This Writing Life

Gratitude / Beauty / Freedom

A handful of writers I really value have posted about their writing lives recently: what they’ve learned about storytelling from a decade of writing online; how they start writing books, and more. I’ve found that the most beautiful part of being on Substack is this writing community. The generosity and openness, the ways we try to nourish one another. It is beautiful! I am so grateful !

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about success— what it looks like to me for my own writing life — the ins and outs of it all.

I’ve been thinking back to wee newbie me, many years back, before I had ever even published online outwith my own blog or Instagram, never mind published work in a print publication, let alone a book, least of all two books…

I had the absolute honour, mid December— frost on the ground, collective grief in many of our hearts for other people of Palestine—to lead a LIFE WRITING course in person with Jarred McGinnis for Arvon. It was my first in person course and I found it so incredibly moving for so many reasons. First and foremost I think was the joy of being trusted at such a pivotal stage of people’s writing lives.

It got me thinking about my beginnings, and I thought it might be helpful for folk to hear a different kind of journey into writing than we often do. I’m really keen to talk more here on process, publishing, creative community and more. I hope that is something that might be of worth.

When I started out writing properly—this concept alone deserve its own post!—I had no money, no chance whatever of a week like that one at Arvon, in which to honour my words, and I think this is part of why it felt gorgeous to be able, years into my own writing practice, to share everything I could with the group.

Courses, entering into whatever form of creative community is available in which to share your work, is so intrinsic to a creative practice in my view. Mentoring, peer feedback, working one on one with an editor at any publication no matter how small, are huge and deeply transformative steps for your path into writing a way that is not only sustainable but nourishing.

One of the beautiful writers on the course tagged me in this gorgeous image above: she bought almost all the books I’d recommend and gathered them together.

A wee gathering of friends.

Books as colleagues, support, sustenance, family.

It’s how it’s always been for me. At the start, I found my way into writing through reading; as I still do.

Books in place of other people, reading in place of doing the things it had been drummed into me were the things that real writers did. At times when I was working so many hours and had no choice to join a writers group or take a course; when — because of a background of poverty— I could not do the unpaid internship, take the summer to hone my skills etc: I read. Mostly books from the library, passed on by friends with disposable income, or from charity shops; my reading has been, since my teens when I began working, extremely varied:based on what was available to me.

This is one of the things I am most grateful for; that wide experience as a reader; which has fed into my writing immeasurably.

It was well into adulthood, actually when I was in my early thirties, before I began to properly feel comfortable or justified to actually buy the books I wanted to read. I mostly still bought them all second hand, well after they’d been published, but as my writing practice began to deepen—as I began to allow myself, for the first time in my life, to view myself as a writer—I began to see books as a necessary investment: a tool of what I hoped would become my paying trade.

The Grassling, one of my all time favourite books, had been out only a short period of time when I bought it. It felt wild. I remember every moment of buying it with tremendous joy. I was in London, meeting with my agent, and afterwards I headed to Burley Fisher for the very first time, and without hesitation lifted this, a chapbook by Seán Hewitt, a navy tote bag, and bought them. After I did, I told the gorgeous person who served me that I was writing a book. All of it felt like the kind of magic you only hear about happening to other people, never get to experience yourself.

It was Summer 2019.

My partner and I were working non stop, had been for quite some time, and there was very little left over after we had paid our bills each month.

But just that winter that had gone by, I’d made one of the most important decisions of my whole life: I’d stopped drinking.

Somehow we didn’t manage to really feel the impact of me going sober on our finances (we were small business owners and you simply give all you have to it no matter what) but something else had happened that summer of 2019: I sold my first book.

Suddenly, for the first time ever, I had earned an income from my writing. We decided to put most of the first part of that advance (and all that came after) into the derelict cottage my partner had been left the previous year. There was something in me that knew if I stood a chance at making this writing lark work for me, I needed the very thing I’d never properly had before: a safe home.

By the time I sold that book, in the space of less than four years, I had moved from one rented room to another, then another, then another. In two different countries. Then I moved to a third country to be with my partner. By that book sale, my partner and I had moved from that first rented house together , to another, and another still in less than two years. I was done with that level of precarious living, and had such a deep sense that in order to live through the consequences of writing a book which, at its core, was an excavation of my darkest experiences: I needed to take any chance I could at feeling safe. So we ran with the chance we were so lucky to be given. I wrote about out experience of moving there, that small stone cottage in the very heart of Ireland, in my second book.

How it impacted on my creativity; shaped the way I spent my days, which, as we know, shapes our lives.

Perhaps the most important of the changes , after the fact we were much more able to actually breathe without the suffocating fear regarding making rent money , was the one above: my partner set me up a writing space that was permanent. Just for me, and again: we all know what it means to have a DESK of one’s own. (I’ve never had a ROOM of my own just to write, I’m not entirely sure how I’d even cope with the joy of such a thing!) In our previous set ups I’d worked at the kitchen table, or at a table in our coffee shop: open, public spaces with no privacy or room to simply be alone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still grateful to have had them. The whole of THIN PLACES was written at work, at my kitchen table, in coffee shops ( aside from a few solo days camping in Donegal) and I’m fiercely proud of that surreal time.

The very first pages of TP were written in the small galley kitchen above. I kept at it here, in the hallway of our next rental —

Then here , at our living room table (the kitchen was too small and cold)—

— the highchair was our granddaughter’s (yes, I was only in my 30’s! yes I have a colourful family setup!) who was with us lots back then.

We all have different views on what is beautiful but what I will say here is that, to me, to my eye and heart and soul: these spaces my partner and I created for me and my work are beautiful. And this is something I have long known is important for my writing life; the seeking, honouring and recording of BEAUTY.

Even when stone cold broke, I’ve scoured charity shops , car boot sales, skips on the street etc, in search of the tools of my trade. Desks carried back across the meadows in Edinburgh for my room, a buttery soft leather pen holder bought for a pound at a car boot sale in east London on a work trip— to make journaling through a difficult time feel sacred, the most divine wee wooden stool lifted out of a skip on the street of a Steiner school in london and carried back to Bristol on a megabus: I’ve long known that I am in the best relationship I can be with my creativity when surrounded by the kind of beauty I love best.

I advise every writer I work with that one way to approach your creativity is through ritual, and I make my way towards ritual through honouring the beauty of the everyday.

These spaces— kitchen tables, hallways, circular pallets at work—were so important for me in building a writing practice that could continue no matter what the circumstance. I have written in so many different places. But for me, sustaining a writing practice that is nourishing and that makes me feel at home in my work requires exactly that for my life too: feeling at home.

Feeling free.

Feeling safe.

And even though we moved from that wee cottage, I knew we didn’t have to, which — for someone whose life has been defined by enforced moving from place to place— made an awful lot of difference for how I felt able to be in the world and in my work.

I wish, more than anything, we could ALL be free, and feel safe, all of the time.

There is lots more to say here— about being a mother; caregiving—and it’s relationship with my writing life. I’d also widen this to look at consumerism as a byproduct and upholder of capitalism, itself a byproduct of the violence of colonialism: how some writers face much more entrenched difficulties forging both a creative life and in being published (which is not a prerequisite for me of calling yourself a writer!) But that will likely come soon in a separate post.

So when I think about that idea of success — what it takes for me to feel I am doing well— I think it comes down to these three things.

Gratitude.

Beauty.

Freedom.

I am so grateful to wake every day into a life where I love this world an unimaginable amount, and I am able to spend the day writing that live.

I am surrounded by beauty of a kind that nourishes and sustains my being and the words in turn; that makes me wish to give my all to creating beauty, too.

I am safe, in my own body, first and foremost, and in my family, my home, my community; which is really freedom: which is really what every one of us deserve, always.

This image was taken on a mobile phone that cost me one of the last tenners I had after moving my whole life to Edinburgh , the hot chocolate I was about to drink and the notebook and pen in the picture took the rest of that tenner. I was going through a breakup with the only man I had ever loved, trying to heal from deep rooted intergenerational trauma, and had arrived with no job and no idea what I was going to do except that I wasn’t going back to being Steiner teacher and I was finally going to write my study down. The notes in this thin cornflower blue notebook became THIN PLACES.

Many year later, when that man and I did the work to make that relationship the one it is today, he asked me what I wanted from my life and I told him it was to live with him in the west of Ireland and to write. It has taken a decade to reach that place, and fuck me it has been the hardest one of my life , but the most beautiful too. The one I am most grateful for. The one in which I have known most freedom.

All of this is to say: write your story.

Create your own meaning of your writing life.

Waken each day into gratitude, and beauty, and freedom (and then do all you can to make sure every single person on earth gets to wake this way too.)

It won’t be easy, it’s not supposed to be, but it will be you and your words, and this achingly beautiful earth, and you will dance together, all three…

And it will be like nothing you could have ever even dreamed of, and you will remember, you will remember. You thought that everything that you knew, and that you were, and that you loved all that time ago had gone away forever.

But this dance will remind you, ever and always, that you are you, and love is love, and that things that matter, beautiful, worthy things, never go anywhere, they remain with you always.

What a life, this writing life.