story. This excerpt from” Gusev” gives the reader a setting (the sick bay of a ship), paints a picture of the weather they are enduring (rough), and has given an idea of the length of time these men have been at sea (long enough for them to not be bothered by the noises around them). As soon as this has been established, the story changes tone from a sense of realism to something stranger. The narrator begins to mull over some questions:

Suppose the fish is as big as a mountain [. . .] or suppose that there are thick stone walls where the end of the world is, and ferocious winds chained to the walls… If they haven’t broken their chains, why do they charge all over the sea like madmen, tugging as if they were dogs? And if they aren’t chained up, where do they go when it is calm?

The questions produce surreal images, changing the tone of the writing to something off-balance and philosophical. Chekhov creates strong imagery that grows stranger as the thoughts continue on. It is not a character actively having these thoughts about the wind; it is the narrator who wonders, speaking directly to the reader. Chekhov reaches out beyond the page and directly asks the reader the questions, asking them to imagine alongside the narrator. This effect draws the reader closer and deeper into the world of the story. The contrast between verisimilitude in the opening of the story and the swift change into an abstract thought experiment illustrates how the brevity of the short story does not negate its ability to be inventive, draw the reader close, or create depth. Chekhov’s sliding from reality to the surreal hooks the reader and pulls them along. Although he may be dealing with everyday feelings, thoughts, and people, Chekhov’s writing transcends the tradition of Russian realism found in the novels that preceded him, weaving together a poetic vision that speaks to the existential and philosophical. This lends itself well to the short story as the reader can be fully submerged for the duration of Chekhov’s stories, allowing for a more profound sense of engagement with his themes and the questions that undoubtedly arise from the page and sink into the reader’s mind.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a practitioner of the short story but also an early critic of the form. He created a concept that a short story must work toward a ‘unity of effect or impression’. He proposed that there should be ‘no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design’. He notes that this unity of effect is at its most impactful when the writer utilises the containment of the short form, allowing the reader to fully engage with the story in one sitting. This allows ‘the soul of the reader [to be] at the writer’s control’, explaining that ‘there are no external or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption’6. In both “The Huntsman” and “Gusev”, Chekhov executes his word choice, imagery, and tone to create an effective impression—the pain of clashing incompatibilities and the meaning of one’s place in the world—which is typical of his work. Chekhov broke away from the Russian realists whose novels he grew up with. The long-form prose work of the time typically ‘develop[ed] on the principle of combination, primarily lead[ing] away from parallelism, moving further away from a core subject, elaborating by dealing with all those elements contiguous with it’7. These novels also often handled moral questions and posed guidance for their readers. By working with the compact story form, Chekhov instead refused to follow the tangential wanderings of the novel and he also rejected the need to guide his reader toward an answer. He gifted his reader questions and refused to answer them; he offered them a carefully and artistically crafted impression whilst denying them the satisfaction of a neatly executed denouement. Reading Chekhov’s stories is entering an ambiguous space where the reader will not be spoon-fed any answers or explanations. There is an objectivity that reverberates throughout his stories, his choice of third-person narrative is often tightly controlled yet still renders a poignancy that unearths the want to question from his reader. “Gooseberries”8 is a story that holds itself at arm’s length whilst still managing to elicit deep philosophical questions in its reader. This story utilises a frame narrative; there is a story within the story. This device underlines the objectivity characteristic of Chekhov’s writing; it also lends a reflective quality to the story. The second in a trilogy of stories—the first being “The Man in a Case”9 and the third being “About Love”10 —“Gooseberries” follows a couple of friends as they undertake a summer hunting trip. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin are trekking through the countryside under subdued weather, growing tired at the seemingly endless expanse before them. Yet, they are both ‘filled with love’ for the landscape and are both ‘thinking how magnificent and beautiful their country was’. The opening already suggests the theme of the story, happiness. The two characters could easily succumb to the tiredness tugging at their bodies or the gloominess of the weather, but they choose to let the beauty around them be their focus. Ivan Ivanych decides to tell a story about his brother, Nikolay. However, before he can get started on his tale, the rain interrupts him, and Burkin suggests they find shelter at a mutual friend’s house. Chekhov removes his characters from the ‘damp, muddy, and uninviting’ scene that quickly becomes ‘cold and malevolent’ and provides them shelter where they are greeted with warmth and beauty. The heavy silence that had descended between the two friends dissipates once they cross the threshold onto Alyokhin’s property. Ivan Ivaych swims in the river, unable to mask his delight, and then the three men return to the house to ‘silk robes and warm shoes’ as the servant girl quietly attends to them, bringing them refreshments and smiling sweetly. Ivan Ivanych returns to the story of his brother from this idyll of comfort. He tells of how his brother, a government official, led a dismal life in a monotonous job, which led him to fantasise about living in the countryside, growing his own fruits and vegetables, most especially gooseberries. This fantasy soon turns into a desire that reigns above everything else in his life. He begins to live so scrupulously and frugally that he decides to marry not for love but for money. Nikolay continues on his obsessive pursuit of the perfect homestead with gooseberry bushes, ‘keeping [his wife] half-starved and putting her money in the bank in his name’. Ivan Ivanych clearly disapproves of how his brother acted; his story soon takes on a gruesome hue as he describes his visit to the property his brother finally owns. He notes that it was challenging to find the entrance to the house as ‘[t]here were ditches everywhere, and hedges, fences, and fir trees planted in rows’. His brother has managed to isolate himself from everything except his all-consuming gooseberry vision, making it difficult for others to even enter his home. Ivan Ivanych recounts how he was ‘met by a fat ginger-haired dog that looked like a pig’, who ‘couldn’t even be bothered’ to greet him. When he finally sets eyes on his brother, the image verges on nightmarish, ‘he had aged and filled out and looked bloated: his cheeks, nose, and lips were all protruding and he was grunting into [his] blanket’. One might think that this obsessive quest to own a property and grow gooseberries would generate some remorse or regret in Nikolay, seeing as his wife died due to his hoarding of money, his property sits between a brick factory and bone burning factory, he is in legal battles with the locals, and his beloved and long-awaited gooseberries were ‘hard and sour’. Yet, he is solely focused on his sense of achievement. He can only see that he finally has his own property and gooseberries. Nikolay is so completely myopic that the suffering which paved the way to his dream and the damage he continues to cause exists entirely outside his awareness. His quest for happiness and fulfilment turns morbid, yet he is blind to this. Once the telling of this story is over, the reader is brought back into the room with the three men. Ivan Ivanych confronts his friends about the meaning of life, pleading with them to realise that ‘Happiness does not exist’ and that life is for them to ‘Do good!’. The tale has created a sour atmosphere in the room; the men would rather have been listening to a story about ‘elegant people, about ladies’. The notion of turning to what makes one happy is apparent, whether it is gooseberries or lovely women. They wish they could turn away from Ivan Ivanych’s despair. Chekhov’s story lingers over the question of happiness and whether the only way to attain it is to tune out the suffering of those around you. Is personal happiness worth moral corruption? Is it real happiness if that is the cost? The story’s effect clings all the way to the end as the characters retire for the night. Burkin settles in his bed yet lies awake, trying to figure out the source of a ‘pungent smell’. The unsettled and discontented mood stretches into the night and is echoed by the weather outside, ‘rain hammered against the windows all night’. “Gooseberries” leaves the reader to wrestle with the meaning of happiness and the meaning of life from the work of a mere handful of pages. This lack of a concrete ending mirrors the way life often exists in a state of ambiguity with no finite answers in a world of moral relativity.

It would be reductive to attempt to create or affix one singular ‘short story theory’ to critique pieces of short prose, figuring out which fit the formula, therefore earning the right to belong to this elastic genre of writing. However, it is evident that a short story is not simply a failed attempt at a novel. It exists within its own parameters and has much to offer the reader within its own context. The compression and limitation ask a lot of the creator: economy of language, deft technique in creating mood and atmosphere, and innovative ways to create structure out of constricted space. Chekhov’s short stories are complete works in themselves; they do not leave the reader yearning for more words or pages. They do, however, leave the reader with an immersive experience that reaches down into the depths of life’s great questions relating to the self and one’s place in the world. His stories are glimpses of mundane occurrences that he imbues with paradoxically no less drama than the longer works of prose filled with action. The fragmented and splintered nature of the short story often reflects the feeling that the world is not harmonious and that wholeness, which maybe once felt like a possibility, now feels out of reach. It uses each word carefully to say what needs to be said and nothing more, asking the reader to engage with the text in a meaningful way. The short story refuses to guide the reader through explanation or provide deep analysis like the novel; it is a craft with no filler. It simply lays itself bare and invites the readers into its world.

By taking the opportunity to explain his choice of blank verse before the reader enters the world of the poem, Milton manages to communicate both definitions of revolution in one act. Firstly, he notes that he will be reproducing the blank verse used in Greek and Latin heroic epics and then rejects what his contemporaries have favoured. Milton is deciding to bring something back rather than conform to the style of his time. His statement that rhyme is ‘troublesome’ and ‘modern bondage’ elicits a strong reaction; he is not simply in favour of writing in another style due to preference but rejects rhyming as if he were to use it the text would be stifled from conveying the grandeur it possesses. The effect of his choice is evident as Satan addresses his fellow fallen angels as they find themselves waking in Hell after being hurled down from the great heights of Heaven:

Farewell happy fields

Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors, hail

Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor, one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time!4

If Milton had chosen to write in rhyme, this powerful speech that is used to rouse Satan’s army as he joyfully rejects Heaven and embraces the depths of Hell would lose its sincerity and sense of status. Employing a predictable rhyme scheme would undermine the sound of authority it conjures. Milton also chose enjambment over end-stopped lines. End-stopping in poetry feels regimented, structured, and creates a sense of predictability. With enjambment, there is a sprawling feeling within this speech from Satan. The lines spill into the next, gathering momentum and power as they move forward. These lines let the character of Satan build and build on the fervour within his speech as he inserts himself as the leader of Hell. Milton’s use of caesurae throughout the text, in combination with the enjambment, creates tension within the verses. It allows for space, breath, emotion, and reflection between phrases mid-line. The option to forgo end-stopped lines, especially rhyming ones, avoids the poem feeling too harmonious, as this would certainly compromise the multiple threads of tension and drama that run throughout. It also serves to emphasise the meter Milton has opted for. Iambic pentameter mimics natural speaking patterns whilst allowing for a feeling of grandeur. With its steady and carrying rhythm, reminiscent of a heartbeat, it moves the reader onwards and forwards, pulling them deeper into the world of the poem. Satan spurns Heaven, ‘Farewell happy fields / Where joy forever dwells!’ bringing to mind both the Christian tradition with the image of blissful eternal life whilst also evoking the Elysian fields of the Classical tradition where heroes go after death. Milton expertly threads together the two traditions that inform the narrative and form of the poem. Within the last two lines of this excerpt, Satan turns his speech from being directed at his army of fallen angels to Hell itself. The use of ‘profoundest’ suggests the supreme depths of Hell alongside creating a tone of significance. The plosive ‘p’ in the last word, ‘possessor’, generates a harsh, dominant feeling, fitting as Satan declares his ownership of their new home. At the end of Book One, Satan has installed himself as a leader of a rebellion against God; his legions have assembled Pandemonium—his revolutionary base—and they bide their time, waiting to wage their retaliation in Heaven. In this excerpt, the two definitions of revolution lean against one another; Milton’s revolutionary dismissal of rhyme in favour of a recycling of the heroic verse successfully underpins Satan’s rising rebellion and proclamation of himself as leader of Hell.

Instead of having God as the protagonist in the poem—or even as the obvious hero—Satan is the character the narrative revolves around. It is Satan Milton chooses to open the poem with, and it is Satan’s perspective the reader is given intimacy with. There is a closeness with Satan that Paradise Lost offers its reader that is not conventional within Christian writing. Whilst there is the strand of narrative relating to Adam and Eve’s life in Eden running in multiple books of the text, it is Satan’s presence in the poem which commands the reader’s attention. It is with him the journey begins, and because of him, the poem reaches its conclusion. To be given such proximity to Satan affords him a degree of pathos that he does not usually receive; it gives him space to be fleshed out as a character rather than simply remaining the evil seducer waiting to corrupt as he is widely known. C. S. Lewis—another Christian writer—writes about Milton’s depiction of Satan, ‘a creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers—including even his power to revolt’5. This insight is compelling regarding the political upheaval and chaos in Milton’s life preceding the creation of Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan is the product of God and His government of Heaven, and Lewis questions whether one can successfully overthrow the origin of one’s creation. Essentially, he interrogates the idea that we are the product of the systems we are born into, and whilst we may revolt and rebel against them, can we ever conquer that which made us? Satan’s lust for revenge against a system he deems unfair, his persuasive speeches to garner support from his fallen peers, and his subsequent defeat somewhat mirror Milton’s active political life. There is a similarity between Satan’s disdain for God as a ruler, ‘O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell . . .’6 and Milton’s opposition to the ruling of bishops in Of Reformation. Lewis7 details the cycle of Satan within the narrative as such:

After asserting dominance in Hell, Satan goes on a downward trajectory, losing status at every turn until he is left with his wings pinned to his sides and his belly in the dirt. He has lost everything—his position in Heaven, his leading role in Hell—and now he is condemned to the lowest life. This trajectory evokes a sense of sympathy when the reader is aware of Milton’s many tragic losses—it suggests that it might be easier than one might think to relate and sympathise with Satan. To craft a sympathetic character of one of the most well-known antagonists and villains his readers would have encountered throughout their lives is a revolutionary idea.

Milton, plunged into darkness through the loss of his sight, is reverential about the light of God within the poem, ‘Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav’n, first-born’8. This passage has Milton as the speaker of the poem, and is captured at the transition between the darkness of Hell and the bright illumination of Heaven. It has the tone of a lamentation, which brings the tragic circumstance of the writer of the poem centre stage as he likens his blindness to the darkness of Satan’s banishment to the depths of Hell. Milton goes on to mourn the loss of seeing the world’s beauty transform around him throughout the seasons, ‘Presented with a universal blank / Of nature’s works to me expunged and razed’9, he then pleads to God:

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,

Shine inward and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate. There plant eyes. All mist from thence

Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight10.

It is a painfully sad moment in the poem, especially as Paradise Lost is an intensely visual poem, creating strikingly rich worlds and characters through the brushstrokes of Milton’s descriptive language. The poet himself reminds his reader directly that he cannot see. This juxtaposition of Milton’s blindness with a vibrantly visual literary text symbolises the depth of sight he has gained. He may not be able to see the world around him and the manifestation of each beautiful season, but he can discern something profound in his blindness. Even whilst this is a sorrowful moment in the text, there is a penetrating hope in Milton’s words; he is not succumbing to darkness but using the darkness to illuminate a deeper significance in life. Rooted in the middle of line 53 is an extremely evocative short sentence: ‘There plant eyes’. Paradise Lost has long, rambling lines and passages that carry the reader onward with the narrative, getting them lost in the drama that swirls across the pages. However, this short and direct moment of pleading from Milton to God has a pared-back simplicity to it. His earnestness and hope cut through the pages of the complex lexicon he deftly wields to provide an intimate look at the writer. The reader feels Milton’s presence in his text and it draws them closer, asking them to read on to find what the ‘celestial light’ will illuminate within him. This makes it easier to understand why Milton would put Satan at the centre of his narrative. Like him, Satan is cast out of the light and into darkness. To be a Christian writer and emphasise the perspective of Satan is revolutionary, it does not conform to biblical and Christian tradition to offer Satan patience or pathos. It is not conventional to depict Satan as a figure worthy of his own perspective and to allow space for sympathy. This choice alone could qualify Paradise Lost as a revolutionary Christian text as it moves towards affording those we are taught to understand as evil empathy.

Paradise Lost is a text steeped in a revolutionary spirit. Crafted by a figure who endured many losses and a failed uprising, the poem interrogates the nature of good and evil whilst rebelling against authority. To provide Satan space within his sprawling epic to expand into a fully fleshed-out character, Milton draws close to evil and interrogates its roots and reasons. It is a revolutionary act as a Christian to afford Satan more space than God. The text is evidence of an author who respected Christian scholarship deeply and sought to push its boundaries and see if it was possible to question God’s authority. Alongside its exploration of Christian hierarchy, it captures Milton’s core political beliefs and exhibits them in a rich poetic form which in itself is rebellious, casting off the chains of modern convention. Milton expertly weaves together old forms of the Classical genre with biblical narrative, threading political and religious themes throughout. By rejecting what his contemporaries were doing, he sculpted an influential text that reached back in time whilst propelling himself and his work to relevance for centuries. Orlando Reade11 captures the significance of Milton’s epic on future generations of writers, ‘[he] had done so much to define success that a writer had to be like him and not like him at the same time’. Revolution moves forward and with Paradise Lost, Milton has proven that sometimes in order to make that forward motion in a meaningful way, one must take from the past, break it apart, and produce something new.

Revolution, in the original sense of the word, is defined as a cyclical return. Over time, it evolved and expanded its meaning, as language does, to a forward movement towards a changed condition. For a text to be considered revolutionary, it would be expected to meet the criteria of cyclical recurrence and reaching a changed condition. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674)1 is a text crafted by its author reaching back through time to the Classical and Christian writing traditions to provide form and narrative. The narrative of God’s creation and the Fall of mankind is expanded as Milton did not simply regurgitate the story of Genesis but rewrote scripture and wrestled with it to create something new. He borrowed the structure of the heroic epic to create a sense of grandeur yet infused it with a biblical retelling. To take such well-known literary traditions and tear them apart to craft something of his own, Milton emulates the Great Creator in a revolutionary feat of writing filled with rebellion. As a public figure, Milton was heavily involved in the political movements of his time. He campaigned against the monarchy, decried the hierarchy within the Christian church, and produced many polemical pamphlets, even arguing in favour of divorce. He was a notable figure with a mind that supported many revolutionary ideas; he did not question bringing this fervour to his political and poetical writing. Exploring Paradise Lost and Milton’s personal life around the time of its conception produces ample evidence that it is indeed a revolutionary text.

Milton’s political work contains a pronounced poetic energy embedded within it, underscoring his political arguments. In his polemical tract Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes that hitherto have hindred it2, Milton explores and criticises the Christian churches of England, with a particular focus on hierarchy in the ecclesiastical system. Milton condemns episcopacy, the government of the Christian church by bishops: ‘who no sooner advanc’t to it, but like a seething pot set to coole, sensibly exhale and reake out the greatest part of that zeale, and those Gifts which were formerly in them, settling in a skinny congealment of ease and sloth at the top’. He does not attempt to play down his feelings on the issue. There is a clear tone of disgust, particularly visceral with his choice of ‘skinny congealment’, as if a thin layer has gathered and stagnated atop the system, smothering what lies beneath. This excerpt forcefully illustrates Milton’s disapproval of the hierarchical system as he wanted and pushed for a more decentralised governing of the church. The word choice of ‘ease and sloth’ denotes a position of power that is undeserved and not used for the betterment of the system. It is simply power that is squandered. He continues in this vein of contempt, ‘but their devotion most commonly comes to that queazy temper of luke-warmnesse, that gives a Vomit to GOD himselfe’. There is undeniably a strong sense of tone and mood, untempered by what is usually a more prosaic field of writing. However, by incorporating his poetic voice into his prose, Milton’s writing is persuasive, conjuring effective imagery and hooking his reader with its passion. It is evident that Milton was an active figure in the political sphere as well as in literature, each domain informing the other. Paradise Lost is a poem made up of doubles that underscore one another: Satan and God, Heaven and Hell, Adam and Eve, good and evil, free will and obedience. Milton’s writing, as Thomas N. Corns3 notes, ‘is probably most often approached from the perspective of its political content or its polemical skill’. The political charge of his prose works is readily reflected in Paradise Lost.

Within the opening lines of Paradise Lost is a statement audacious in its confidence and boldness. Milton is the speaker of the poem as it begins, and he tells his reader this text ‘pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’4. This proclamation at the poem’s opening brings the reader’s awareness to the creative process running alongside its narrative. Milton may be retelling a well-known story of creation, but he also inserts himself as a great creator. He views himself and his work as revolutionary and makes the reader immediately aware of this. The drama of the creation of Paradise Lost rivals the narrative within its pages.

After some months of dwindling eyesight, Milton became blind in 1652. Soon after, his first wife, Mary Powell, died in childbirth. He found himself in the difficult position of being blind, widowed, and the father of three young daughters. However, his suffering only continued from there. In 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock, but sadly, history repeated itself as he lost his new wife only a couple of years later as she died in childbirth in 1658, their infant daughter only outliving her by a few weeks. As Teskey notes in the 2020 introduction to Paradise Lost, the date of the poem’s composition is unknown but believed to be 1658, the same year as these devastating personal losses. Adding to the grief and tragedy already prominent in the writer’s life, the revolutionary political figure Oliver Cromwell died in the late summer of that same year. Cromwell had loomed large in Milton’s political beliefs, as is evident in a sonnet Milton dedicated to him: ‘Guided by faith, and matchless fortitude / To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough’d’5. It is clear that Milton’s political prose and dramatic poetry often overlapped, crossing the division between life and art, bringing one into the other. After Cromwell’s death, his son Richard stepped into his father’s role of Lord Protector, but he was not received with confidence. Political chaos followed soon after, with parliament ignoring demands and pleas from the voices of those supportive of the republic Cromwell had established. In 1660, the monarchy was restored. What Milton had been fighting and campaigning against for years was now his reality again. Milton truly believed that eradicating the monarchy and living under a republic would offer the people of his country more freedom and liberty. He produced many pamphlets filled with polemical rhetoric, often writing about liberation and freedom whether from episcopacy, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes that hitherto have hindred it6, censorship in publishing, Areopagitica7, and he even ventured into the domestic realm by writing on divorce, The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce8. He was a writer poised by unrelentingly dire personal and political circumstances to write about loss. It is unsurprising that this period of his life—losing his new wife and their infant daughter followed by the death of Cromwell and the reinstating of the monarchy—led him to write Paradise Lost, a poem abundant in tension relating to free will, good and evil, and hierarchy.

The reader encounters revolution in the original sense of the word, a cyclical return, within Paradise Lost as Milton brings about a return of genre. The poem begins:

Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe

With loss of Eden till one greater Man

Restore us and regain the blissful seat

Sing Heav’nly Muse . . .9

Milton weaves together two literary traditions from the beginning of Paradise Lost. He does not shy away from the recycling of genres. He shows his hand to the reader immediately; he has co-opted two poetic traditions and wants the reader to know this. Fleetingly delineated in the opening lines is the Christian narrative of the Fall of man, followed by the resulting expulsion from Eden and the redemptive act of Christ—it is assumed the reader knows this story well. On line 6, Milton invokes the ‘Heav’nly Muse’ of the Classical tradition. There is a quick move from Christian tradition to the Classical, which alerts the reader to Milton’s recycling of multiple genres. This poem is not only about the retelling of a biblical story but also Milton’s skilful technique and literary knowledge. By echoing the epic poem, there is an assumption the reader will be familiar with this genre too—this is soon followed by a sacred invocation from the Christian tradition, ‘And chiefly thou, O Spirit’10. By making his use of former literary genres clear from the very beginning, Milton begins a text which exemplifies the revolutionary nature of literature in the original sense of the word. Writers nourish their craft by reading, and this constant contact and deep engagement with literature is reflected in the texts they create, distilled through their own understanding into a new piece of work. Embedded references that have inspired writers can be found reappearing in new ways. Paradise Lost exemplifies this as it takes familiar narratives and genres and synthesises them into something new, using intertextuality to engage readers and deepen its effectiveness as a text. Samuel Johnson11 remarks on Milton’s borrowing from earlier works of literature:

Milton was a known Christian poet and revolutionary thinker; in Paradise Lost, he pulled from the deep well of these practices he was intimately immersed, and he welcomed the familiarity of these worlds to cultivate something of his own.

Thank you, , for suggesting I publish this list!

My favourite reads have been marked with a 🖤

2022

July: Higher Ground, Anke Stelling (trans. Lucy Jones) (2021) 🖤

August: Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (trans. Sophie Hughes) (2017) 🖤

September: Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head, Warsan Shire (2022)

October: Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (1956) 🖤

November: The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, Rachel Cusk (2009)

December: O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker (1991) 🖤

2023

January: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver (1981) 🖤

February: Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz (1991) 🖤

March: Among Flowers: a Walk in the Himalaya, Jamaica Kincaid (2005)

April: Optic Nerve, Maria Gainza (trans. Thomas Bunstead) (2014)

May: A Devil Comes to Town, Paolo Maurensig (trans. Anne Milano Appel) (2019)

June: Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk (2022) 🖤

July: Love, Toni Morrison (2002) 🖤

August: The Lake, Banana Yoshimoto (trans. Michael Emmerich) (2005)

September: The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh (1948) 🖤

October: The Lottery and Other Short Stories, Shirley Jackson (1948)

November: Small Bodies of Water, Nina Mingya Powles (2021)

December: Fair Play, Trove Jansson (trans. Thomas Teal) (1989)

2024

January: On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson (2021) 🖤

February: The Woman Destroyed, Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Patrick O’Brian) (1967) 🖤

March: The Private Lives of Trees, Alejandro Zambra (trans. Megan Mcdowell) (2010)

April: Art and Lies, Jeanette Winterson (1994)

May: On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass (1975)

June: Lote, Shola von Reinhold (2020) 🖤

July: A Flat Place; Moving Through Empty Landscapes Naming Complex Trauma, Noreen Masud (2023)

August: Run River, Joan Didion (1963) 🖤

September: Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin (1953) 🖤

October: The Vet’s Daughter, Barbara Comyns (1959)

November: Grove, Esther Kinsky (trans. Caroline Schmidt) (2020)

December: Under the Net, Iris Murdoch (1954)

2025

January: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)

February: After the Winter, Guadalupe Nettel (trans. Rosalind Harvey) (2014)

March: I Paint What I Want to See, Philip Guston (2022)

April: Sex and Lies, Leïla Slimani (trans. Sophie Lewis) (2017) 🖤

May-July: hiatus

August: The Fawn, Magda Szabó (trans. Len Rix) (1959) 🖤

I can only hope this gift of a community we have created together continues to read and share thoughts with one another because regardless of how my month has been, it’s always a welcome date in my calendar.

Virginia Woolf’s writing wrestles with the profound and the universal—life, love, death, belonging—but she does it through a deceptively domestic realm. Small lives contain multitudes, don’t they? There is a blurring, softening, and a stitching together of life in her work that only makes her narratives feel lived in and believable, they are convincing. Woolf is a writer that gently guides and builds something seemingly banal into something monumental.

John Berger notes, ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world'.1

Breaking away from the realist conventions of the 19th-century novel, Virginia Woolf was concerned with discovering new methods of portraying and representing life. Her writing often stitches together caught moments, snippets of conversations, and unspooling thoughts with rich visual detail running throughout. She does not follow a strict linear timeline, and a narrative plot is not what ties her work together. Between the Acts was the last novel Woolf wrote, and its midsummer setting of a pageant with a taut tension pulled tight across every page brings it to mind lately. The novel stretches an entire day across its pages. By distorting the typical convention of a novel possessing a chronological timeline broken up into chapters, she instead presents an experiential representation of time, we become caught up in the day through glimpses of setting and the natural world, the acts of the pageant, the words shared between the audience. Without a singular protagonist to follow throughout Between the Acts, various characters are given fleeting moments on the page. Whilst some characters return again and again, some seem to barely hold any significance.

One such character is Candish. He makes his first appearance near the beginning of the book and then an even briefer appearance some thirty pages later. We first meet him within a small yet beautiful paragraph as he rearranges some flowers, ‘yellow, white, carnation red—he placed them. He loved flowers, and arranging them, and placing the green sword or heart-shaped leaf that came, fitly, between them’. This is a paragraph which precedes a couple of paintings Woolf incorporates into Between the Acts. We are being set up visually—the colours of the flowers, the composition, and the consideration of these elements. Woolf is preparing us for the visual analysis of two portraits which are soon to follow. But why are they given so much consideration and space on the page? When writers decide to include visual art in their work, it never fails to draw me closer. Here is something that is saying far more than the sum of its parts. It is providing context, it is giving us insight, there is something within this image that is expressing more than the words surrounding it. This is true of many things in literature; setting, clothing, objects, gesture. Yet, visual art is what always stands out to me the most. For a writer to create a piece of art within their work demands my attention and I will always take the time to study its potential message.

Two full-length portraits hang side by side. One a man, the other a woman. The narrator is quick to say that the people portrayed in these paintings did not know one another, ‘in real life they had never met, the long lady and the man holding his horse by the reign’. We are first introduced to the painted characters through an all too familiar lens; the woman’s body and the man’s action. The identity of each is explored a little further, ‘the lady was a picture, bought by Oliver because he liked the picture; the man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the reign in his hand’. Again, Woolf’s description of how the people captured in these paintings came to reside on the wall of this house has a particular feel to it. The woman was bought because of her beauty. The man is here through significance to the family. It is mentioned that the man ‘had a name’, yet we are not given his name. And then there is the repetition of him holding ‘the reign in his hand’, a deliberate underscoring of his power through implied ownership and ability to lead. We are now aware of the disparity with which gender is viewed in this household, the location of the novel. The narrative unfolds within an environment where the predominant view is that men are seen as active participants in life and women are static, passive, and valued by their beauty—they are possessions to be admired. The man is given a voice as the narrator explains the genesis of the portrait, ‘He said to the painter: ‘If you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves are on the tree.’ There were leaves on the trees’. The subject of the portrait is given no name, however, he has a voice, he is directing, and he has agency—he needs no name. Being a man is enough to command respect and action. The inclusion of a horse in the painting speaks again to the subject’s ability to command alongside his demand that there must be leaves on the trees—also a possible symbol of his perceived virility. The narrator closes the description of the man’s portrait by saying, ‘He was a talk producer, that ancestor’. It is not said who engages in the discussions this portrait might elicit, is it a first-time viewer keen to hear about the art of the house? Or a proud family member wishing to reminisce about family history? It seems this particular information is not important, what is important is that the man demands enough interest to evoke discussion, and that we be made aware of this.

In contrast to the man who has a name, a voice, a story, and a family history, the ‘lady was a picture’. As Berger states, ‘one might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear’. Woolf includes a far more detailed and poetic description of the woman in the painting. The first visual detail the reader is offered is that of her ‘yellow robe’, again, the woman’s presentation is highlighted. The colour yellow has connotations of positive feelings; joy, happiness, hope, idealism. Is this related to the woman’s own nature? Or is it so the woman projects a certain ideal towards the viewer—one of always radiating outwards and bringing others joy? The description then details her pose, she ‘lean[s], with a pillar to support her’. This relaxed position directly contrasts the image of her counterpart holding the horse’s ‘reign in his hand’. He is an image of ownership and power, she is soft and relaxed. The combination of the colour yellow with the relaxed pose creates an air of softness and passivity in the woman. Interestingly, the woman holds ‘a silver arrow in her hand’. Arrows illustrate movement and direction, yet, by holding it in her hand, it is as if she is choosing to remain still, possibly to be viewed. This creates a sense of awareness of being watched. She also has a ‘feather in her hair’. A feather might suggest flight or freedom, but again, it—and she—are static. This blend of colour, pose, and symbols culminates in the idea that the woman is choosing to be watched and admired. This is compounded by the description of the viewer’s experience of the painting, ‘she led the eye up, down, from the curve to the straight’. This hints at an attitude towards women suggesting they bring objectification on themselves.

Woolf, incidentally, does not name the artist of either painting, leaving the subjects the sole focus. As she closes this paragraph, she asks us to take these images with us as we read on. There are two ways she executes this. Firstly, the description of the painting trails off the frame and into the space the viewer occupies, ‘. . . through the glades of greenery and shades of silver, dun and rose into the silence. The room was empty.’ The alliteration of ‘glades of greenery’ and shades of silver’ feels almost incantatory, encouraging the viewer to follow along into the empty room. Secondly, the empty room is mirrored in the opening of the next paragraph, the repetition appearing similar to the enjambment of poetry on the page. Our eye mimics the viewer’s eye into the room and into the novel. Both of these portraits appear only in this moment, yet they carry heavy symbolism and context. This is an example of what Woolf’s writing does so well, allowing the weight of the past to be felt in the present, imbuing the moment of ‘now’ with all that has come before. The past constructs the present and this is felt in the tension that smothers the entirety of the novel. Woolf is one of those writers whose construction is constantly glimmering with significant details. Brushstroke by brushstroke, her novels are built through images and visual language that convinces us of both the strangely familiar reality she is hoping to portray.

We moved at the beginning of February to a flat that is a sun trap. The light spills into the rooms all day long, warming everything up. My desk faces out onto the garden at the back of the block, which is actually a grid of gardens. My street, the street parallel, and the one that runs across the top connecting us all face each other at the back. Our little gardens are fenced off per block with a lane running down the middle to cut through from one street to the other. I used to live by a canal and loved watching the swans every day and worried I would miss a closeness to nature in our new home, which is in a busier part of the city. However, there are many, many birds that flit between the trees growing in each garden. These trees and hedges are not neat and tidy, they are sprawling and untamed. They reach across fences and tangle themselves into one another. It is a pleasing, knotted mess. Sparrows dart across my eyeline, bickering with their siblings, robins sing from deep in the overgrowth, their little blotches of blood red and burnt orange flash between branches every so often. Directly opposite my desk is a tall, spindly tree that has been bare since we moved here. Until the other morning. I was making a cup of tea and noticed a flush of pink amidst the various tones of green, grey, and brown. Reaching taller than all the other trees around it, a cherry tree. A blackbird swaying with song on the highest branch, announcing the eruption of blossoms. The day before was the warmest we have had so far this year, the evening refusing to let go of the gentle heat the day had created. The sunlight was warm, and the air was balmy. It felt good, but not without a deep streak of worry, given how early in the season it is. I’m sure it was this warmth which coaxed the blossom to burst overnight.

The full moon appeared last night and brought the rain with her. Clouds have flooded the sky and made the trees greener. Everything is flat and dense in colour. Spring shifts and slips from one feeling to another, and I can feel how her mood defines the people around me. They are ready for renewal, they can feel the season’s characteristic sense of being ripe with possibility. They mourn the sun hiding from them and despise the typical Scottish rain they have been given. I miss the sunlight too, but I welcome the rain. The shifts in pressure that come with warmer weather throw my body into a state of tension that often leaks into a pool of pain at my temples and behind my eyes. My sister and mother are also sensitive to the pressure changes brought on by rain clouds and stormy weather. I didn’t realise there was a rational and explainable reason for this until a few years ago. Growing up, I assumed every family had a unique sensitivity or power that ran through their bloodline. Ours just happened to be the ability to predict the weather. I could feel the pressure building yesterday evening as I moved around our small kitchen making dinner. I was chopping garlic and shallots, and every movement felt like it might rupture the pressure building in my skull. I had to lie down and focus on my breath, attempting to hold myself together. And then it rained. The heavens broke, and so did the tension within my body. The rainfall was loud, wild, streaking against the windows. We opened them and let the sound rush over us. The smell of warm earth mixing with the cool rain, a soothing balm.

A deeper sense of appreciation for life tends to unfurl during spring. People can sense the chance for growth, lightness, beauty around them. Winter has held us in its shaded stillness for a long, long time and now is the time to see if anything germinated in that darkness. I always hope that each season prepares me for the next. In winter, I am willing to get on my hands and knees and dig myself deep into the dark loam of the cold season if it will help me grow. I hope spring brings you renewal, I hope it brings you lightness. Most of all, I hope that you share whatever it brings you with those around you. I hope each of us chooses to remake and renew rather than succumb to the systems of oppression and destruction.

Signs spring is here

• Bees are bumping against windows

• Coconut oil softens in its jar

• A cherry tree greets me in the morning from my kitchen window

• Everything feels flirty

• Experiencing the weather of each season in one single day

• The dark circles under my eyes meet fresh freckles and flushed cheeks

• Earnest mornings

• Going outside without a coat and without regret

• Getting caught in a sudden downpour

• Magnolia petals drift across pavements

• Sleeping under the lighter duvet

• Camellias drenched in April showers

• Birds singing from dawn until after the sun sets

• Lingering evenings

• The warm smell of the pavement when walking home in the evening

For years, I attended Sunday services and various evening meetings throughout the week. I would walk through the doors of His house and wind my way down the sloped floor, the carpet scratchy with a clear path faded to the colour of dry grass from years of believers walking to assume their positions in the creaking pews. I watched hundreds of people standing in the chipped wooden pews, their eyes closed and heads tilted towards heaven, arms open wide, and voices breaking as they sang with abandon. When the oceans rise and thunders roar / I will soar with you above the storm. It gave me a rush. They looked full of something akin to rapture. Yet also expectant, as if they believed there was more to come. I wanted it. I became insatiably hungry for the feeling I witnessed in them. I felt charged by their exhilaration. So much emotion was held within those walls every Sunday morning that it seemed the brickwork should shudder and crumble. Tears would stream down faces as they uttered prayers under their breath. Hands would shake, cries would fly high up into the wooden beams of the ceiling, and bodies would heave and sink to the ground as spirits were cast out of them. It was as if something bigger than us was commanding the room, its frenetic energy moving through bodies and minds, bringing them to their knees. I was told this was the work of the Holy Spirit.

The word ecstasy derives from the Greek ekstasis. A sudden, intense, overpowering emotion that takes hold of your body so fully that you almost feel outside yourself—ecstasy is a kind of self-transcendence. This is what I remember chasing when I look back on my time as part of the church. I would be standing amidst all the high-octane emotion and feel I was missing something—like I was broken or not good enough for the Holy Spirit to waste its breath on me. I relentlessly observed those around me, sometimes even noting down their movements or words. I could never quite manage to break the wave of bliss that swept those standing around me out into a sea of unbridled faith. It was beautiful, their belief was beautiful to me. I would sing their words, mirror their movements, and dutifully listen to God's word. But I felt my feet firmly on the earth beneath me, anxiously waiting for the angels to descend.

Leaving was a gradual process. There was no clear-cut decision one day; it was a steady dimming. In the end, it felt wrong. There was an us versus them dichotomy that felt brutal in its judgement. The high production value displayed at each service with its loud music, charismatic characters, and therapised language rang hollow. I witnessed calculated moves to try and 'win souls for the Lord', which felt misleading and manipulative. It was a breakup that happened over a couple of years, and in the end, I was left unsure of why I had stayed so long. The ecstasy, the rapture, the bliss—which I had chased for almost a decade—existed in other places. It wasn't exclusive to the church. I didn't have to be flooded by the Holy Spirit to experience awe.

The year of my departure, I began studying contemporary dance performance and choreography full-time. After being told for so long that bodily urges and earthly desires were of the Devil, and I was to quell them with everything I had, these were the impulses I was urged to listen to for the sake of creativity. I was to indulge them. I had never been encouraged to indulge in anything before. Moving from the intangibility of Christianity into a world defined by its physicality was a move from a mindset of restriction and denial into a life seductive in its openness. I often use literature as a stimulus for creating choreography. Words evoke a feeling or mood I feel compelled to translate into a physical language. Mary Oliver's Wild Geese contributed to the birth of a solo I created during the early years of my training. She told me I '[did] not have to be good'. She told me I 'only have to let the soft animal of my body / love what it loves'. The 'soft animal' within me loves moving my body as if the air around it is sticky like honey. It loves surrendering to the thrumming impulses that shimmer through my core and out into my extremities. It loves connection: skin to skin, feet to earth, feeling to movement.

I was introduced to this poem by a pen pal, an actor who lived in Silverlake, Los Angeles. We often sent each other poems, quotes from books we loved, and postcard-sized prints of our favourite artworks across the ocean, arriving in envelopes worn thin from travel. After I read Wild Geese for the first time, I ran to my backpack and dug my notebook out from under ballet shoes, fruit bruised from travelling to the studio and back, a sweaty t-shirt, and tore out a page. I scrawled the poem down, line by line, and placed it next to my bed—a new holy text. Her words cracked something wide open within me like I had been cleaved in half. I felt restrictions, rules, and regulations I had spent years clinging to—believing they would grant me unconditional love and acceptance—rushing out of me. I suddenly had permission to access my own body and the desires that lived within it. Beginning my dance training had allowed me to dip my toe into the unknown, but Mary Oliver let me throw my entire body into its depths. I realised I could worship at the altars of my choice: the altars of movement, bodily connection, words, and the natural world. For years, I read that poem every night before falling asleep. My mind still wanders to those lines—a reminder of permission.

A few years ago, I filmed a project with a close friend and collaborator in the Highlands. Like me, they had grown up in an evangelical church and left in their early twenties. It was a typical February morning as we travelled north, the light was grey and hazy, the cold bled easily into the car to sit alongside us. Rain was coming down at a gentle, rhythmic pace, bouncing off the loch and streaking down the windows. It was -4 °C and a hazy mist hung in the air, settling on our faces as we began setting up at the base of the hills. Once the camera was ready, I removed the multiple layers between my skin and the bitter air—heavy winter coat, roll-neck jumper, cashmere gloves and hat, thick scarf—and settled into position. The thin black satin I wore warped and shifted with the weather, the wind cascading through gaps to slip icily against my skin. Standing amidst the roughly-tangled heather, with a clear stream pouring over rocks to my left, I could feel a deep sense of wonder beginning to build in me. It started in the pit of my stomach and rushed through my blood. It threatened to spill over.

The descending sky was beginning to swallow Aonach Dubh, Beinn Fhada, and Gearr Aonach—the peaks of the mountains also known as the Three Sisters of Glencoe. All around me was rough and moody topography, fitting of the birthplace of many myths and legends. I felt overcome by its untamed and tempestuous beauty. The connection I felt in that place had me on my knees. I began to move. Tentatively at first, feeling my way through winds bordering on a squall. Long hair trailing into the sky like dark ribbons. Muscles aching from the effort of moving in the cold, shaking and seizing. Tears flowed down my face, their salty paths staining my skin. I wasn’t the only one struck by wonder, my tears were mirrored in the face behind the camera. We exchanged soft smiles and nods of understanding. We were working and existing in an atmosphere imbued with a holiness that was beyond our understanding. It invited our surrender. We allowed ourselves to quietly cry as we worked. We let the mountains, sky, and mist dictate our movements. Mary says, ‘attention is the beginning of devotion’, and there was an attention to our surroundings and our place within them that was both innate and purposeful. The fierce, natural beauty around us and how instinctual a connection we shared with it pulled the final lines of Wild Geese to my mind. Here we were, surrounded by a rugged, astonishing landscape as it ‘offer[ed] itself to [our] imagination . . . announcing [our] place / in the family of things’. My movement felt like a prayer. We realised we didn't need God, the church or the Holy Spirit; we were already reverent.