Fire in the head

I used to improvise and wing things a lot, in rituals, and musically. There was a time when I’d happily go out with a violin and play music I didn’t know, with strangers, and mostly get away with it. It takes a certain amount of nerve. I think you could do that from a place of arrogance or self confidence, but for me what mostly enable the winging of things, was a deep belief in the awen. I’d open my heart, and the words would come, or the notes, or whatever I needed creatively in the moment. It never failed me. Mostly I just experienced the inspiration as happening to me, a force rushing through me, and I never felt much ownership of the things I did.

Life changes and a loss of nerve have meant I’ve not been out winging it as much in the last few years. Hardly at all, in fact. I draw on inspiration to write, but that’s usually a slow and private process. If it doesn’t work, no one else will ever know. Winging it in public is totally exposed and vulnerable, any shortcomings made visible. It’s one thing to go out and feel that you’re balancing on a tightrope the awen holds steady, and quite another to feel like you can’t. Depression and anxiety are not aids to the flow of inspiration. They are serious blocks, and anxiety makes it hard to just go out there and do it and trust that you can.

I had some unexpected jamming in a pub with some guys about a month ago. That helped me feel like I could just leap in and do those improvised things again. Yesterday I really took the plunge. If you read the blog – here – about Intelligent Designing, I proposed to write limericks for anyone who shared either the blog or the link. I had quite a few link shares on facebook yesterday (thank you everyone who joined in) and was rapidly churning out silly limericks that included people’s names. Exposed enough to feel a bit edgy, hidden behind the computer enough to feel a bit safe.

So much of creativity is actually about trust. Trusting yourself that the skills are there and you can do it. Trusting the inspiration to flow. Trusting people not to bring over ripe fruit and throw it at you… It’s always a bit of a leap into the dark. It always feels a bit risky, and I realise that I’d become risk averse in a way that was restricting what I could do. I need to learn how to trust myself again, and how to trust the inspiration. Yesterday went well.

If you fancy having a play, pop the book link http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1368694639&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+designing+for+amateurs on the site of your choice, and let me know – I’m on facebook, @brynneth_nimue, I’m on Google+ and linkedin and if you reblog to another wordpress one I can spot that. If in doubt poke me here or some other place…

Steam Druid

For all of you who suffer from folk innuendo syndrome, I should start by saying no, this is not a Beltain related topic. It’s about steam engines and Druids.

Only when I went to the Cambridge (Gloucestershire) vintage car and steam show last weekend did I remember what I was doing there the previous year. It’s a small show – a field of old cars, a steam car (the only car I have ever loved!) a steamroller and a few baby traction engines puffing about. There was also a lot of rain. Last year I was working on Intelligent Designing for Amateurs. It’s a fiction thing and it’s coming soon… and as the title suggests, it is a bit about people playing God.

But I digress. I’d read Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe the previous winter, and that was a big influence on writing Druidry and the Ancestors. I needed to make some kind of meaningful response. A legacy remained. The sheer insanity of revival Druids, the mad energy, shameless disregard for facts, fraudulent invention… that had got under my skin. At the time I couldn’t see any way of bringing that to my ‘proper’ Druidry so I did what I usually do with impossible things, and put it in a story. How to do revival Druids? I didn’t want to work with the actual historical figures, so I needed to invent some equally crazy people to play with.

One of the consequences of this, was Henry Caractacus Morestrop Jones (Archdruid) complete with moustache, a robe that looks suspiciously like a nightdress, and a heightened sense of self importance. I wanted some slightly more sympathetic Druids as well though.

Then, at last year’s vintage car show with traction engine event, I watched the steam roller pootle back and forth, slowly. Inspiration popped into my head. Not the kind of spiritual, fire in the head awen inspiration we normally like to associate with Druids, but very silly inspiration. Druids on a traction engine. The scope for low speed chases struck me at once. I like a good slow chase for comedy value. Jack Barrow does them well, too.

In the process of writing a book, its’ not difficult to lose track of the source material, especially with fiction where I’m not making the same conscious effort to remember what I got from where. As a result I sometimes get the curious pleasure of re-encountering a thing and realising that it set me on an imaginative journey.
Druids on a traction engine.

I gather Dr Who has sinister cybermice in it, so I may have been a bit prescient with that one. Yes, it’s been a strange year, creatively speaking and the upshot is a strange book.

A case of mistaken identity

“What the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds “aha! This is my story. This is something I had always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say.” There has to be a dialogue, an interaction between the seer and the community.” Joseph Campbell.

That was my “aha!” moment, and with it came a stunning realisation about what it was I’d got wrong. I thought I wanted to be an author. I thought that from the age of about five, with flirtations with wanting to be other things along the way (Batman, rock star, teacher, traveller, the usual really). I’d always imagined that I’d find a way of being an author that was useful but never really put in the legwork there.

I don’t want to be an author after all. I want to be a seer. I want to put into words things that need expressing but that people don’t have words for yet. I want to be like a Troubadour of Mediaeval France, introducing the idea of personal love to a society that didn’t have that idea, and doing it mostly via songs. Only obviously I’m going to have to find some other concepts.

All the recent trauma and loss of direction makes sense to me now. I understand why I wasn’t happy. I was trying to do the wrong thing. I had misunderstood what it was that I wanted to be in the first place, and having that clarity now, I can better see where I need to be and what I need to be doing. I shall be chipping away at the non-fiction work (several in the pipeline now) and stepping back from the fiction a little. I need to spend more time trying to be the seer, not the author, and then come back when I have tales to tell. It’s going to be an adventure and I feel good about that prospect.

I’m also going to keep reading Joseph Campbell. I’ve got The Power of Myth on the go at the moment – a transcript of the interviews he did with Bill Moyers including bits that did not make it onto the TV. I’d not read any Campbell before, I confess, but am blown away. Some of it is dated, inevitably, but I have such a sense of finding a kindred spirit there, I’ve been coming to so many of the same conclusions on my own. It feels a bit like coming home. I’ve got a lot of reading to do, and that’s an excellent prospect.

Everyone has a book in them

There’s an idea that drives me a bit nuts. It has too much to do with the fact that most of us can read and write, and books are just a big pile of words, so of course anyone can do it. We don’t have a collective belief that we all have a fresco, symphony, ballet or opera in us. Or a really impressive bit of brain surgery just needing the right context to bring it out. This is in many ways a shame, who knows how many amazing things haven’t happened because the person who should have done it was bogged down in the idea of a book.

I cherish creativity, in all forms. I love the gorgeous photographs on facebook of things people have knitted and sewn, the craft items and artwork. Having dabbled enough in song writing to know I’m not terribly good at it, I am deeply impressed by people who can reliably get an idea down succinctly to a good tune. There are so many ways of being creative, but for some mysterious reason we’ve elevated the book as some kind of creative ideal. At the same time, from the business side, it’s one of the least lucrative things you can do. Write a song and busk with it and at the end of the day there will be some money in the hat. Not so with a book. If you have dreams of wealth and fame for writing, a novel is almost certainly not the answer. The money these days is in film, TV, and writing content for computer games. If you think that’s going to be too hard to get into, it’s not any worse than writing novels. Sure, the illusion of self publishing is that you will get a readership, but putting a book out there and getting people to read it is a whole other thing.

If you’re drawn at all to more bardic ways of working, then creating just for yourself isn’t going to be enough. The sharing of inspiration, and output is so much of what it’s all about. Making things that have nowhere to go is not a happy or rewarding process. It feels like something has aborted, and it feels wrong, and demoralising. Finding spaces to share creativity is actually a key part of the creative process. Short stories and storytelling often results in being able to get a thing into the world, where novels do not.

I’ve seen this from the outside too many times. People who wanted to write a book, and who didn’t know all the technical and business things that go with it, assuming it would be easier than the symphony or the ballet. It isn’t. Not being able to take the work forward cripples confidence and undermines inspiration, and a person who was full of creative energy can end up with very little. Frustration will do that to you.

Everyone has the capacity to create, and there are many different ways of doing it, all of them equally valid. Having been through this process with novels, I’ve ended up moving away to spend most of my time working on other things. The graphic novel are out there and doing well – there is more of a market for them, for a start. I’ve found a deep love of writing non-fiction work, which came as a total surprise to me. Far more of my creative energy goes into non-fiction work these days, and I’m determined to get back into dancing and singing. Novels are nice, and when I find a good one, I enjoy it, but they aren’t the pinnacle of creative achievement, and it’s not worth getting too focused on them. What you might have in you is the next cult TV hit, the next Ben Ten, the next pant wittingly funny piece of stand-up comedy.

If, after all of that you’re thinking, no, I really must write a novel, it is the only thing that makes sense then, yes. You may well have a novel in there trying to get out, and I wish you much joy of it.

Poetry, Druidry and Ancestors

I didn’t realise until I did the final proof read of Beyond the Map, just how much a companion piece this is to Druidry and the Ancestors. Partly because the writing and research for the non-fic happened in the same time frame, partly because the real life experiences shaping one, also shaped the other. I moved back to Gloucestershire, land of my ancestors, had the pleasure of introducing my child to a vast array of history, story, connection and people. Landing in Slimbridge we lived for a while in a cottage that had been in my family for a good eight generations, and found distant relations amongst the locals, ancestors in the graveyard, and stories. It was quite a journey.

Ideas about family, ancestry, progress and connection lace through Beyond the Map. It was also written during a time when my relationship with my son was at a heightened level of intensity. That process of radical life change and upheaval created a degree of mutual dependence and greater closeness as we dealt with all manner of challenges. What it means to be a parent, what it means to be a future ancestor, were all very much on my mind.

It was also fascinating watching my son developing and changing relationships with his own ancestors. The sense of engagement and connection he experienced, living in that cottage, and meeting people, were really important to him. In the same time frame he also gained access to his paternal family in a way that hadn’t been available to him before, and seeing him find his place there and other feelings of belonging was also powerful.

There’s so much in normal, modern life that encourages us to cut away our own roots. The pressure to move, for work and study, the financial issues around rural living that make it impossible for many people to stay in the villages they were born in, the age divides we’re encouraged to accept… so many things unroot us. I think in the last few years I’ve become more conscious of just how much our cultures have changed around age. The tribe meant everyone. Smaller communities, historically, included people of all ages. The rise of the car and the television combine to reduce our contact with our neighbours, making us less aware of the people around us who don’t engage in our much more restricted social circles. We divide more readily by age, affluence, level of education and leisure preferences than ever before, and its easy to go through life only engaging with other people who resemble us, missing so much of the diversity.

Walking makes a lot of difference. I’ve actively sought spaces where I could engage more diversely. Steampunk, folk and Druidry are notably communities where people of all ages can mingle. That way you get communities with elders in them, shared ancestors of community become relevant and available. Ancestors of tradition are much more present in life.

Beyond the Map is the emotional journey that went with Druidry and the Ancestors. It’s full of comparable ideas and concerns, explored in different ways. I think they go rather well together, which is a happy accident – I certainly didn’t plan it that way, and didn’t even realise what I’d done until this week! The poetry isn’t in order of writing though, there is no narrative chronology – at least, no intentional story being told across the book.

Dissecting the work issue

I realise it may sound like I live in an ivory tower/boat, doing only fancy things, and that as a consequence that post about being totally demoralised may have sounded a tad self indulgent. I do all sorts of things, many of them mundane, banal, unexciting. This isn’t just a justification exercise though, I’ve sat down and thought hard about the nature of work, and figured out some stuff I think has far wider relevance, so let’s test that and see…

I write under other names too, and in a wide range of genres and forms. I’m not precious about that, I’ve written pub quizzes, custom erotica and reviews of household products along the way. I have worked tills and stacked shelves, I’ve washed glassware and spent long days doing stalls. It’s not all poncing about in celebrant gear and dabbling in philosophy! As a volunteer I’ve painted fences, picked litter, done long data entry sessions… I also edit for cash. And sometimes, for love.

The money aspect is simple. We all need money, and to be paid for your work is generally necessary, and also contributes to self esteem. I had no problem writing pub quizzes. I’d do it now if it came up. When the pay per hour is so low that you can’t live on it, that’s both deeply impractical, and in our cash driven society, does seem like a value judgement. I’d like to support anyone whose work was valuable enough to be paid, but who wasn’t being paid enough to live on, and there’s way too much of that out there.

I can bring a sense of meaning and soul and integrity to any job I do, based on experience to date. That’s about my attitude to work, that I know how to bring those things to the most mundane tasks. I think back to the paper round, and other low-brainers. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, and I know if I want to feel something is innately valuable, I have to invest the right things. You can do it on a checkout, you can do it cleaning toilets. There aren’t many innately useless, meaningless jobs out there, and if you find one, there are always issues around how the money is deployed. Supporting a family is meaningful. Financing your planned studies, or your bardic work, or travel; there are many paths to meaning, and that’s down to the individual.

So that isn’t the problem either.

I focused my thinking on the volunteer work, because it takes the money out of the equation, and because when you’re volunteering, the innate worth is a given. Some of those jobs made me happier than others. I was happiest picking litter and painting fences. I was least happy in the job that came with a title and apparent status. Why? It all boils down to how I’m being treated. I spent a month working evenings to get the fences painted at my son’s school. It was a huge job, and although I had some help, it was exhausting. But, teachers, and the head, would stop and talk to me, and they kept telling me how much they appreciated what I was doing, how it cheered them up in the mornings seeing the painted fence. I felt wanted, needed, appreciated, and that enabled me to do a long, hard job for no pay, and to take pride in doing it. The two volunteer jobs that gave me a title came with a side order of never feeling trusted, always feeling inferior, no praise, nothing to sustain or enable. It burned me out, and I saw the same organisations burn out and demoralise a number of other good volunteers too. It’s not enough that the work be rewarding. A little respect, praise, recognition and encouragement make a world of difference.

I took this back to my current working situation. There are places where I feel like a loved and valued member of the team, and places I don’t. There are places where communications have been poor and I’ve been demoralised by this, but, those are fixing so hopefully I will feel better about what I do there. Working for someone who values me is a joy. There are people for whom I would happily wash dishes and fetch coffees if that was where they needed me to fit. I don’t need to feel super-important, I need to feel that my bit, whatever it is, matters, has a use to someone, and is recognised. That comes through, or doesn’t, in the smallest nuances of interaction. Recognising what’s going on here, I shall vote with my feet, where I need to.

It’s all about getting to be a person, and being treated like a person. I’ve worked in a small production space that was fun and happy, even though I was just washing and packaging. The culture of a workplace may be the most important thing. Places where they time and restrict loo breaks, constantly monitor, harass and demand, these are soul sapping. Such employers ask you to be a machine, not a person. There are some people who, seeing writing purely as a ‘product’ want authors to be well behaved little machines that make product. Any employer, in any business who in any way wants their worker to act like a machine, is an abomination. Human respect, human dignity, human expression are, I think, what makes the differences between workplaces that are good spaces to be in, and workplaces that grind you down and make you feel like shit. With the right employer and the right people, the most mundane job can be a joy. And with the wrong person, the most lovely and heartfelt project can be turned into a miserable act of drudgery. Been there. Not doing that again.

The next big thing

Graeme Talboys drew me into this one, so you might want to take the time to backtrack and have a look at what he’s done with these questions too. http://grumsworld.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-next-big-thing.html I shall also be tagging a bunch of people to spread the love, so do have a look at what they’ve done. This is basically a cheery promotional thing for authors that I have done in a slightly convoluted way.

What is the working title of your next book?
In terms of things not yet published, Letters Between Gentlemen (Fic) and Druidry and Prayer (not fic) I’ve also got an audio project in the works called The Unquiet Land, and there’s going to be Hopeless Maine Book 2 at some point – Inheritance.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Most of my ideas come from inside my head in a response to things that happen outside my head, and it’s the interface between the two that gets the writing done. Actually there’s a whole rant in Druidry and the Ancestors about the frequency at which this very question comes up in interviews, because it assumes that ideas and inspiration come from ‘away’ and not from ‘within’.
I pay attention to everything around me – I’m a compulsive observer, I read widely, listen to the radio. I think about everything, and I imagine what things would be like and how they look from other perspectives, and I ask, what if? Then some alchemy occurs, and books happen.

What genre does your book fall under?
Druidry and Prayer will, unshockingly be a non-fic Druid book. Letters Between Gentlemen is shaping up to be an illustrated sort-of novel in the Steampunk genre. Unquiet Land is gothic alternative history type of thing. Not entirely sure how to pigeonhole that yet, it’s early days. Hopeless of course is a gothic, graphic novel Steampunky sort of thing.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Well now, For the Letters, the main character would, quite simply, have to play himself. Those of you who have been paying very close attention to my creative entanglements may be able to figure that one out! I’d also like the fabulous Chantelle Smith to play the female lead. Which may come as a surprise to her because she’s better known as a singer… Unquiet Land, well, that’s audio and written for a specific voice, hopefully he’ll like it, so that doesn’t need casting. As for Hopeless, my dream is not of a live action movie, but of a Studio Ghibli production and anything Hayao Miyazaki wanted to do would be fine with me!

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Ah, if only I’d started this thing with one book I’d have a fighting chance. But I never seem to be working on just one thing. Too many irons in the fire, too many ideas, too much the grasshopper mind. How about: Nimue writes a book which is distinctly different from the books she has written so far in which things happen that may or may not, depending on genre, be wholly fictional?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Druidry and Prayer I shall wave at Moon Books, I feel able to say this because Trevor expressed interest in public on facebook the other day! Hopeless Maine book 2 will be published by Archaia. The Letters, we’re contemplating and at a guess the audio work will be a self pubbing business.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I very seldom know. Partly because of the having multiple projects on the go at any one time thing. Letters Between Gentlemen, I’ve been working on for nearly a year, sporadically. I expect Duridry and Prayer will have its first draft down in a month a two. The Audio, not a clue, depends on how the inspiration flows.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I try very hard, in all areas of work, to find space that don’t have much other content in and shoot for there. On the downside this does not make the marketing easy and I know being able to say ‘it’s a lot like X’ is helpful, except that if X has already done it, I want to do something else. I’m not even that reliably like me, I suspect, because I get bored far too easily. There are days when I want to be Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett an Douglas Adams. There are days when I want to be Dunsany and Lovecraft and Clive Barker all at the same time. There are dark days, and gothic days, and angry political days, and all kinds of other things going on.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Most of it lately has been inspired by a heady combo of Tom Brown and Paul Alborough. However, Druidry and Prayer was mostly inspired by the fact that there wasn’t much about prayer in Alain Du Botain’s Religion for Atheists book so, even though I’m not an atheist, this made sense to me as a gap I needed to take on. Hopefully it’ll still make sense when I’ve finished tackling it.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
As I get bored easily and I hate things I can predict, I try very hard to come up with things that will surprise and entertain and take you somewhere you haven’t been before. Regardless of genre.

I shall be tagging…

Tom Brown http://www.mothfestival.wordpress.com

And

Jonathan Green jonathangreenauthor.blogspot.com/

And

Rachel Tansy Patterson tansyfiredragon.blogspot.com

(And if you want to be tagged, yell)

Hopelessly Happy

Yesterday, author copies of Hopeless Maine book 1 found their way to us. Now, I thought I’d done enough of this paper malarkey to be able to be passably grownup about it. Apparently not. The urge to run round making random ‘squee’ noises and show it to everyone was huge. I resisted though, mostly. This is not just a book, this is a moment in an epic journey. It’s a bit like the moment in a very long and sometimes quite challenging walk, when you find a pub and they turn out to do good beer.

This is the project that really cemented the friendship and working relationship I have with Tom. This is the project we were working on when we fell in love with each other. There are pages he was doing when I visited in America all those years ago. There are pages drawn after Tom moved to the UK. Whole swathes of our lives are wrapped up in these pages, and this is the first time either of us has seen them on paper like this. It’s also the first book with both our names on the cover, and that makes me feel fuzzy and emotional.

Tom and I have both travelled a long way to get to this point. I shared his story back in September, of medically induced nervous breakdown, homelessness, a total loss of everything and a slow, hard rebuild. To go from there, to here, is epic. My own journey from lost soul to new self was not on the same scale, but it’s been plenty dramatic enough. Then there was the crossing of the Atlantic a physical journey alongside the creative one.

We’ve made some amazing friends along the way. We’ve both learned a huge amount too about our craft, and ourselves and each other and life… This is a milestone. Getting here makes it seem like a lot more things are possible than I would previously have dared to hope. We got this far, we can go a lot further.

Thus far, online reviews have been really encouraging. Not just that people are saying nice things, but there are deeper observations coming through about what it means, what it’s for, and that makes me very happy indeed.

So, we’re off to Druid con this weekend, to launch a graphic novel, and wave Druid books at people and talk about the end of the world whilst wearing spoons.

To everyone who has supported, encouraged, and enabled Hopeless Maine, Tom and I offer heartfelt thanks. We would not have got this far had it not been for everyone else who believed in the project. Thank you.

Ancestors of style

Finding a voice as an author isn’t easy. How formal are you going to be? Academic style? Objective third person narrator, authority laden and confident? Are you going to be present as a person? And then, what form are you going to write? Poetry? Non-fiction? Fantasy? Literature? Conventional wisdom will tell you that to make it as an author you have to do one thing (usually a rather narrow thing) and stick to it so that readers know what to expect. That never felt comfortable to me. I get bored too easily.

I’ve been working on trying to find my own voice for a lot of years, but ended up tending to have different voices for different jobs, not one, coherent sort of me. However, there are two authors who have been increasingly influential when it comes to how I’ve developed on the style front: Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. If you aren’t familiar with them, I heartily recommend checking out their books. Both are of a pagan persuasion, and both are awesome.

There are a number of things about their work that hold true for both chaps, so I’m going to talk about them collectively. Both Kevan and Robin mix things up in a way that conventional wisdom has it, you shouldn’t. Books of poetry that also are about poetry. Mixing the academic and the experiential, the personal and the objective. They range widely, both writing fiction and non-fiction work – Robin’s fiction tends more towards the story telling. Kevan writes adult and YA. Their books aren’t easy to pigeon hole because they ignore where convention sets the boundaries, so that the intensely personal can sit alongside deep literary analysis, and other wonderful juxtapositions. Both men write with humour, and expose their thoughts and feelings in a way that I find utterly compelling. Last but not least, neither seems averse to irritating the hell out of people! If they feel or think something, neither tends to pull any punches with the delivery.

I don’t want to write academic style books. It’s not a style that comes easily to me and I think it puts off more people than it turns on. I also don’t want to write fluffy, lightweight content. I’ve learned through this blog and other teaching work that writing from personal experience is the strongest way to go. I’ve learned to work with my own doubt. In terms of how I present my thoughts to the world, the two writers I am especially keen to emulate, would be Kevan and Robin. Both in terms of the diversity of work, and the tones they strike. I want that blend of intimate, erudite, playful and confident. I have a LOT of reading to do if I mean to get anywhere near either of them for eruditeness… erudicity…. Eruditude…? It’s good to have something to aspire to, though.

So, picking through influences on current work, I thought of Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. There are a lot of people who have influenced what I do, over the years, but no one else I have set out quite so deliberately to follow. I think both of them have a great deal of style, and not only in their writing. It may be a bit much calling them ‘ancestors’ though, because neither is that much older than me. Although that’s one of the great joys in picking your ancestors of tradition… anyone is fair game!

Ancestors of Book

When I started work on Druidry and the Ancestors it was as a deliberate response to the work of Graeme K Talboys and Ronald Hutton (more on that another day). I’ve recently realised there was an unconscious ancestor in the mix and I thought that would be a good topic today, because I’ve just re-read the book that it turns out, significantly contributed to mine. It’s Graham Swift’s Waterland, and is, amongst other things about the Fens, history and the end of the world. I’d re-read it because I remembered it talking about the death of history and my topic for Druid con in a few weeks, is Druidry at the end of history.

One of the things I did with Druidry and the Ancestors was to think about the kinds of overarching stories we tell about history. The big two are history as progress and history as decay. I knew, when writing this, that it wasn’t entirely mine but I could not think where I’d got it from. Waterland, is the answer.

It’s a beautiful, mournful book, about the strange historical connections that get us to where we are, and the circular nature of history, and the way thing flow back upon themselves. Reading was also a reminder of how many influences we absorb, and how easily a thing can become part of us and we not know its source. That was also one of the things in Druidry and the Ancestors, wanting to explore how we build a sense of the past, what we take on board unquestioningly. All those stories that are so deep within us that we no longer realise they are stories. Waterland was one of those, for me, it was the story of the making of history stories and from it I unconsciously made a history story and then, for an event where talking about my book is on the agenda I suddenly, irrationally wanted to talk about this book as well, and re-read it, and there it all was.

Another moment of strange cyclicalness. Cyclicity… is there a word for this? The book has been full of them, bringing with it a journey that goes forwards as it goes backwards, that has taken me deeper into my sense of self and taken me forward. Back I go, into a book that I read for A level English an then again during my degree and which, coming back now as a parent reads completely differently. At seventeen, how could I understand a fifty something male history teacher, childless, and the theme of children? Can I understand it now? Maybe more. Books change you, and as you age and grow and learn, when you read the same book again it too becomes different. We bring so much of ourselves to books, that I think it might be fair to say that, as with the proverbial thing about getting into rivers, you can never read the same book twice.