“I write this from my bed.”
Sometimes I think I must have written that sentence a hundred, hundred times. Sometimes I wonder if you’ll get bored of it.
What follows next is usually a description: the collared doves cooing from the uneven terraced roofs outside my bedroom window; the soft black of my cat on the bed next to me, his paw extended from the void of him so as to touch some part of me; the sound of my son laughing downstairs. I could have written these words in the year I wrote A Still Life and all the years since.
So much of my life doesn’t change. You know this well — all the faithful souls who always took the time to come to sit with me and my words and my pictures long before I got my first book deal, and all the generous, thoughtful new people who have found me since. My body has needed near-constant rest and careful management my whole life. For the last twenty years, that rest has happened in this same house, mostly in this same room. Things have changed around me, beautifully, unexpectedly, but mostly I have remained in this quiet middle.
The fact that I get to inhabit this often timeless-feeling place and write from here, over and over, writing deeper and deeper from this one spot, deeper not wider, this slow tumble down a rabbit hole all my own with all the magic that follows, is, I know, part of my gift; part of why you’re here. You know it’s a rich place. You know stuff happens here. (Or, if you don’t know my story yet, perhaps you’d like to.)
But, no thing gets to stay entirely unchanging. Not me, not anything. These twice monthly, private letters to those of you so deeply kind enough to pay for a subscription (you are changing my life too, you know) are going to be about that: about change. About what happened when A Still Life ended and what is happening next, because it looks like change has decided to come and dance with me a while again — to pull me out of my familiar place and into somewhere new. Or at least, it seems to be about to.
There is much to say.
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