The Heat

Midsummer newsletter, book news and poetry

All photos by me

The heatwave, a gap in my work schedule, the signing of publishing deals earlier than I had either hoped or anticipated, and both kids at school before the summer holidays, albeit part-time, all landed at once, giving me permission to do nothing.

As temperatures climbed, I dissolved. Mostly I sat in front of the fan, staring out of the window, watching the birds splashing around in the bird bath I made from an old saucepan on top of the rabbit hutch. A tiredness came over me. There is plenty I could have been doing, but it was too hot. For a few days, life was on pause.

In the garden

Everything moves slow and syrupy in the heat. In the morning, before the sun hits, I make tea and give the garden a few watering cans. I notice what is growing - sunflowers, hollyhocks, herbs, strawberries and raspberries, tomatoes and courgettes - and absorb the golden quality of the light as it rises over the field. After the school run I do essential jobs, and in the afternoons, while the children are watching TV, I read on the swing under the oak tree.

For various reasons, we had to give up renting the back field. The farmer came in with a tractor and mowed it all down during May. Thankfully, my pleas to leave alone the hedgerows and some of the scrub were (partially) listened to, but it still broke my heart to see four years of slow rewilding destroyed in minutes. The space had become more than just a patch of land; to me, it was a friend. I have had to let it go. Nothing in this life is ours for keeps.

Meanwhile, building work has started a few fields over. The scraping of the earth and the machine-thrum of diggers drifts over and bothers me during the oppressively hot days. I worry for the moles, and especially the badgers at the bottom of the graveyard: how will they get to the river, with all the fields aggressively fenced off? I leave water and food out in an attempt to do what I can, but the land here is being desecrated, and it is impossible to ignore.

Our green, rented garden, though, is still a little island of wild. Everything is growing up and around everything else: there are cottage sweetpeas climbing the buddleia, honeysuckle twining around the elder tree, and the white stars of clematis clambering up the skirts of the oak tree, releasing warm clouds of vanilla fragrance in the evening. I saw my first glow worm of the year down by the rabbit hutch one night, a tiny, unmistakeable green lantern of bioluminescence glowing in the long grass. These magical creatures are sentinels of a healthy ecosystem where they are found. We still haven’t mown the lawn because they need long grass and scrub to reproduce. It’s a jungle out there.

Evenings are just about cool enough for a walk around the village. The linden trees in the graveyard are just coming to the end of their honey-scented flowering cycle: I like to stand underneath them, breathing and listening to the hum of the bees, imagining myself as though inside a giant beehive. The wheat field to the front of the cottage has been left fallow this year. A skylark sings there every morning and evening, and patches of the land have blushed poppy red where it has been allowed to rest.

Poppies in the wheat field.

I haven’t done too much new writing. I am being gentle with my creative self after finishing the long task of writing my book of poetry, nourishing with rest, good books, notebooks, and permission to not produce anything. We all need our fallow times, too. I’m in my mid forties now, and am more interested in growing gently and showing up for my writing in ways that feel good, rather than forcing myself to be something I’m not. And I am getting better at trusting the ebbs and flows.

Every day I make sure the bird bath stays topped up, feeling grateful for the clean water running abundantly from the taps. Blackbird, robin, wren, tit and jackdaw come to bathe in the saucepan, a dance of feathered wings, light, and water. It is a joy to watch.

But every summer it gets hotter, and the heat hits different every year. This has been no ordinary week, and no ordinary heatwave. It reminded me of the pandemic, somehow, schools closing at the last minute, everyone staying home if they were able to, different rules. The unnerving sense of a warped reality. There is no ordinary any more.

I have never been able to keep up with the demands of this insane world. The more I learn about my son’s AuDHD, the more I am starting to understand that I have gone through my whole life with undiagnosed neurodivergence. There is an amount of grief attached to this, as well as compassion for my younger self, who survived a lot, and who always felt on the outside of things.

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Book news

If you’ve followed me here for a while, you might have noticed that I have two books coming out over the next year or so. I am beyond delighted to share this with you!

The first is a children’s book, The Old Words, illustrated by the brilliant (and wonderfully named) Siski Kalla, and published by Catch a Leaf publishers.

This book started life as a poem, first published online under the title ‘We Need to Teach the Children the Old Words’ and eventually making it into print in my first collection of poetry, The Honey in the Bones. It has been a privilege to work with Siski on this project, and I could not be more thrilled with the end result.

Several of the words in the book come from Robert Macfarlane’s research on words for landscape, weather and nature, a glossary of which can be found in his brilliant book Landmarks. I emailed Robert to thank him for inspiring the poem and to ask for his permission to use his words as the epigraph: “Words are world-makers”. Despite being our most celebrated nature writer, a college lecturer, adventurer and father of three, he replied warmly and wished me the best of luck with the book (I’m a total fan-girl, so seeing his name in my inbox was a thrill for sure! What a kind, generous man).

Today’s full Strawberry Moon seems like the perfect day to share the cover with you:

Isn’t it lovely?! I am over the moon with Siski’s illustrations, and look forward to sharing more with you ahead of the book’s launch in November. You can pre-order the book here; authors and illustrators LOVE pre-orders, and they really help to put some wind in the book’s sails. I’ll also be releasing a number of signed copies closer to the book’s publication - so please stay tuned!

Meanwhile here’s a reading of the poem by me, turned into a ‘reel’ by my in-house Capcut editing team, i.e. my 13 year old daughter:

Also in Very Exciting Publishing News, my second full collection of poetry and essays, River, Moss, Moon, has been picked up by The Poetry Lighthouse, and scheduled for release in 2027. This book took me four years to write, and I put everything I had into it. I am overjoyed to be on board with such an exciting, innovative UK press, and am looking forward to working with their editors in the lead up to publication.

I might have squished all this into a few short paragraphs, but I can’t emphasise how much it all means to me. It was always my dream to write books. To have two arrive so close together feels like a dream come true.

‘Strawberry moon’, a spread from The Old Words.

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I’ve been in a bit of a creative lull recently, which is probably natural after finishing a long project. I’m so glad I followed my inner compass and finished writing my poetry collection - but now that it has entered into a new stage of life, there is an empty space.

As well as the happiness and relief, there is also the vulnerability that comes with publishing a deeply personal collection of poems and essays, and the strangeness of it becoming a product. For now I am taking it slowly, having fun with writing, and not rushing anything.

When the writing isn’t flowing, I sometimes find that it’s a good idea to spend some time getting organised, and playing around with old work. It’s a nice way of keeping a toe in without feeling pressure to produce something new.

During the fiery, humid days that followed the solstice, I finally organised the files in my laptop (it was chaos in there, and I’d been putting it off for years), and dug out a few older poems that I’d forgotten about. I reworked this one, written during the scorching summer of 2022:

And, while we’re digging out oldies, here’s one from The Honey in the Bones just for good measure:

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That’s it for now. Thank you, as always, for being here - in our age of excessive noise and distraction, I never take it for granted that people choose to spend a few minutes of their precious time here with me.

Wishing everyone a peaceful and joyful full Strawberry Moon! I will be taking a break during August, but all things being well there will be another newsletter in July. Enjoy the dog days of summer,

C x

Solstice sunrise