Top Posts from my First Year on Substack
I napped, I cried, I got published
I migrated to this platform a year ago, packing up my Patreon and making the leap to Substack. My wee cadre of Patreon supporters really saw me through the writing of Ashes & Stones. They supported me through those tough years and were the first readers of my field notes, the first to see my documentation and research.
To those supporters who followed me onto this platform, I thank you—and to all the new readers, I am thrilled we have found each other. As I go forward with tentative steps into the next book, paid subscribers here will be the first to glimpse these new field notes and revelations.
This blog has become a place for authentic conversations. Thank you for being here and for being a part of that. I love that this is still possible, despite the many mediums designed to hypnotise us into isolated reveries.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
—Simone Weil
To celebrate this anniversary, I have put together a round-up of my top six posts over the last year:
1. Unpacking my books: on Walter Benjamin, bibliophilia, and word hoards
When I talk about my books, I am talking about myself—what has chosen me, accompanied across many state lines, national borders and vast bodies of water.
After moving to Orkney, my boxes of books were the last things I unpacked. I talk about the tomes that followed me across the Pentland Firth and the ones that didn’t.
2. The Witch is Reel In: on performing witchy-ness
I made the elevator pitch about my spiritual identity. I danced the witches reel.
This is a post about coming out of the broom closet and navigating the cottage industry of the witch vogue.
3. Other People’s Houses: on gentrification, displacement and longing
“Houses are selling in seven minutes,” the estate agent warns as she stands in the bare kitchen, dressed in a trench coat and heels, her faux Gucci bag thrown onto the countertop with studied insouciance.
In this post I talk about the disorientation of looking for a home and the colonial roots of gentrification.
4. New LIghtning Moon: thunder magic & Shuhada Sinead
This culture can’t hold its visionaries, can neither see nor hear them without devouring them first to see what they taste like.
I come to grips with Shuhada Sinead’s death and what her life and work meant to me.
5. Blue Moon Magic & Subversive Joy: on being a paperback writer
Exuberance has been a tricky place to navigate emotionally—yet that’s the mood I’m in. It’s contained in “September.” —our hearts were ringing
/ In the key that our souls were singing.
…in which I practice being happy.
6. Nocturnal Harvests: reaping the nap year at Lammas
In my year of sleep I have discovered all teachings, the deepest information, is processed this way as the body resets and heals.
I kept a dream diary for a year and made each dream into a line of a poem, recorded here (the overshare begins under the paywall).
Thank you for reading this far. Please subscribe, upgrade to paid & share Missives.
