Truth and Justice

(Nimue)

For there to be justice, there must also be truth. Those who act unjustly will often try to conceal this by also distorting the truth of the situation. They will attempt to blame their victims, misrepresent events and will outright lie. Establishing the truth is often an important step towards healing and, if appropriate, reconciliation.

It can be very difficult for people who have been led to believe something untrue that then causes them to act on behalf of an abuser of oppressor. Coming to terms with the truth in such a context is a painful thing. This raises questions about how we deal with people who have been indoctrinated. It is better to get people to a place where they can accept the truth, but that isn’t easy.

Faced with evidence that your truth isn’t true at all, it can be tempting to dig in. Conspiracy theories, ideas of deep state, and propaganda are especially tempting when you’re looking at something that compromises your world view. In a culture based on lies and manipulation, it is very hard to know who, or what to trust.

When we don’t feel confident about truth, what we have to depend on are faith positions. This kind of faith will tap in to whatever best fits with our existing stories, and whatever most impacts on us emotionally. The vast majority of people want to believe that they are good, that they are doing the right things for the right reasons, and that they have not been hoodwinked. When the truth does not support the story that you are a good person, it can be very painful to deal with.

No matter how good the evidence is, many people do not respond to evidence when it compromises their story and their sense of self. It’s something we can be vigilant about with regards to ourselves, and very difficult to know what to do in face of other people. Belief that terrible things and people are actually good is a massive issue for us as a species right now.

To speak up for truth and for justice is not easy, and in some places it will get you killed. To stay silent is a form of complicity that enables injustice to continue. The question I most often come back to around this is, what can I do that would be kind? Alongside that I’m asking how can I challenge people in ways they can bear? How can I support truth and reason in my day to day life? I don’t have the scope to do anything on a grand scale, as is true for the vast majority of us. However, small everyday choices are a meaningful contribution to our societies, and we all have scope to seek both kindness and justice in our daily lives.

Reading as a bardic skill

(Nimue)

Many of us learn to read when very young and as such it’s a skill we can easily take for granted, and under-estimate. Reading is a very effective way of acquiring information, but there is also massive scope for misreading – most especially when dealing with a text from an unfamiliar culture. By this I don’t just mean the implications of writing from other periods, peoples, traditions and cultures. 

Every group has it’s own way of communicating. A political paper from the EU is written in a very different way from a scientific paper, which is very different again from the conventions of a culinary blog. To read something well you need a handle on the conventions at play in the writing and that takes multiple encounters. Reading the unfamiliar is less likely to result in a complete understanding, and it really helps to factor that in and to consider your own limitations as a reader.

It’s good to be alert to your own biases and assumptions. This isn’t easy, but the more attention you pay the better a sense you get. Watch out for the phrases that jar you or the things you are inclined to reject. Be alert to your own emotions when reading. If something makes you angry or frustrated it’s good to stop and make space to examine that.

If a text has an emotional impact on you, it is good to pause and reflect on how and why that’s happening. Consider whether the emotions are something the text is trying to elicit. If you’re crying over the tragic end of a story then you’re probably responding in the way the author intended. If you’re angry with a stranger on the internet, it’s worth pausing to see if that anger is something you’ve brought with you. It’s worth studying the ways in which you are affected as a reader because that will help you hone your bard skills to deliberately create those effects yourself.

Reading creates opportunities not only to learn the material in the text, but also to learn about ourselves. In exploring our own emotional responses to what we read, we can find out more about who we are. Being more self aware makes it more feasible to choose how we want to be rather than being a victim of circumstance.

Reading is at its most complicated when we get into the territory of what is inferred, and what is implied. Some texts are written with the aim of making us infer things that are never plainly stated. Some texts imply things that the author did not intend to convey but are nonetheless fair inferences. We might think about racism in colonial writing on these terms. There’s (unconscious?) sexism in stories that feature zero women with agency who add no more to the tale than would a sexy lamp.

At the same time we have to be alert to the things we might read in just because we’re looking for them. Projecting can be particularly an issue around this, and that’s not always about bringing anger or the worst parts of ourselves. We can also project our own virtues into a text. As a child-reader I was forgiving, and I filled in the gaps in stories imaginatively. Going back to some texts as an adult reader I was surprised by how much of my childhood reading experience had been about my own attitude and imagination. 

Stories always have gaps in them. The spaces in stories give us room to engage imaginatively with a text, and that’s one of the great pleasures of reading. A book is always a collaboration between the imagination of the author and the imagination of the reader. What we bring, and what we find can have a very big part of our selves in it. We all also tend to respond strongly to books that reflect back to us our own experiences and that show us something of ourselves. A sense of being understood by the author can also have a huge impact on how we read and what we take away with us.

Reading fiction is a creative activity. It’s not about just passively absorbing the text. The best way to learn about how you, as a creator might engage people in this way is to think about your own experience as a reader.

Things we do in Gloucester

Mark Hayes has very kindly hosted me on his blog. There’s a rather silly excerpt about a parallel version of Gloucester. I wrote this long before the Gloucester steampunk scene took off, in case anyone was wondering.

Breaking Reality in Gloucester by Nimue Brown

Book reviews beyond the paradigm

This lovely blog post includes a review for my book on sustainability, a review for one of Keith Errington’s Hopeless, Maine books and a review for a spiritual book by my lovely friend Cat Treadwell.

The Passing Place

Hello, how you doing?

Yes I know that is an odd way to start a blog post but its the most important question we can ask each other, even if its the one that normally elicits gentle lies rather than uncomfortable truths. Also I am not the greatest at small talk, but I am trying to get better at it. Or at least less awkward. And sure there is probably a point to me asking beyond that which may becomes clear, or not as the case my be, but enough of that…

Regular readers of the book reviews I post will be aware of two things. The first being that I never give bad reviews, if I don’t like a book I just don’t review it, as I may not like it but that may just mean its not for me. The second thing regular readers will be aware of…

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Survivors

The final graphic novel in the Hopeless, Maine series comes out this summer. I’ve blogged about it on the Hopeless blog and I thought it made sense to just reblog that here. If it would be interesting to have me write about the technical side of doing graphic novels then that’s something I could look at for here. Or any other Hopeless related questions anyone has.

The Hopeless Vendetta

Survivors is the final graphic novel in the Hopeless, Maine graphic novel series. These books are a complete story arc. So, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t like committing to an unfinished series, now is a good time to jump in. Also, I know how you feel, I get very frustrated by things that go on long after they should have stopped, and by things that stop long before they’ve actually finished.

This isn’t the last story about life in Hopeless, Maine. There are other things written and we need to figure out how best to get those out into the world. There will also be a steady supply of community sourced nonsense and whimsy here on the blog for as long as there’s anyone finding it entertaining to do that. Feel free to dive in if you want to be part of it, and if you don’t…

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Passing Place – a review

(Nimue)

Passing Place, by Mark Hayes is a beautiful, bonkers sort of a book. This is speculative fiction, with a story that isn’t easily explained at all without spoilers. What I can say with some confidence is that if you like the kind of bonkers and speculative fiction I write then the odds are you’re going to also enjoy what Mark does. I feel that we may have been cut from the same cloth. (I think it was a pair of intergalactic trousers, with a print design it might be safest not to examine too closely.)

I’m not claiming objectivity here. Mark is a friend, I know him through steampunk events. To all intents and purposes, Mark is on of the Gloucestershire steampunks, despite the small technical detail of his currently living a rather long way from Gloucestershire. He’s a fine chap, has piled in to help me with book layouts, keeps buying my stuff and has been incredibly supportive and encouraging of me as a person, so, I have biases. But it’s also fair to say that a big part of why I like him is because he’s funny, and kind and interesting and all of that shows up in his writing.

There’s a lot of humour in Passing Place. A surprising amount for a book whose story centres on a suicide. Trigger warnings here for anyone who has been suicidal or lost someone to suicide or otherwise been too far into that terrain for comfort. There were a lot of very familiar thoughts and feelings in the story. There’s a lot of pathos, and insight, compassion and philosophy all woven together to make something extraordinary. I cried several times.

I found a surprising amount of myself in these pages. Mark wrote it long before we met, so it isn’t that he’s knowingly taken scenes from my life. It was disconcerting to read the things that were close to the bone for me, but also deeply cathartic. There’s a lot that’s restorative about this book. It’s a story of wounding and loss and heartbreak and what you do afterwards. Too many stories focus on the drama, and not what happens to your life when the drama stops but you don’t. It’s good territory to explore, and I think a lot of people will find parts of themselves in the characters, and the stories.

If you’re the sort of lost little monster who is looking for Midian, The Passing Place is well worth a visit. There’s a forest in the cellar, the kitchen depends on non-linear systems of cause and effect, and the front door could open to just about anywhere. Or anywhen. A haven for the lost, it might be exactly the place you need to spend some time. It certainly was for me.

Book review: Spells for the Second Sister by Nimue Brown

Merry has written some very lovely things about my novel, Spells for the Second Sister. You can find the ebook over here https://ko-fi.com/s/f312aa059a

Meredith Debonnaire

So here we are at the start, which is clearly not the beginning, it is just the point at which you have jumped in.

I first read this book back when it was a word document, and I loved it then. Having an actual physical copy in my hands was very exciting indeed! Spells for the Second Sister is rather hard to describe: we follow Kathleen Sylvia West at seven year intervals in her lives (yes you read that right), as she encounters woodlands that are bigger on the inside, strange men in cottages, eats far more cold baked beans than anyone deserves to, and her life becomes increasingly bizarre to the point of absurd. It is an incredibly emotionally touching story, which is a skilled thing to be able to write into absurdity.

Kathleen is a narrator I am definitely a bit in love with. She’s angry, and unreliable…

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Severn sisters…

Mark Hayes – bless him – waded into the madness that is Spells for the Second Sister, and blogged about it. He’s a splendid chap and if you’re into the steampunk fiction side of life, do sign up for his blog.

If you’re looking for the book in question, you can ick it up for free over here – https://ko-fi.com/s/f312aa059a

The Passing Place

Somewhere along the banks of the river Severn there is a small tumbledown stone cottage, with a patchy thatched roof which I suspect the local swallows have been stealing away for nesting material for a decade or so. A small plume of wood smoke from the crooked chimney lets you know it’s occupied rather than abandoned. You know there is a stove below that chimney and something is slowly bubbling away on it…

The garden that has lost a battle with weeds and brambles, if not the war, made it hard to be sure if that was the case. Though the trio of large sunflowers, tied to bamboo canes, should have been a clue. Strange mosses gather on the old stones and an old stump in the middle of the garden has long been given over to interesting fungi, which is either delicious, deadly or both. There is also an…

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Ominous Songs

I am delighted to announce that I’m recording an album with The Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine! This is one of the projects I’ve been making vague, hopeful noises about for a few months – not wanting to say anything until I was sure it was happening. As it’s taken a while to go from deciding to do it, to being able to start recording, it is as well that I waited.

Back last year I also intimated that I hoped to be working more with Keith Errington, and that’s now officially and definitely happening, too. We’ve worked together on a number of steampunk and Hopeless, Maine projects at this point and there’s going to be a lot more in the future. He’s a remarkable chap with a huge array of skills and talents and I’ve yet to find something where we don’t collaborate well.

More about all of this over on the Hopeless, Maine blog.

The Hopeless Vendetta

We’re very excited to announce that The Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine are recording an album. People have been asking us for CDs for a while now, and we started thinking in earnest about this back in the autumn and exploring what kind of space, studio, and technical support we were going to need.

We wanted to capture the sound of us live and we needed someone to work with who has the gear and also understands the sort of thing we’re trying to achieve. We needed a collaborator we could trust, and once we started looking at studios, and realised Lucas Drinkwater was emigrating, it all got a bit complicated. No one else locally was producing anything that meant we knew they could do what we needed.

And then it all became delightfully uncomplicated, because it turns out that we already had someone in the Hopeless, Maine family with…

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The Circle of Life is Broken – a review

My only complaint about this book is that the title suggests a far more depressing read than is actually the case. I should have known better – Brendan Myers isn’t the kind of philosopher to succumb to despair. It is of course a challenging and sometimes uncomfortable book, but there is also lyrical writing driven by a passion for life and existence, a book written to try and express possible ways forward.

For anyone looking for ways to think about the climate crisis, and to think about what they personally might be able to do, this is a good book to read. There are no glib answers here, there’s no sure fire quick fix and there is a lot of analysis of things that have already been tried and that failed. There’s also an enlightening history of ecological science which will help anyone not experienced in that field to better understand the ways in which we talk about the world and how that impacts on our responses to the crisis. Brendan also explores the kinds of psychological factors and human-created pressures acting on us to keep us where we are, with all the disastrous implications.

I particularly appreciated the way Brendan has tackled both the history and current manifestations of eco-fascism. Hate, as he points out, is not going to save anything or anyone. However, there is a lot of eco-fascism out there and like most kinds of fascism, it often seems persuasive to people at a surface level. The classist, racist, eugenics-oriented aspects don’t reveal themselves at first glance. Any argument that involves blaming poor people for existing will lead us into this territory and it is so important to be alert to where that thinking goes and how harmful it is.

For anyone into philosophy, and anyone who wants material to reflect on, this book has a great deal to offer. It is an invitation to engage, to contemplate, and ultimately, to act. Heartily recommended.

More on the publisher’s website https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-circle-life-broken