My Neck of the Woods
A warm welcome to all those who read Uncivil Savant, old and new
For three beautiful days and nights this week I shared the woods and shoreline most dear and familiar to me since my childhood with my partner and two of his old friends. They are Northerners, I am a Southerner, and I think they were taken aback at the real beauty to be found south of Yorkshire, albeit slightly more packed with people... We camped, tramped and later decamped to a beach bar, a great pub, and finally thatched tearooms. It was not to be exclusively craggy oaks and wild dunes. After all, it was a holiday.
It got me thinking that I hadn’t introduced myself to new readers for 18 months, a thing I’d only done once since starting this Substack in November 2022.1 Maybe it was time to show people around my online neck of the woods too, and to explain a little of what I am up to here. So, hopefully of interest to subscribers new or well-seasoned, here’s a little ramble into the thickets and glades of Uncivil Savant, plus some sketched maps of where we’ll be wandering next. It’s all accompanied by pictures from The New Forest this week.
Beginnings
It was 3rd May 2021 and I’d still never heard of Substack, when a friend who was about to start writing here asked me to join up and have a look at some of their drafts. Impressed by both the writing and the ad-free environment, I took my first small steps into this now giant online place, which then was still quite a backwater. I’d never got into Medium, too many ads, never been on Twitter, too much argy bargy, likewise Facebook, which apart from all the usual reasons cited by people for disliking it, I just found to be graphically ugly, with the FB home page full of moving images and intrusive messages. I’d been a regular writer on Blogger for my T’ai Chi school since 2006 but just used it as a notice board for students and a place for occasional essays on practice, Taoist books or meditation. Instagram was there for my professional art account and not for lifestyle things. And despite a bit too much scrolling of stunningly beautiful earth arts materials, I felt the internet was, for me, a place for emails, reading Dark Mountain pieces, doing occasional searches and buying things I couldn’t get in real-life stores. Classic Gen-X.
I subscribed to a few writers recommended by my friend but it took me about a year to actually go to the Substack web portal rather than just read the emails delivered to my inbox. I discovered several things I enjoyed reading such as
, , and others, and until I discovered the settings toggle to read things online rather than get emails, my inbox started to fill up alarmingly.On 14th November 2022 I began to write Uncivil Savant, and the story of how that came about is here. When I started, it felt like I took a massive stone slab off the top of a spring and watched all the pent-up words flood out. There were five years’ pieces on my laptop, some fully formed, some just notes, plenty of rants amongst the letters, poems, sketches and emails I’d written. That initial push to put out what I’d saved up lasted at least 18 months, and although now I generally write everything fresh, having eventually found a way to go about writing here, I still find notes and themes that I have been saving for half a decade. Since last year, there’s also a notebook full of plans and notes for more essays and pieces. I don’t delve into it enough, but will be doing so this summer, as it’s time to be thorough, and my desire to ‘get it all down’ is strong.
Besides, I am working an Uncivil Savant book. Reading on devices is ok, but ah, to hold paper in your hands and sit in a comfy chair, without the light of a screen assaulting your retinas. That’s the dream. More about that later in the year. Thankyou to everyone who has paid subscriptions here as it makes writing my books possible.
If you feel like giving me a one-off ‘tip’ for an article any time, you can…
How Uncivil Savant rolls
Last year, I tried to write every other week, but I ended up writing every week except two anyway. So, this year, I attempted to give myself a little more time off and instigated a rough monthly schedule to include:
a proper essay with audio, plus a podcast version that goes up later in the week
a video, guest podcast or ‘magazine’ style post
an archive essay from my first years here that many will not have read
a visual or art-based post.
That would leave an extra slot in months that have five Mondays, which I was supposed to have off writing… but I end up usually writing another essay or posting poems I love or a short unclassifiable piece I’ve written.
According to all ‘Substack Bestsellers’ chat advice, this is exactly how not to run a successful Substack. Apparently I am to give the reader something very reliable each week, find my special little niche and make that my USP.
Sod that. If nothing else, I am a tributarian, and not some singular thing. What I do almost always adhere to is my 7am UK time publishing slot. It makes me happy that people I love start their week with my words and it gives me the working week to think about what I want to write next for you.
Themes
When I started this Substack, I thought I’d mainly write about the way of nature, books that had hugely mattered to me, such as those by
, Chuang Tzu and Ursula K LeGuin, and the more poetic end of my writing. I do share those, but over time I have also written about resisting ‘the machine’, nature, saints, embodied philosophy, T’ai Chi, tactile richness, art and more. I go where my study, inclination and practice takes me, trusting that if I find something absorbing, someone else probably will too.It’s been educational attempting to write from my expertise. Almost everything I am known for being even vaguely good at is a physical skill, learned over a very long time in person, and not something that has traditionally lent itself to being written down in words. However, that is a wonderful challenge for a writer, a maker or doer, to somehow present the tangled wood that is embodied practice and point out the flora and fauna in it, which are prone to hide if stared at too harshly. One has to start with darting glances into the trees, then more prolonged gazing. Finally, a way to describe the scene becomes apparent.2 That’s half of what I am up to here, trying to find words for things that began as movement, making and action. Not everything worth knowing has ever been written down, nor can be found in books. For a start, much of what is priceless to humans is kept in oral traditions, teaching stories, myth, ‘fairy tale’, kennings and song. Poetry gets close, I know, but I am not well-read enough to be your guide there.
I search for words to tell you about that thousandth time I placed my hand upon my teacher and felt the sudden sensation of falling, and knew what had unplugged gravity and replaced it with equal parts unknowing and delight.
Or that time a rock taught me a new song and I sung it to my friends, and it turned out to be a few thousand years old, already.
‘Artisanal Intelligence’ not AI
Thanks to
for ‘artisanal intelligence’, which he saw on a sign in Italy. I don’t use AI to create any of my writing, art, music, audio or video material. Sadly, the apps that I use to write with, edit sound or video and crop photos, such as ones bundled with my Windows laptop, do now include an AI facility, but I do not use them for any creativity at all, no generation of words, suggestions of grammar, or images. I try to bypass these apps when I can and find alternatives, such as open source Audacity for sound editing. A complete guide to all the useful things I use to create my Substack can be found here. I have never knowingly used ChatGPT or any other AI service for anything and I disable them on my searches by using the swearword trick, as I quickly saw factual errors in AI ‘assisted’ searches a couple of years ago.I would say that I am ‘AI sober’, as my friend
puts it. My approach to AI can be found here in detail. Last year, I requested that my new book Drawn From the Wild would have a paragraph in the front saying, ‘Caroline Ross created all her original text, art and concepts for this book without the use of AI’ and since then, my publisher Search Press has asked all their authors if they would like to include something similar. That felt good, even if it’s just a small action in the grand scheme of things. Here at Uncivil Savant, you can be sure what you see is by me, an actual woman sitting at a desk, who thoroughly enjoys the creative act and doesn’t want to get an algorithm to do it for her.
What’s next?
More beauty. Art, books, practices to revivify life and make the machinations and fakery that plague modern life have less of a hold on us. Investigations into faith and love. An online meet up for paid subscribers. And a notebook full of much more.
I don’t write about politics here more than maybe one post a year, but that shouldn’t be taken as not caring or not following it. After a few years of reading less, while recovering from certain life events, now I do stay abreast of things more thoroughly, and it is probably the cause of the same swirl of feelings in me as in you. I see what has happened to friends who have fallen into rabbit holes or fights online and the massive waste of energy that has cost them, not to mention the threats, harassment and more. I still get hassled online by men who have actually known me in real life and I do not want to spend one drop more of my energy on a batch of strangers doing the same. Comments are for paid subscribers for this reason: trolls are time-consuming. If you’d like to comment but can’t afford a subscription, just reply to this email and I will comp you six months for free, anytime.
My opinions are not particularly important or helpful to others without the context of knowing me in person. Besides, if you read me each week, you’ll get an idea of where I am coming from about various things, some of which won’t match up with each other if you tend to trust terms such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’. My standpoints are based on my experience of reality as a woman in my fifties, the influence of people I know and respect in real life, some profoundly important historical figures, books and practices, and my own ethics. I’d love to be part of a huge group of like-minded souls, such as a venerable old religion, but it seems that life and The Great Mystery have other plans for me just now.
People I know in real life get to talk about the nitty gritty of things with me and we generally observe the Chatham House Rule. This is possibly why I am trusted with people’s actual thoughts about things, rather than platitudes, and you’ll never see me outing, doxxing or shaming individuals. I do not believe that is how we will ever get anything done in a world where we are all going to have to live together anyway, whether our overlords jet off to Mars or just continue to steal everything from ordinary people. In my personal life, friends and family hold hugely diverse, indeed sometimes absolutely opposite positions to each other and I love that. May I always get to associate with people of good faith who don’t hold the same views as me about everything. The reason I don’t sound-off here too much is because I value the range of people I have met and talked to since starting this publication. It’s something I would like to continue to foster, not destroy with some easy, angry words.
I am sceptical about easily-stated beliefs anyway. I prefer to pay attention to people’s actions over time instead. Of course, when those two are congruent, that’s someone really worth spending time with.
What to call it?
It was hard to file this Substack under the headings originally available; I used ‘philosophy’ and ‘faith and spirituality’, but it also could be art, nature, memoir, culture… I am sticking with what I chose originally, as nothing else seems better and I am happy you found me here, however that was. You’ll find all my recommendations for other Substacks worth your time here, as well as my archive, movement classes, practical posts, about me page, podcast, links and more. Make yourself a tea and have a browse if you haven’t lately, I updated it all very recently. And if you fancy learning T’ai Chi with me online this autumn after I move home, you can find all the details here.
All that remains is to tell you about this week’s good thing, which has been a recurring feature of Uncivil Savant since the start, and one I am keeping, as, even in the worst of times, it’s important to be reminded of something good.
Thanks for reading, feel free to share this post with anyone you think would enjoy my work. Warmest wishes from me, on a Sunday evening at my writing desk, looking west though some sweet chestnut trees that line the road and coat my windows with their thick yellow pollen.
This Week’s Good Thing: I am so late to the Ted Chiang party, sorry. Exhalation was superb: incredibly inventive, ethically complex, humanely inspiring, full of relationships and characters that felt real even in situations I had never imagined before. I will be reading his first collection Stories of Your life and Others, when I go on holiday later this month. I can’t wait. If you love short stories and top-class SF, you’ve probably already read these, but if not, do!
‘Experts’ say you should reintroduce yourself every week. Do not worry, I won’t.
It is akin to remembering dreams.
An Uncivil Savant book is just about the best news I've heard in a while.
Thank you Caroline, rich as always and so many wonderful pathways......the trees.....when you look at them, even in your photos....they speak!