ARTS CATASTROPHE & AMBIENT GHOSTS 🐁

IN THIS MISSIVE:

• I’m musing on a Scotland without Arts Funding
• I’m Reading Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
• I’m Listening to Elin Kåven’s ambient yoiking
• I’m Watching Save Yourselves!
• I’m Planning a hallows-tide subscriber hang

I’m musing on a Scotland without arts funding.

This week the main arts funding body in Scotland, Creative Scotland, announced it is closing its Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to budget uncertainty and the Scottish government not releasing funds. [Read more at The Bookseller.] The Scottish government has become more conservative and we see one of the first things to brutally suffer are artists, writers and musicians working outside of big commercial endeavours. I currently survive as a writer because I am funded by Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals while I research and write my next book. Without this funding there would be no next book—or perhaps it would take another six to ten years of stolen moments lived in economic insecurity, hand to mouth. I’m not sure I could survive that. What I mean is this decision silences so many of us.

Most professional writers in the UK earn less than £7000 a year—these are poverty wages, even for established writers. With the end of this essential funding, disabled, marginalised writers like myself will be silenced. 

Funding will still subsidise big commercial endeavours, but the smallest of us, who rely on the Open Fund, are further marginalised by this decision. Only work following narrow commercial dictates will stand a chance. Innovation will be lost, the voices of those deemed uncommercial will be silenced.

What is Scotland without its literature, music and performance? Will only the wealthy be free to tell their stories? What will happen to the diverse voices of Scotland? 

On their website, The Campaign for the Arts has a clear and shocking overview of what has happened. Sign the Campaign for the arts petition here: https://www.campaignforthearts.org/petitions/scotland-2024/

If you are in Scotland, you can write to your MSP using this template created by the people at Canonical Theatre in Glasgow.

I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are.

—Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

I’m reading Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

I actually read this back in June, but it’s haunted me. This book is a childhood memoir and a pathography about the author’s struggle with endometriosis. It is a paean to memory. Each detail is exquisitely rendered, summoning a world of subtle meaning and connection.

It’s terrifying to realise that in the twenty years since the book was published chronically ill women and patients with ‘invisible’ illnesses are no closer to being listened to and believed by the medical establishment. This book wasn’t ‘packaged’ as a pathography, but those of us writing about life and illness could learn much here—the lens of the suffering self is never solipsistic; it’s always projected outward toward the wider world. 

History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it the same way you sift through a landfill for evidence of what people want to bury.

—Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

These words, though I had not read them yet, were precisely what drove the writing of Ashes & Stones.

I’m listening to this ambient album from Sa Sïlvae. Elin Kåven’s yoiking—sacred song in the Sami tradtion—is so beautiful.

I’m watching Save Yourselves! 

I loved this cuddly-ominous apocalypse movie. Funny, sweet and terrifying. If you are in the UK it’s streaming free on Channel 4 for two more days!

I’m planning our next subscriber hang…

For October, around Samhain. Maybe October 27th. These are always at 7pm GMT. Will post more details as the date approaches!

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