For your stray attention this Halloween...

Briefly: Join my Patreon community - this month includes a Sharon Blackie book club & a hangout with Leah Hazard | Another kind of winter | Ramblers Association event | Embracing winter in the Guardian | Wintering @ The Shift Book Club (& win a proof of Enchantment!) | Thanks for your lovely messages after last week’s newsletter - for anyone who needs it, I have a resource for people who want to understand more about autism here.

Hello,

You may have noticed that - spookily - this newsletter is a day late. It was for the terrifying reason that… I just didn’t get around to writing it last week. But that gives me the opportunity to write from the cusp of winter, which as many of you know is my favourite time of year.

Yesterday in the UK, the clocks went back, and so the evenings are now darker. That will make tonight’s Halloween all the more liminal. I am not really a lover of trick or treating and I absolutely hate people in masks, but I do like Halloween a little bit more than I used to. That’s partly because Bert adores it, and I’ve learned to pour all my angst into making him a Scary Supper - this year’s feast includes Babybel eyeballs, mummy dogs, pumpkin fondue cauldrons and chocolate zombie cake. But I’ve also come to undestand how much we need this transition point into the dark half of the year. It’s the first gesture of defiance against the cold, bursting with a wild kind of creativity. It’s also a moment to acknowledge the darknesses that lurk in all of us.

So, some reading for you this week…

Lia Leendertz - author of the beloved annual Almanac - has a new Substack, and here she talks about the folklore of Samhain and Allhallowmas. Understanding this history has made me feel more kindly towards Halloween - it was, after all, an old tradition before the gaudy commercialism set in.

Aubrey Hirsch’s A Brief History of Witches on The Audacity makes a powerful link between witchcraft and the longstanding battle for women’s control over their own fertility.

This classic New Yorker article from 1978 by Calvin Trillin expresses the joyful exuberance that rises in some people at Halloween: Confessions of a Grownup Trick-Or-Treater.

Having just spent a few days in Spain, this classic 1933 lecture by Federico García Lorca on the Theory and Play of the Duende felt especially resonant. An untranslatable word describing a heightened state of emotion linked to flamenco, it evokes the unspeakable, the authentic and the bittersweet.

Given that Halloween once spoke to us about the closeness of our ancestors, I think we could do with a little more duende in our present day festivities.

I’m listening to…

I can’t resist a good ghost story, so Imaginary Friend on Endless Thread had me captivated.

Posted in full realisation that the whole world listens to this podcast anyway, and that it’s two months old but the episode of Off Menu with Prof. Brian Cox completely flipped my knowledge of gravity, which I felt like I understood until now. Apparently I don’t even have a grasp of the basics.

The ever-excellent Ologies has abandoned its strictly empiracal approach to explore the discipline of Vampirology this week. Why do we keep coming back to these bloodsucking fantasies? The answer is complex and fascinating.

I’m reading…

In the spirit of taking a rest, I read only fiction last week. I devoured Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows, the story of a sister who desperately wants to die, and a sister who desperately wants that not to happen. It somehow manages to be funny and deeply moving at the same time. Wonderful.

Appropriately for this moment, I also read Jenni Fagan’s Hex, a tale of witchcraft across the ages, and I’m halfway through a proof of Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss (out May 2023) which is a delightfully eccentric story of a therapist’s transcriber who becomes obsessed with the anonymous voice of one of the clients. Apparently it’s going to become an HBO series starring Jodie Comer. The new Killing Eve? Maybe. Don’t ask me.

On my TBR

Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent - ‘Stories of soil, sisterhood, and survival’ from the author of Rootbound. (Out March 2023)

The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas - a memoir of resilience set in Iceland.

Oxygen Mask by Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin - a beautiful graphic novel about not being able to breathe and the power of connection.

Listen to the Land Speak by Manchán Magan - understanding the Irish culture through language, landscape and lore.

Actually, don’t ask me about my TBR. It has grown so large that I fear it’s about to attain sentience.

See you all soon. Take care.

Katherine x

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