An Invitation for this Sunday Evening
I'll be in conversation with my good friend Dougald Hine
For all paying subscribers to or my Substacks, there’s an invitation below to a live Zoom call on Sunday where we’ll be discussing… anything Dougald wants to ask me! But almost certainly beauty, conviviality, using the false to cultivate the real and what we feel our work in the world is, and how hard that is sometimes to put into words. We’ll touch on practicality, the hands, the hemispheres, love, Tao and religion, most likely. If you would like to join us live and ask questions, the link is at the bottom for paying subscribers. The first 40 minutes will be made public.
Below is the text from Dougald’s post Taking Beauty Seriously. He has some great guests coming up over the next weeks, so if you don’t already subscribe to him, now’s a good time.
See you on Sunday.
Join me on Sunday at 8pm CET / 7pm GMT / 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT when I’ll be holding the first in a fortnightly series of Sunday Sessions. These Zoom sessions are open to paid subscribers to WRITING HOME. My guest for this inaugural session is my good friend Caroline Ross.
Last night, I finished Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. There were pages that had me chuckling aloud – and several passages where I muttered to Anna, “This is like my book… but funny!” – but what struck me as I reached the final chapter was that, of all the people O’Connell had met on his journey, the one whose words came back to haunt him in its closing pages was Caroline Ross . It was something she’d said, as they walked together on a Scottish hillside: “I wonder whether we humans will make beautiful fossils.”
There are so many stories to be told about Caro’s work – as an artist, a tai chi teacher, the front-woman of multiple bands, a finder and grinder of natural materials to make paints and pigments – and for a long time, one of those stories was the way that she wandered in and out of the books of other writers, haunting our imaginations. In my case, that has taken the form of long and generative threads of emails, even longer conversations over multiple cups of tea at the kitchen table, or lately the voice messages we leave each other several times a week.
For a long time it felt like keeping a secret, being a recipient of Caro’s mails, because here was this fantastic writer whose words were kept for the inboxes of a web of friends and collaborators. So when she took the step of launching Uncivil Savantin November 2022, it felt like the moment when that secret was revealed. These days, there are thousands of people who welcome her words and her voice into their inbox on a Monday morning, and it’s been a delight to follow along as writing has become a central part of her practice.
In this Monday’s instalment, ‘For the Roses’, Caro wrote about the work she had been doing in recent days, tanning reindeer and roe deer skins, turning a waste-stream material into something beautiful and useful, some of which she will use to test techniques for painting and drawing on leather for a course this summer:
It is all part of my cunning plan to make adornment, decoration and material beauty a living tradition again amongst everyday people who have lost the confidence to make beauty as they see fit, rather than how they are told. To make beauty freely, rather than allowing the dictates of coolness, influencers or mass-production set a standardised, un-convivial visual tone for our homes and belongings.
When the two of us get together on Sunday for the first in this season of “overheard conversations”, one of the things I want to ask her about is this sense of the importance of beauty, because it overlaps with a theme that has been coming to the fore in my own thinking in recent months. A suspicion that the loss of beauty – or even of a language for taking beauty seriously – might lie closer than we often allow to the heart of the trouble that the world is in.
In the months ahead, I’ll be hosting these sessions on alternate Sundays. Other guests include Michael Reynolds of the Roimata Food Commons in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, Rob Lewisof The Climate According to Life, the Solarpunk theoristJay Springettand Elizabeth Oldfieldwho I’ll be talking to on the threshold of publication of her first book,Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.
I’m imagining these sessions as a kind of live podcast recording. For the first forty minutes, you can listen in on our conversation – and then in the last twenty minutes, we’ll take questions from those who are on the call with us. The recording of the first part of the call will be released as a public podcast, while if you want to listen to the rest of it or join us for the call itself, you’ll need a paid subscription to this Substack (or that of the guest for that week’s session). But if you really want to join and the price is a barrier, drop me a note and I’ll comp you a subscription.
The full details for joining Sunday’s inaugural session are below the paywall on this post. I look forward to seeing many of you on the call.
DH