#3 In the footsteps of the Brontë sisters: walking our stories to life
Tending the dormant seeds of our creativity
Hello! Welcome to the third monthly issue of The Joy Rise.
I’ve been loving this little community that we’re building so much that I’ve not been able to wait for the first week of the month to roll around before I write to you again. That’s meant that in August, I wrote a couple of additional newsletters on creativity being contagious, and on the power of embodying our imaginations for all subscribers to read. Thanks for being here!
This monthly dispatch for paid subscribers is jam-packed. Come with me on my return to Brontë country, as I reflect on what those heather-covered moors have taught me about how we walk through stories in our outer and inner landscapes. I also answer a deeply moving reader question about how to get creativity to come back to us when it feels utterly gone. We meet Amalfi, our majestic Dog of the Month, and, dive with me in to the art, music and words that have called to my heart lately.
I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.
EMILY BRONTË
August was a surreal, late-northern-summer month in this writer’s life. It held all of the feeling, processing, and adjusting of returning to our house in the UK (and who I was last time I was here) after five unexpected, pandemic-caused years away, which I wrote about in issue #2 of The Joy Rise. What made last month particularly dreamlike was that, days after Sam and I returned to Manchester, beloved friend Catherine arrived to stay with us on her travels from Australia. As well as being one of our favourite people, Catherine is also my principal publisher, who I have written and published all of my books with since 2016. And so, throughout August, memories of life when I first arrived here 15 years ago aching to become a writer, were overlaid with a coming-full-circle moment in the present that I shared with Catherine. Through the pandemic years it’s something I wouldn’t have been able to believe, that when we’d eventually return to Manchester I’d remember and explore my way back into the life I’d unwittingly left here with Sam and the woman who has championed and published my writing since my draft manuscript of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart first landed on her desk eight years ago. As such, August had a once-in-a-lifetime kind of quality to it.
We three travelled and talked stories all over the UK and felt like we lived ten-days-in-one. Each night when we’d crumple, replete on the couch after another adventure, one of us would declare that it had been ‘the best day’. But, of all our days, going together to Brontë country - the heather-covered landscapes that I regularly sought out to connect to something bigger than myself during the decade that I lived in Manchester - was maybe my best day of all.
When I moved to Manchester in 2009, I was 29 years old and didn’t know much about the Brontë sisters beyond their classics status. But, as I unpacked in my student house, I did remember that I’d read Jane Eyre in high school, which I’d robustly resisted - it felt dated and irrelevant to teenage me. Until I begrudgingly did read it and had to admit how much I loved it. How much my burning 16-year-old heart related to Jane. Little could I have imagined then, a 90s teen in the Queensland subtropics, how much the Brontë sisters and the northern landscapes of their beloved, heather-covered moors would come to mean to me and my writing.
I didn’t read Wuthering Heights until 2010. I was nearly a year into living and studying writing in Manchester, was on the cusp of turning thirty, and beginning to rebuild my life from the trauma of the violent relationship I’d left behind in Australia. All of which is to say that the day I curled up on my student bed a block from Oxford Road with a cup of tea in hand as I cracked open the spine of Emily Brontë’s psychological masterpiece, I was ripe for the toxic, dark, disturbed and beautifully written story of Cathy and Heathcliff. I closed the last page feeling utterly consumed, seen, and known. Feeling every bit of the magic Carl Sagan was talking about when he said:
…[O]ne glance at [a book] and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
After the deeply familiar fever of being consumed by a man like Heathcliff had passed, I then re-read Jane Eyre. This time, the experience of reading it was a combustion, as if the story had laid glowering in my heart, waiting to ignite in me fifteen years after I’d read it in high school. I didn’t know then that I was four years away from writing the first sentence of what would become my debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart - but I did sense that the authors to help me to find the grit I would need to write my first book had found me. I remember yearning so strongly to reach across millennia (or two hundred years) and find the Brontë women too. One of the ways that my previous years living in the western desert of Australia had taught me to do that - fully immerse myself in story - was to go to the land that the story had come from. And to walk slowly, listening deeply to that place. I took to Google… and when I discovered that Charlotte and Emily had lived and written these books that had spoken clearly and silently inside my head only one hour from where I was living in Manchester, I was…not composed.