#3: A whirlpool of inspiration
Footpaths • Wednesday 18 June 2025
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Another 1,000 words this morning, and Wolf Crawl #25 finished and sent off. We’ve started one of the darkest chapters of the trilogy. Meanwhile, reading ahead and marvelling at the writing in A Place of Greater Safety. What a book!
I am greedily gobbling up words and images on Substack at the moment – it is such an engine of ideas, a whirlpool of inspiration. Oh, you can get sucked in and submerged as much as anywhere else online. But it is deliciously heartening to see it all going on; this busy buzzing workshop, this cradle of creativity.
After getting out my thoughts on Is A River Alive? I keep stumbling across more intersections with Robert Macfarlane’s writing.
shared a writer new to me, , who wrote this:It has been seven months since Robert MacFarlane left with kindness. Now it is June and I am here again. Sitting in the roots. Trying to see. Before I came to this city I had faith that time and I were in cahoots. That any troubles would be brushed away by the force of us two. Going on. Now, older, but by very little. The same troubles are showing no signs of shifting. I get more precise and they do too. We scale down together, like fractals in nature, like trunks, and twigs, and leaves on a Great Oriental Tree. If everything gets bigger by getting smaller, I will need reading glasses by thirty. My troubles are hundreds of years old and contain everything in everything. Because they are earthly and small.
What shimmer of words, precise but elusive. And how remarkable to be tangled up in this web of readers and writers, spinning something new each day.
Read another chapter of Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. This quote struck a chord:
Twice in your life you know that you are approved of by everyone: when you learn to walk, and when you learn to read.
Perhaps because Mimi achieved the first last year, and Zack’s on the eve of the second; his first school visit is next week. September is the start of a new stage in our life as a family. And because someone will always disapprove of the things you make and do, and you have to keep doing it anyway.
Books on my bedside table
Listening to The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann). Reading Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee. Also on the go: A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Terri Ochiagha and John Mullan’s How Novels Work.
