My Life in Octobers
My Life in Octobers
Friday Fireside #7 | Five years in Newcastle, four of creative drought and three of being a father. It's time to return to writing.
Dear reader,
I sometimes write letters to my three-year-old son. Here’s one, followed by some thoughts on how and why I started this newsletter.
Today I push you on the swing, into the sun coming down on trees up above. You say you are going to the moon. I say we need to get back.
I am thinking of another autumn, five years ago. We, your parents, turned off the motorway before the river, parked the car and climbed the hill. We stood for a moment beneath the Angel of the North, welcome arms stretched wide across the sky. Beyond, Newcastle and October, and sometime later: you and your baby sister.
“All the leaves are coming off the trees,” you shout. Just like I said they would. You smile.
I am thinking of the book I was writing then. The one that died. In the year we walked to the Sycamore Gap and said, this is our home now. We’ve lived all over, in worlds sometimes Spanish, elsewhere Arabic. But now it’s time to put down roots.
First, the fallow year. We knew no one and missed everyone, and wondered whether we had made a big mistake. Then the plague year. The great disruptor, the mind mangler. The year of no going back.
You were born in that year. You were the only good thing that happened then, and the best. The brightest, the most brilliant October. You, in your bassinet, looking up as the leaves were coming down.
“Tell your mummy,” I say, as we head home. “Tell her thank you for making tea.” She’s tired, and she loves you. This city wasn’t home until you made it so. You don’t know it, how could you? You’re only three. But we wouldn’t have done it without you.
We have friends now here, five years in. And when we head south, the Angel waits by the roadside. And smiles. And knows we’ll be coming back.
Into the house, and off with your coat. “Thank you mummy for making tea.” There are hugs and kisses. And then pie and chips. And up above the trees, a sky of Octobers coming down.
That big steel sculpture in Gateshead is supposed to be the largest angel in the world. With a wingspan of 54m, it is broader than a Boeing 757. I grew up in Sheffield, and we called ourselves Northerners. But up here, they don’t think much of that. This is the “true north” of the Sycamore Gap, now sadly no more.
We’re celebrating five years of living in Newcastle. Like everywhere I’ve ended up, I cannot fully explain how it happened. But here we are.
On a lesser note, it is two months into writing these weekly letters. A bit like our move to Newcastle, I am still figuring out what these letters are supposed to be. So your patience is greatly appreciated. I know that they all begin with a 300-word tangent. Something hopefully worth reading, and if you can: read aloud or listen. Words read in silence seem only ever to be half a thing.
If you are reading this letter by email, you may not know it is coming from Substack, a growing corner of the Internet designed specifically for readers and writers. It has its own app, a social media platform called Notes, discussion rooms for each newsletter (here’s mine), writing groups, book clubs, serialised fiction, memoirs and magazines. Right now, it’s an exciting place to be, and I recommend checking it out.
About seven years ago, I completed my PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology. I gave up academia and decided to return to my first love: writing fiction. I knew I was in it for the long haul, and I applied the discipline and perseverance I had developed in my doctoral study to the goal of writing stories.
Then in 2020, the pandemic happened. This week over on Notes, I was chatting to
about this. In my opening tangent, I called 2020 the mind mangler. I think many can empathise with this. My attention span was shot, my anxiety was up. Anyone trying to be creative during the pandemic was tormented by articles about Shakespeare’s plague poetry and lockdown plays. I just sat at my desk and felt miserable.In lieu of writing fiction, I began to write about books on Instagram. There is a pleasure in this practice: say something captivating in 2,200 characters. They weren’t really reviews, more like riffing off a book. Later, I learned the word ekphrasis, a creative description of a work of visual art. My posts were the bookish equivalent. I called them tangents.
This year, footnotes and tangents led to some wonderful things. I set up the Whisky and Perseverance read-along of War and Peace. This careful reading of an old favourite was a reward in itself. But it also connected me more closely with a community of readers. And it gave me a sense of purpose and direction in my writing, as well as an identity. In the #bookstagram world, I became “that War and Peace guy.” There are worse things to be.
Moving footnotes and tangents from Instagram to Substack, from photo captions to newsletters, is about taking all these good things and making them better. And building something new. This year’s slow read has worked its quiet magic on my attention span. I feel enriched by it. To make the most of this, I want to write more – fiction and nonfiction – and connect on a more meaningful level with other writers and readers. Which is why I am here.
Was your creativity affected by the pandemic? Or perhaps by something else, or a whole set of circumstances? I wrote last week about the process of waking up from lockdown. I’m hoping this space will be part of that happy return to writing. And just maybe, it might inspire others.
Many many thanks for reading,
Until next time,
Simon
In case you missed it…
Here’s the most recent War and Peace post:
Choose your own adventure
You’re reading a Friday Fireside letter from me,
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For me the lockdowns were disruptive in some ways, but also cleared out space I had been devoting to living in a community, and I instead found an online writing community that led to an influx of poetry. I also restarted my first blog. This was a tradeoff and I saw the balance shift when I could spend time with people again; I’ve only written a fraction of the poetry I did in 2021. But it was a starving time in other ways. Tricky!
Ekphrasis = what a beautiful word