This month at The Clearing

Julia Baird Book Club + Creative Questions - all the links you need!

Hello,

I feel like we’re all a little disctracted this month - I can’t think why. It’s not like there are globally consequential elections going on or anything. Seriously, I hope you’re all okay. Please remember to breathe.

This month at The Clearing, we have a few things to cheer you up. There’s Creative Questions with Elissa Altman on Tuesday 12th, with your regular chance to ask us a quesiton about the creative life, and to receive our (slightly idiosyncratic, but all the better for it) answers.

Meanwhile, our monthly Book Club pick is Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything by Julia Baird. Scroll down for a reading guide, and go below the line for links to join us live.

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November Book Club: Bright Shining

Julia Baird’s beautiful exploration of grace

Tuesday 26th November at 9am UK (please look up your local time here)

Julia is based in Australia, hence the unusual timings, but the recording will be available later that week.

The Zoom link to attend live is here, or add the event directly to your digital calendar using the button below.

Reading Guide

About Bright Shining

Grace is a concept that’s notoriously hard to define. As Julia Baird has it, if karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, loving the unlovable.

The current world can feel drained of all its grace, but Baird shows us how and where it can still be found: in intergenerational forgiveness, encounters with strangers, the fiery wonder of teenage girls. Baird describes an era in which the scales have fallen from our eyes, and we cannot unsee multiple horrors; and yet still, grace glints through them.

And Baird needs grace more than most:

‘While writing this book, I have been wrestling with the opposite of grace: my bodily gravity, the weight of a chronic, recurrent illness that keeps bringing me back to earth, that has filled me with despair, uncertainty, fear and grief. This has been my gravity. And it has made my search for grace even more pressing — my search for the moments when we transcend the worst of ourselves, and witness or experience a moment of clarity or beauty, like a glisk, which, as nature writer Robert Macfarlane tells us, is a Scots word meaning ‘glimpse’ or, more specifically, ‘sunlight glimpsed through a break in the clouds’ or, figuratively, ‘a glimpse of the good, a brief burst of warmth or hope’.

I have written these paragraphs, meditating on moral beauty, in between appointments with grim-faced surgeons, GPs and hospital nurses, with my arms punctured and bruised by the taking of blood and inserting of cannulas, and my veins pumped full of contrast dye as I slide in and out of scanning machines that search my insides for lumps of cancer and keep lighting up: Bingo, bingo, bingo, your card is full.

And outside these sterile medical rooms, I have gone to remote reefs for solace, floated rapidly along currents, mimicking flight with my arms outstretched, seeking peace, seeking grace in motion, in nature, in beauty, in silence, in loving, in fighting, in the chance to live another year, or day.

Grace is elusive and hard, and it’s everywhere, shining bright like the sun.’

I hope you’ll join us in reading along with this redemptive book.

About Julia Baird

Julia Baird is a Sydney-based author and journalist. She writes columns for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the ABC. She is a former co-host of The Drum on ABC TV, senior editor of Newsweek, Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard University and op-ed contributor for The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her first book, Media Tarts, was based on her PhD in History about the portrayal of female politicians. Victoria, her biography of Queen Victoria, was published globally to critical acclaim and was one of The New York Times' top 10 books of 2016.

Her third book, Phosphorescence, was a multi-award-winning international bestseller. Julia's latest book, Bright Shining, is shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Julia lives near the sea with her two children and an abnormally large dog.

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For a chance to win my Clearing goody box in November, just take out or renew an annual subscription (including for the Retreat tier). This month's treasure chest contains a copy of Bright Shining, a signed copy of Enchantment, plus stickers, my favourite refillable Herbin pen, Diamine ink, a Blackwing pencil, a Rhodia notebook, Burt's Bees lip balm, Nursem hand cream, and a gorgeous Ark bookmark. 

Below the line: links to forthcoming subscriber events, and a chace to put foward questions for the Book Club and Creative Questions.