Love, Love I Have Hung Our Cave with Roses
I have always loved these lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Nick and the Candlestick’:
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs—
She was writing during a period of great personal difficulty, but this poem acts as a cocoon for her child to feel safe and soft. The love in the writing moves me deeply.
I recently had a conversation with a friend, and creative mentor, Kening Zhu. She helped me to understand that I don’t need to oscillate between high intensity and blacking out when I communicate.
From there I was unable to unravel the meaning of the hoarded half-letters I never send and the impossible tasks I set myself. I love making pretty emails, and planning grand design projects (like zines), but they ultimately leave me stuck in perfectionism.
It’s not that I don’t want to share, it’s just that my academia-warped brain prepares me for a hostile jury ready to demolish my ideas. So, I black out.
Instead of blacking out, I want to whisper secrets or tell ghost stories.
Kening helped me to locate the place of safety that I can do this from: the cocoon.
Instead of trying to build a haunted castle from scratch, I can share a flash of gold wallpaper: a taste, a morsel, a microdose.
I am an unabashed romantic, and I want to live somewhere hung with roses. I hope that every time you receive a microdose of ceremony, it colours your world with fantasy, just for a moment.
This week, in my ecosystem, I have fruit, spores, and mycelium, in honour of the second edition of my first novella, The Museum of Atheism, coming out with the incomparable Calamari Archive.
🍄 Fruit (things that are ready to share)
The Museum of Atheism: Mycelial Life Renewed
Calamari Archive became the cocoon for this new iteration of my strange little horror story. Derek and Garielle showed me tenderness and care throughout the sometimes violent inner process of re-making the book.
Wonderful friends and loves fed the soil with spores. Generous readers extended its fungal network.
Mimi Zacharia: Writing from Obsession
Last month, I released a podcast episode with Mimi Zacharia. Mimi was a toddler when her displaced Palestinian parents moved to England via Lebanon escaping civil war. As she grew up, her obsessive reading habit became a way of dealing with intergenerational trauma, and eventually she started to write about her experiences.
Mimi's ceremonies for writing are:
🌠 Conferring with her ancestors to share their stories
🌲 Being in community with like-minded writers at home and in the forest
🤸🏽 Perfecting her backflip
Electricity in the Writing Workshop
It’s September, so I have been reflecting on the writing workshop. When done right, the workshop becomes electric. The facilitator becomes a container for the dangerous feelings that emerge into the space. They conduct and ground. They allow the currents to flow as safely as possible. They help to bring a writer one step closer to their vision.
I already spend lots of time in the cocoon with other writers. I help them to write their books by getting deep into the primordial soup with them.
Sometimes that process is one of composting and digesting. It can look messy, and even scary, but that is the richness of transformation.
The cocoon is not only about the end product but about translating the process from the inside.
🦠 Spores (tiny ideas)
I have been avoiding AI for years, but last week I found a way to collaborate with it. The protagonist of my novel, stuck in a liminal space with no access to money, writes to an AI therapist. I was able to write, in character, to ChatGPT and dig out the character’s hidden motivations. I can see why it is addictive!
𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium (relational networks)
Lunga Izata, a Ceremony writer, recently launched her speculative fiction trilogy at the Museu Nacional de História Natural de Angola in Luanda, Angola.
For those in the US, Olivia Cronk and Emily Greenquist are hosting a virtual poetry night on Wednesday evening (6.30 pm Central), where you will get the first taste of Olivia’s forthcoming poetry book, Gwenda, Rodney.
If you would like to create your own artist’s cocoon and have your relationship to art and the Internet transformed, then you can sign up to Kening Zhu’s House on the Webs. To get a taste of her philosophy, you can listen to her podcast here. I recommend starting with “The Internet as Creative Practice” but you can choose your own adventure.
I wish you a soft and gentle week.
Love, Laura
🐚 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.