✎What's capturing your stray attention?
Reading and playing through a hiatus
Hello,
This morning, I posted a piece about the creative process, a subject that obsesses me. Will I ever, I wonder, come to terms with how it feels? It’s a very crunchy thing, very uncertain and uneven. On Friday, I found myself explaining my current place in it to a friend who works in a different creative field. ‘Every time I start a project,’ I told her, ‘it looks so good on paper. But then, after a while, it begins to feel too tight, too regimented. I can’t write in that environment. So I have to walk away from it while it loosens up a bit.’
She looked like she understood. Either way, that’s where I am right now.
Which means I’ve been busy reading. I might as well write a list:
• Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle, a brilliant memoir that looks to Mediaeval literature to contextualise a messy contemporary life.
• Brain Doyle’s collection of essays, One Long River of Song, has been holding me captive this week. What a beautiful writer. He’s new to me: I don’t think the UK has quite discovered him yet, which is a shame.
• Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s Twelve Words for Moss is fresh out in paperback, and is a lovely exploration of grief, travel and a very curious plant.
• James Bridle’s Ways of Being has been on my pile for the longest time, and I finally got round to reading it. I love the way it unpicks what it means to be intelligent, undermining our tendency to model it on human perception. I’ve been spouting facts from it all week.
• Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily is a superlative melding of memoir and fairytale, delivered so deftly that you don’t always know where one begins and the other ends.
There have been more, but these are the edited highlights. Finally, in an effort to show our son that it’s possible to neither cling to a tablet all evening nor glue oneself to the TV (he’s binge-watching Matt Groening’s Disenchantment, which I have to admit is brilliant), we’ve been playing board games. We are fans of Big Potato Games, and our new favourite is Ransom Notes; we also love Obama Llama, Colour Brain, Herd Mentality and Chameleon. All of these stop Bert from wanting to play Monopoly, which, like most reasonable people, I hate.
Okay, I meant to write a paragraph. Over to you: what’s been capturing your stray attention lately? And where are you in the creative process right now?
Take care,
Katherine
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I will make note of all these though who knows which will climb to the top. Having recently been diagnosed with stage four cancer I’ve been doing more than my fair share of reading and most recently like yesterday finished a book called Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad. Although I felt it could’ve been edited down a little bit. I truly liked the book and found Sol to be a beautiful, beautiful writer. She is so insightful and I felt like I’ve been rather dim with it about my own cancer or at least I don’t seem to have the brilliant reflections that she does and yet I recognize them all.
Going back to old favorites, like Margaret Atwood, and picked up a book of her essays called Burning Questions and another favorite, Joan Didion. I purchased a copy of one of her notebooks called South and west. I’m excited to dive in.
Having got my highest and lowest mark for two MA modules, I sympathise with difficulties of the creative process! However, I have been saved by Derek Jarman’s film Blue , his book Chroma, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh and Enlightenment by Sarah Perry. Guess I was ‘nt well over the last modules. Just the Dissertation left. Have just bought peonies to sooth my brain .