Diving Into the Wreck
A couple of weeks ago, I was out walking when I heard the sound of a plane approaching very low in the sky. I began, without thinking, to run. So did a couple of other people. The kids at a nearby nursery caught the hysteria, and began to shout. The plane came lower and I felt the vibrations in my body. I was shot through with adrenaline. Then, thankfully, it passed. The kids were okay. I panicked, wondering if it might land nearby. I checked the local news, but there was nothing. There was no smoke on the horizon, no screams.
I rang my friend who had just received painful news. I babbled about the plane, and she told me about a fire she'd seen in a building close to where she lives, the sky thick with ash, and nothing on the local news there either. We distracted each other, and wondered about what happens to these strange incidents when they go unrecorded.
But we were both lucky to be safe, to have avoided the disaster.
I think, every day, about the people of Gaza who can't escape, who can't go anywhere when the disaster strikes. There is a sense of opening up here, as we head towards the equinox. A warmth in the air and longer, lighter days. But it feels cruel that the genocide continues, season after season. I am learning to live with both truths at once, rather than repressing the horror to enjoy the sunshine.
I recently read Stephanie Foo's memoir, What My Bones Know, in pretty much one sitting. It is a memoir about reckoning with intergenerational trauma and building a life from the ruins. I was struck, when reading the acknowledgements, by the name of the class she had taken when developing the book: it was called 'Diving into the Wreck' after the Adrienne Rich poem. I got chills. Of course you have to dive into the wreck to write something like this. To hold both truths at once. To acknowledges and reckon with pain instead of wishing it away.
In my recent piece on the erotics of writing, I said that, 'I can work with the minute textures of abusive or coercive relationships, and of powerful institutions. I can write warped prayer books that glow cold blue. I can weave books like they are shrouds.' I wanted to breathe life into my work and write 'about blood circulating in warm bodies, flushed cheeks, and beating hearts.' The kind of writing invited by 'Diving into the Wreck' feels like the synthesis of both of these approaches; a way to integrate the darkness and the light.
It is art that has been my solace for the last several months, and I appreciate the people who have been thinking through what it means to bear witness to the most unbearable and complex parts of life: genocide, trauma, climate change, and war, but also, to make space for what might come next.
I first encountered the writer Vigdis Hjorth when a friend recommended A House in Norway many years ago. I finally read Will and Testament, a controversial work of autofiction that reckons with individual abuses within the bourgeois family, geopolitical violence, and the limits of truth and reconciliation. This book felt like being invited deep into someone's psyche, but it was also very readable and, oddly, uplifting. She could only write this book by diving into her own wreck, showing her own part in the disaster, not making herself a hero or a victim, but someone whose voice needed to be heard no matter what the cost, no matter how painful the struggle.
I'm still thinking about this quotation from Ayesha Khan that I shared at the end of last year: “Palestinians have taught me that the ONLY way to resist oppression or even live during these times is by rooting into culture, community & land. Palestinian's resistance/ resilience/ creativity/ joy/ art/ music/ food/ culture… all of it, is an embodiment of decolonized medicine.” There is no future for any of us without collective dreaming.
Recent Experiments
I have made my podcast live this month. The first two episodes are available on Apple or Spotify. You can also listen, and find the transcripts, below.
News from the Community
My dear friend S J Kim's book will be published next month. It is part-poetry, part-memoir, part-searing critique of academia, and it reads as an act of care for her colleagues and her students, to whom she is deeply committed. The book feels like a handmade tapestry; the working is so fine, and the design so singular. If you are ready to be transformed by her words, you can pre-order it here.
Yuxin Zhao is about to publish The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog a durational work of autofiction about a long-distance queer relationship and the complexities of identity. It is also a beautifully-wrought log of the mundane and the otherworldly. This gorgeous book is available to preorder on Calamari Archive right now!
M. Forajter is working on her new poetry manuscript, after summer: an apocalypse. A Gothic priestess of high neon, she writes about haunted houses like they are moon-charged crystals: (grayer and grayer. yes, every party dress upturned. the house would line in you for all of time–– growing in you, becoming covered with vines like a protective cocoon. the image of the house would glow in your chest like a hot coal, warming and burning all the same.) While waiting to read the final version, you can read her recent work here.
M.'s piece is available on Peripety and/or Tronies a creative space hosted by the endlessly generous – and wildly glamorous – Olivia Cronk, one of my favourite poets. She is breathing life into the work of her students and friends by offering this space for weird and ambitious poetry and prose. Thank you, Olivia! Read your fill!
IRL News
For the Northern England writing contingent. I will be teaching a fiction residential in Hebden Bridge from 8 - 12 April with Tom Benn who recently won the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for his brilliant Northern Gothic novel Oxblood. The guest writer will be my dear friend Naomi Booth whose stunning queer ghost story 'Sour Hall' was adapted into an audio series by Laura Kirwan-Ashman, and won the Edge Hill Reader's Choice in January. Naomi says of it that, '[t]here's a particular landscape, the Todmorden moors above the Calder Valley, that I love, and I feel that in this story I come close to capturing what that landscape means to me: its haunting desolation as well as its beauty.' It will be a treat to explore that landscape with her on location! There are a few places left. If I don't see you in the Calder Valley, I will see you in the ether.
I wish you love and peace this week, however deep you want to dive into the wreck.
Send me your soundings – I'd love to hear from you.
Until next time, Laura
March 2024
🐚 this is microdosing ceremony, a weekly-ish letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
🌺 find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
🐇 explore creative rabbit holes on my website.