Cornflowers, dandelions, maple trees, and all the rest of their towering and tiny green cousins send out their seeds on the winds, hoping to find fertile ground. Inspiration is much the same. A book, a song, a poem might land in just the right spot for you, on just the right day, giving life to a new idea. On the first Sunday of each month, I send out a handful of seeds that have drifted into my own path, in the hope that their beauty or their poignancy or their curiosity feeds your creativity.
First of all, my apologies for not sending this until the second Sunday of July. Last Sunday we were away for the holiday weekend, but that little getaway also gave me my first seed to share:
Standing ankle-deep in the waves as they crept up over warm sand, I felt my entire body relax and connect to the salt, the sand, the slimy eel grass, all of it glorious and sticky and cold. I spent long moments watching individual rocks as they changed colour with each swell of seawater, and inhabiting my body in a way that gets lost in the day-to-day of mothering and working and cleaning and everything else. If you have a spot that reconnects you to your heart and your body and your imagination, I dearly hope you find some time to go there this summer.
And then there are any of these spectacular shelf paintings from artist Lizzy Gass.
This witch’s shelf is obviously my favourite, but she also has shelves for biologists, archeologists, astronomers, adventurers, veterinarians and more, as well as a wealth of other art. And she takes commissions for shelves too! (Which might be something I’m thinking about investing in…)
I recently borrowed The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty from my local library and I inhaled it. A 40-something retired pirate queen with a bum knee and a falling-down house reluctantly takes on one last job to find the kidnapped daughter of a former crewmate. There wasn’t anything I didn’t love about this book. Sorcerers? Obscure magical relics? Ocean-swept winds you can practically feel? Djinn and demons who are infuriatingly attractive? Absolutely! But there is also a moving undercurrent of Amina’s struggle to reconcile her thirst for adventure with the love of her life—her daughter—and how to balance the two. An enthusiastic 5 stars.
I also just read An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson, and it was such a fun, fast read. Seventeen-year-old Isobel paints stunning portraits for the fair folk, who are obsessed with human Craft, and who will crumble to dust if they try to create anything themselves. And then—oh no!—she gets tangled up with the Autumn Prince and dire straits ensue. But what I really loved was this passage:
“We passed slender, white-barked birches, their yellow leaves shimmering and clattering like gold coins in the breeze. We passed stony brooks that wended between hillocks of moss, their water the colour of milk with snowmelt. We passed ash trees that had shed half their foliage all at once, pooled about their roots as a maiden might drop a shift. A stag and doe paused to watch us go by before they leapt away through the light-filled mist, casting their shadows against the air like a paper screen.”
In four sentences, Rogerson creates a vivid, colourful, brilliant autumn world that I could feel on my skin while reading, and it just made me wildly envious as a writer.
And finally, this newsletter from poet Joy Sullivan, who I discovered a little while ago and who I utterly adore. In it, she explores the backstory to her poem “Instructions for traveling west,” and you just need to read the whole thing, but I’ll leave you with this quote from near the end:
Why does writing terrify us? Because it should. Because poetry is the electric alchemy that lurches our lives into motion. It drives us toward whatever west hounds our horizons. When we name the truth of our desire, we’re catalyzed. Like newly found gods, we bellow furious futures into existence. -Joy Sullivan, “How to leave a life”