Darling,
Two weekends ago, the Useless Assholes arranged our ceramics in a transformed old cowshed and wowed ourselves and the people who came and visited the venue with our slick and elegant display. We are no longer the Useless Assholes. We are now called Cowshedders. The Cowshed belongs to Keefer (we call her Keefer to distinguish between her and the other Amelia, who is Jacobs) and if ever a space reflected its owner’s character, it is the Cowshed. Welcoming, gracious, charming and calm.
Taking part in this exhibition in a town’s art festival was such a gentle initiation into how it feels to be a visual artist and to have to show your work to people.
I spoke to a successful ceramist at another studio at the festival. She said the art festival was a much friendlier event than a market. The first time she took a table at a market she didn’t sell a single thing. Hundreds of people streamed past, their eyes on the goods, careful not to engage with the maker.
‘At the end of the day, I wanted to leave everything there just like that and walk away from my work. I was so ashamed,’ she told me. She laughed when she told me this story. She didn’t seem like someone who could be easily crushed.
It takes such courage to show people what you’ve made.
It was good to be a part of something bigger than just me and my little laptop screen, to experience the weird magic of several people working towards one goal.
I decided at school that working in groups was just not my happy space. Someone always skived off, someone was always the self-appointed boss with no sense of humour and lots of instructions, and someone always whined and moaned. One or two people did the hard work, and everyone basked in the good marks. I hated it.
The Cowshed weekend was proof that what happens at school is not necessarily what happens in adult life.
‘What fills the heart spills out of the mouth’ is a rough translation of an Afrikaans idiom. I sat down to write now, not knowing what my heart is full of.
It is full though. So much is going on. My first pottery exhibition. The launch of the Extra Large Love Letter and a podcast. A literary festival. Worst hay fever in fifteen years. Submission deadlines. Work deadlines. Sore knees. SORE KNEES, FFS! Email pileups. Plans. The busy factory floor of the dream production line. A dream! An idea. Working towards a real thing in real time. Fear. Fear now. Tomorrow maybe excitement again. But fear today.
When all these daily little steps have added up to a material manifestation of my fervent wish for this thing I’m pursuing, I will be able to say what it is. Or I will say when I know that I have failed at making it happen. I never tell people when I have a new plan until I feel like the plan is going to work. But right now, it is consuming my every waking moment, and a few times it has penetrated my dreams. It’s all I think about.
I’ve been so far up my own bum for such a long time now, I couldn’t remember what else I’d done this month but work like a machine with new batteries. So I went through my journals to see if I’d done anything else. My journals are my external hard drive.
From them I gleaned that I’ve been doing a lot of listening and reading and watching. From now on, I’ll tag those things on the end of the letter, in their own section, so that they’re easy to find and don’t gunge up the narrative.
I know you are very busy too, but I hope you’re less inward-looking than I am right now. I won’t excuse it though. This is what I need to be for now.
Explaining myself
James told me he didn’t understand what was going on with the Love Letter and Extra Large. So I thought maybe I should explain it in case others don’t get it. I’ve met a few people who don’t know how Substack works. Bear with me while I lay it out.
The Love Letter is a free monthly letter full of lovingly shared reading, listening and thinking tips for you and for anyone who wants to read it.
Because the email list grew unexpectedly long, I exported it to a mailing list.
This mailing list is called Substack. But it’s a lot more than just a mailing list.
I chose Substack because of my own positive experiences of it. Substack was designed for writers who take their work and their readers seriously, providing an interface that’s easy to read. I absolutely hate reading on my phone, but I don’t hate reading Substack articles on the Substack app on my phone. You don’t get interrupted by moving, flashing adverts. It feels very much like reading a page in a newspaper or in a book: it’s just you and the words.
You can find writers — experienced, professional writers — on Substack who write about things that interest you or who just write in an engaging way.
I enjoy supporting the work of writers who care so deeply about their writing and their topics, and their connection with their readers. They feel like my kinda people.
Substack is for writers and readers a little bit like what The Cowshed was for our ceramics exhibition. A comfortable and elegant meeting place.
Because a number of Love Letter readers asked why they were only getting the Love Letter once a month, I decided to extend my Substack offering. On the first of every month, paid subscribers will receive the Extra Large Love Letter and will have access to Tracks, my teeny-tiny, length-of-one-track podcast recording of me reading a poem. You can try it out for a week for free if you’re curious.
Subscription prices are low to accommodate weaker currencies, and they can be bought on a month-to-month basis or once off for a year.
Resetting yourself while I reset myself
If you become a founding member anywhere between now and the end of December, you will have the option to join me on my January Self Reset.
Self Reset involves creative activities aimed at giving you a chance to figure out where you are in your life and what you want to do next. There will be daily short exercises to put you back in touch with that part of you that drives you towards the fulfilment of the possibilities of your personality, or towards exploring new ideas.
You could become a founding member and pass on the Self Reset gift to someone you think would benefit from or enjoy the structure of a once-daily check-in with their non-daily self during January 2023. Or give someone else a founding membership as a gift.
Thank you to all the readers who signed up for paid subscriptions. Unlike what happened to that ceramic artist I wrote about earlier, I did not feel like I wanted to walk away from my work in shame. I felt instantly affirmed and that what I was offering was something people wanted. I care about my work and the subscriptions made me feel like you care about what I have to say. Thank you.
PS: In the next Extra Large, I’ll supply a list of Substack writers whose work I’ve come to enjoy reading.
What my journal says I’ve been doing
When I consulted the hard-drive it reminded me that this is what I’ve been feeding myself this past month:
BRAIN
I read an article in the Washington Post by Amanda Ripley, a former news journalist who stopped reading the news. This article felt important because I have been semi-news-free for several years.
That’s hard to explain to people without sounding like a brat since, for the most part, my life is protected from the worst the world has to offer. To ignore injustice to protect my shaky psyche is to install myself in a social ivory tower, where I already partly dwell due to the biological luck of the draw in a social world that’s been engineered to favour me. It means affirming my own specialness by acting as though I am above daily freedom-life-and-death struggles as though they do not affect me.
It is not my aim to live in blissful ignorance. I read enough to know what’s going on. But I have built a wall between myself and the news. Sometimes the wall is thinner, when I am more psychologically robust, and sometimes that wall is impenetrable when I am feeling psychologically frail.
This feels like a shameful admission. But there it is now: public knowledge. I don’t want to justify it except to say this: I feel like a more effective social creature in the absence of the heavy load of hopelessness the news often becomes. I am more use to my family and community when I am unencumbered by that load that isn’t just heavy, but spiky and bite-y too.
Wendell Berry’s poem on hope is where I plant my flag of action. Without the burden of news paralysing me, I can act, because:
‘When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.’
EARS
I discovered Keeley Forsythe and listened to more songs by Sophie Hunger, whose song ‘Wälzer für Niemand’ has walzed through almost every month of this year with me. My hanging-the-washing happy song for the past few weeks has been Osama, by Zakes Bantwini and Kasango. The official video, which I’ve only just seen, is one of those that makes you feel like you live, without a doubt, in the most beautiful country in the world. Our terrible-beautiful country.
In podcasts, the highlight was without a doubt David Gilbert’s reading of his short story ‘Come Softly To Me’ on The Writer’s Voice podcast. There are too many ways I loved this story to put them all down here. Just go and listen.
The other particularly memorable podcast this past while was Simon Hill on The Proof interviewing the doctors Dean and Ayesha Sherzai about the role of exercise in brain health. I can’t stop telling people about what I learned in that. I’m not sure others are as interested in brain health and the possibilities of staving off everything from mild cognitive impairment to full-blown Alzheimer’s but if those diseases – or mental health issues – are a preoccupation of yours, you will find a lot of value in there.
And then last night, listened to Daniel Mpilo Richards and Tankiso Mamabolo sing and banter together in their show at The Baxter Theatre called What’s Your Budget. Bliss!
EYES
I missed going to the movies so much during lockdown. Went twice in the past few weeks. Saw Three Thousand Years of Longing and The Woman King.
At home, I rewatched one of my all-time favourites, Where the Wild Things Are. It’s strange and funny and has one of the best lines ever in any movie. I loved how the writers turned Maurice Sendak’s simple but rich children’s story into such a brilliant script so full of longing and sadness and friendship. If you watch it, see if you can identify the line I love.
On Netlix, I binged happily on Kleo, a period drama/thriller set in East Berlin a few years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Eighties and East Berlin nostalgia run thick with the styling and costumes that provide an almost Baz Luhrmann-like feast for the eyes. The dialogue is funny, the eponymous main character has a growl of frustration I have incorporated into my own internal dialogue (you’d love her character) and her nemesis is a delightfully foolish (though not idiotic) policeman who wears white socks and is a shitty (though not despicable) life partner and father.
Also watched: Pieces of Her, Dahmer (only one episode – watching it felt like an intrusion into the lives of the victims and that I was indulging in the foulest form of rubbernecking) and Keep Breathing.
HANDS
I became a seller of pottery this month. The art market was a logical full stop for the first part of my pottery life, which started in 2019. I have ideas for what I want to do next with pottery, but first I have to follow this other dream to its own logical conclusion.
I also knitted a new jersey for my hot water bottle (worked out the pattern myself, which felt like overcoming a part of me that always resists doing Maths), but too late for winter, so I can only test run it next year.
READING
I read an article on grief when there is no body to grieve. It’s about major loss when the loss cannot be buried or memorialised. I am glad someone is doing work in this regard. Losing a job or a way of life or your partner to illness are all grief-worthy, but have none of the rituals of death attached to them.
I also read:
· The Story of my Face (Kathy Page)
· You Are Not a Stranger Here (Adam Haslett)
· The Theory of Flight (Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu)
· The Old Ways (Robert Macfarlane)
· Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
· A chapbook of sonnets about the wind by my friend Mike Cope (meditative, sharp, so very Cape Town, if you know the wind in the city, and so poetically skilled)
· Spring (Ali Smith)
· Many of the poems and short stories in the 2022 Ons Klyntji, a South African literary magazine.
I can’t tell you which book to pick from these. I enjoyed them all. You get to an age, I suppose, where you are instinctively able to root out the books you know won’t please you.
What did you watch or listen to or do with your hands or your brain this month that changed you?
Tell me.
All my love, as always,
Kowski.