Notes from the quiet refuge of reading

crawling into bed with books as an act of self care

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Before I go further, I need to tell you about a few things: firstly, I currently have 10% off an annual subscription to my writing community Notes from the Margin. It needs to be redeemed by 30th April, so don’t hang about.

The other thing I need to tell you about is my upcoming zoom course Telling Your Story.

This course will run on Friday afternoons in May 2-3.30pm UK time. It’s all about telling your story through poetry and/or creative non fiction and we’ll be looking at craft aspects alongside discussing and analysing published extracts and as if that wasn’t enough, there will be writing prompts to help you get down to writing your story. The course is five weeks, the first four weeks are workshop weeks and the final, fifth week is a group feedback session.

This course is £50 and you can book through eventbrite, but it is FREE to paid subscribers of Notes from the Margin and I have 10% off an annual subscription until April 30th. That makes it £45 for a year of courses, workshops an community. Come join me!

Oh, and if you want to join me over on instagram I’m posting some snappy little prompts throughout April for NaPoWriMo

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Today’s post was supposed to be a different post, but I’ll be honest, I’m not having a great week, and it’s showing in the way my brain has slowed down to sludge and is refusing to pull a nuanced post together.

I had to have my lovely cat put down on Saturday. He’d been poorly with recurrent urinary crystals causing a blocked urethra and had come close to death several times. We’d done everything we could to prevent it, in the end we kept him in as a house cat, fed him only the expensive medical cat food, made sure he wasn’t stressed and it still returned, resulting in an emergency sprint to the vet on Saturday morning, with a miserable cat in so much pain it broke my heart. There was no cure. He was only six and to look at him, between episodes, you would never imagine he had anything wrong with him. I feel terrible about it. Though I know we did the right thing.

I’ve never seen a more plush, fat, beautiful cat. He was a strange cat. The only cat I ever knew who didn’t like sitting in boxes. His moods were unpredictable, he was shy. But when he did come for comfort or for cuddles, it was magical, he would become ecstatic with love. God, I miss him and his strange ways.

Everyone at the vet’s knew him, they looked forward to seeing him as he was, apparently, extremely friendly and would call out to them for strokes while he was there, which was news to us as at home as he was generally fairly surly and bitey, especially with my husband.

This is him as a kitten. I was so in love with this gorgeous, odd little kitten that I featured in in the Yorkshire Life column I was writing at the time. How lucky was I to get to spend six years as a companion to this beautiful creature.

It was a bit of a shock, to lose him, even though we’d already decided that if he had another flare up we couldn’t continue putting him through the rigmarole of catheters, operations, hospitalisation. He slipped away while I stroked his perfect caramel face. I came home to an empty house. For the first time since my mid twenties I am without either cat or dog, and it is a strange, lonely place to be. I have no one here to love or be loved by. Except my husband, of course, he definitely counts, but it’s different.

My lovely old dog was put down at Christmas, and I felt that I was only just getting over that loss and getting used to it just being myself and Pye (the cat) during the day, and now it is just me. I find myself drifting round the house like a ghost, picking up his toys from under the bed, thinking I’ve heard him padding up the stairs. I feel wretched. It will pass, but while it passes I feel crumpled and useless and my confidence has gone. All I want to do is hide away and read, because reading is a refuge.

This is what books can be; not teaching aids, though they can be that, or pure enjoyment or deep journey’s into other people’s experiences, or ways to enhance your knowledge, or ways to have your mind blown by new concepts, or your heart broken, or your loins girded, they are all that too, but they are also, for me at least, a way of escaping. I’m a fidgeter - twitchy, anxious, I can never quite settle, can never stop my brain from over-exploring. Sometimes this is a good thing, a lot of the time it’s a challenging thing. With books, though, I can just stay in one place and rot, while my mind goes off and does all these other things. And when I come back, I come back rested, because physically, I am rested, mentally I am enriched and soothed.

I’d like to insert some factual evidence around this phenomena here, but as mentioned earlier my brain is slow and I imagine my thoughts like slugs sucking along my synapses, so my own anecdotal experience of books being a safe place to rest will have to do.

I tend to read three books at the same time. I’m not sure that’s wise really, but I know when a book has really caught me, because all other books are abandoned for the love of that book. I am that sort of fickle reader.

What I’m reading right now:

Poetry

Dear Foggs - A Festschrift for John Foggin (1943-2023)

I am finding this one simultaneously heart breaking and heart lifting. So many names I recognise sending poems and love for this man who had so much to give to the poetry community. As I am reading it, I am making notes about how it is changing my perception of John, and my perception of my contact with him, my friendship with him. One thing I wish is that I could go back and speak to him now, as the person who is so much more at peace with myself than when I was first moving through the circles that John was also moving through, in the poetry world. I wish I hadn’t been so wounded, afraid to be looked down on, keen to present a mask of myself that felt appropriate to the poets. I wish I could return to a lot of places and people, maskless, but I guess that’s all part of the journey to self acceptance, I’m grateful to John for playing a part in building my confidence as a poet, though I couldn’t accept it at the time.

Non Fiction

Unmasking Autism - The Power of Embracing our Hidden Neurodiversity by Dr Devon Price

I’ve now been on the waiting list for assessment for eighteen months, so probably around half way there. I’ve been stuck, unable to escape the rigid thinking that won’t allow me to explore myself or neurodiversity without a diagnosis. However, I am now starting to talk a little more about this, and my book, The Ghost Lake, which comes out in August, alludes to it and the feeling of being an outsider in all things. I am beginning to own myself and my actions and forgive myself. This is a good book to dip your toes in, if you are in the same boat. I can only ever speak about the A word or read about it in short bursts, because there’s still a bit of a ring of shame around it for me. There you go. Enough said.

Fiction

The Overstory by Richard Powers

This one I came across, bookmark in place, when I was purging my bookcases at the beginning of the year. Reader, I had done something that I never do, and had not finished a book I started. I felt bad. I felt sorry for the book that didn’t get finished because my brain feels sorry for inanimate objects, a lot. So I am finishing it. Someone asked me recently what I thought of it. It’s a pulitzer prize winner, and I can see why: it’s thought provoking, vigorous, energetic, muscular. But, and this is a personal thing, it jumps between characters and time points and places a lot. I have trouble remembering the names of people in my own family, so jumping between characters is always a bit of a problem for me, I end up having to make notes on who is who and what they’re doing. That’s just me though. I can see why I left it half way through.

And if that wasn’t enough book related stuff, here’s a picture of the books we were inspired by in April’s Dawn and Dusk zoom writing groups. Each one is a friend to me, somewhere to return to with arms open ready to receive the joy, fascination, inspiration, pleasure of them. The next D&D sessions start 6th May, the links are all on my link tree:

Until next time

x