The seeds that grow a book

The touchstones of Enchantment

Briefly: | Listen to How We Live Now | Kateri Kramer’s stunning visual review of Enchantment in The Rumpus | US online virtual tour in two timezones! | Please support Enchantment by pre-ordering 🖤 UK/US

Hello,

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been recording interviews ready for the launch of Enchantment, and I feel like I’ve got to know my book all over again. It’s amazing how much you forget in the time between finishing the edits and sharing the book with the world: so many of the stories have faded from my mind. There have been a few moments when a question has made me panic slightly, and think, Oh god, did I write that down? It thought it only existed in my head.

What I’ve noticed the most, though, are the parts of the book that feel ancient to me, the components that have been there right from the start. It’s a lineage that only I can discern, a private etymology of a public language. It’s as though I planted a handful of seeds some time ago, and they germinated to form a tangled meadow that now conceals those vital first shoots.

Enchantment is a treatise on the urgent need for wonder in dark and uncertain times. When we soften enough to let in those fluttering emotions like fascination, awe and playfulness, we experience a kind of shift in our being, a lurch into a big, elemental context. In retrospect, I can see that two very personal shifts created this book. And both involve stars. 

The first came from an image I stumbled upon one day, an etching of a country village at night, its residents standing outside, awestruck. Above their heads, stars are raining down in such quantity that it looks like a snowstorm. To me, they appeared to be standing on a ball that was zooming through space, and I realised that this was exactly true, and that I was on that same ball. After that, I had to know everything about the meteor storm that inspired the image. It now has a chapter all of its own. 

The second seed only remains in the book in passing, but it was just as important. It came from a picture again, but this time of a person holding a handful of stars. They are tiny and black, finely detailed. I thought at first that they were jewellery, but on closer inspection I learned that they were fossils, the bony segments (or ‘ossicles’) that make up a marine creature called a crinoid. I’m not the only one to find them breathtakingly romantic: often found in rivers, their folk name is ‘fairy coins’.

My sense of fascination with the crinoid ossicles - both scientific and the aesthetic - opened up a direct line to my childhood self, who also collected fossils and loved to spend hours turning them in her hands, trying to fathom the timescales they represented. Although I couldn’t quite make a story out of the little black stars, I realised that Enchantment had to be a book about childhood, and what we lose in our impatience to grow up. 

It is also a book about how fleeting encounters can unpack a vast repository of meaning - the way that we bring the sense of magic that keeps enchantment afloat. The fuel is our attention, our willingness to pause and become engrossed, our extraordinary human ability to weave constellations from a few specks of stone.

As I wrote Enchantment, I returned to those two starfalls over and over again. I gazed at the etching for hours, and imagined the meteors raining down above my own head. I acquired my own handful of crinoids, and rearranged them in my palm as I felt my own fleeting presence in deep time. They became - quite literally - touchstones, distillations of the unruly, shifting idea that I was trying to explore. This week, it’s felt good to make contact with them again, and to feel the roots that they put down in me. They connect me to something far bigger than I am.

Enchantment is published in America next week - if you haven’t already, please pre-order your copy here. You can read a lovely starred review on Bookpage, or gorgeous visual response from Kateri Kramer at The Rumpus.

Catch me on my US virtual events, which are free but you need to book:

📚 Sunday 4th March @ 5pm ET with Pico Iyer in association with Book Passage, Elliott Bay Book Co. and Rakestraw Books. Book here.

📚 Tuesday 7th March @ 7pm ET with Priya Parker in association with Books and Books, Oblong Books, Wellesley Books and Skylark Bookshop. Book here.

UK readers will have to wait a little longer until 9th March, but it’s not long - pre-order yours here.

Thank you :)

Take care, 

Katherine

Website | Patreon | Preorder: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US