Community Borscht, Scary Stories, and Collaborative Practice
This time I am having more fun than ever.
It’s been an eclectic month, to be honest I’ve been bursting with things to tell you all! My brain is very massively full with ideas and stories and intrigue and love right now and it’s a little hard to organise it.
In this digest I’m going to recommend some audio content, give some updates on what we’ve been up to, and write a little about community and food and how it feels like an expansive, exciting thing to be doing. (Apologies that lately I have been describing everything as ‘expansive’ but it’s how I have felt! Abundance! Learning! Big Brain Activities™️!)
As usual, feel free to scroll around, pick out what speaks to you, and focus on that! I always feel like this is a bit of an offering or a gift to you all but yeknow when you’re so excited to give a gift and it’s just because you’d like to get it? A bit like that haha. Please look this gift horse in the mouth and take only what you need.
Cool Stuff Spotlight:
A few weeks ago I finally caved in to my inner nerd and started listening to The Magnus Archives. I’d seen storylines floating about on tiktok as creepypasta and a not insignificant number of cosplay videos (incredible that this this audio story inspired cosplays!) IT IS AMAZING! I am engrossed, OBSESSED, I think about it all the time.
It feels like all the scary stories I read as a kid mixed with all the radio plays and books on tape that I was obsessed with because we didn’t have a tv! Very sort of Ray Bradbury style horror- it doesn’t scare me because I’m so focused on the mystery. I love the format of this monster-of-the-week individual tall-tale narrative that begins to join up and connect in the show’s ‘real world’. Wonderful, pulpy, creepy stuff.
I have agreed to pause now that I’ve finished season 2 to let Rose catch up but I cannot wait to hear more.
While I’m on my Magnus Archives hiatus, I started listening to the BBC Radio 4 audio documentary series Witch on Rose’s recommendation. I’m only around 1.5 episodes in, but it is already scratching my magical-thinking itch. I’m spending a lot of time lately on very intentionally trying to think in the way I did when I was younger and was sure magic was real, I’m also very unintentionally spending a lot of time tuning in to what feels like the still very real magic of the natural world- so this podcast couldn’t have hit at a better time. It’s amazing to hear modern witches talk about what it means to them, and their lifetime of experiences of and relationships with magic in its many forms.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin is something I’ve read before, but I wanted to freshly recommend and perhaps in a new format? I grew up with Le Guin’s fiction and it’s refreshing to see how amazingly her work has aged and how meaningful her non fiction is. Rose read it last week and was filled with so much hype about it, I felt like I needed to read it again. SO- the other night when I was alone in the house I read it aloud to myself. It was so fun, I felt like I was her, we were in collaboration. Saying her words as though they were mine I felt like suddenly all of her points hit home so much harder- it’s hard not to get worked up- she writes with such gusto, and its hard not to laugh- its so cheeky and funny in parts! A delightful thing to read aloud. I recommend you give it a try haha.
What Have We Been Doing?
Learning
This week Rose met with JP again for a more focused session on spreadsheet hygiene- I didn’t realise that Jen was an accountant in a past life and now it all makes so much sense! We really need a dose of organisation and efficiency, I really appreciate our business and personal relationship with her! Some of the stuff they talked about in learning best practice caused a few hiccups in our pattern, but we are working through resolutions and I’m making a beautiful new sample in Uist Wool which I’m very hyped about. It’s amazing seeing Rose surpass me in my limited knowledge of the ins and outs of digital pattern grading!
Creating
We also decided to begin research this week for a joint art project which will hopefully take the form of a residency and produce some fiction writing and music alongside other visual and audio making. I don’t think I’ve ever actually done any collaborative work in my art practice before- I haven’t had much of a chance to spend time working on art or making outside of business stuff in a long time but I feel like it’s always simmering underneath. Rose and I seem to be perfect artistic collaborators, our ideas align and then fill in the blanks for each other, our mediums intersect but aren’t the exact same, we make each other excited to try new things and we are bursting with ideas! (It also doesn’t hurt that we have happily worked together for the last year ish) For a while now it’s going to be the hard graft of persisting with organisation, budgeting, and funding applications, but I’m also building up a reading list, visual inspiration, and other research ideas.
Writing
Adjacent to the colab, I’m starting writing again. I used to think I would become a writer ‘when I grew up’ but in the sort of branching paths of life I went hard in the visual arts direction and to be honest I have fallen almost entirely out of the habit of reading and writing beyond posting on my instagram stories for near 10 years. I want to re-start writing in a way that plays with the physical process I’m more comfortable in, so I’ve been writing little exercises/prompts for myself and I’m going to try to practise and share more of this! For now, I’m working on writing from a sensory input, embedding stimming and sensory seeking/avoidant behaviour into my perspective when writing fiction and if you’d like to read my first attempt, I invite you to read this little text :) (I didn’t include it in this main email as it’s very hard to fit everything in one place and I didn’t want to overwhelm, but I’d really appreciate people reading it and giving feedback!) It’s very vulnerable playing with a new medium but I’ve always just shared everything so why not this.
Community Borscht- Eating Together and Other Small Ways to Build Community
Dave and I have dreamed a lot over the years about sharing meals with coworkers, some kind of mental image about having a company with a few employees that employs a cook, a big table with a beautiful tablecloth and everyone serving themselves, sitting down to eat together and sharing our break in community. Eating together with others between working has been a romanticised dream of ours for a long time (you can tell we are chronically self-employed and working from home haha!)
Since Rose started working here 2 and a half days a week, we had been tentatively getting lunch for all 3 of us off and on on the 2 days we share a lunch break, but a couple weeks ago I decided to make it a built-in part of how I run the business (particularly because I now have started getting adult disability payment and having 2 less meals to think about making is very helpful to me as a disabled person, it feels like a good use of some of the money.) We decided for now to go to the Deanston Bakery and become true regulars and since then I keep dwelling on the small joys of food-based community.
Deanston was a support for many of us in Glasgow through the lockdown, one of the few safe outings and small pleasures in a dark time, and it shows in the way it has grown community around itself. I was inspired to write about this when, while eating delicious borscht from them, I saw a post on their instagram saying that it was a borscht few days because a regular had given them a huge supply of extra beets from their garden. I felt this very physical moment of community then, sitting across from Rose eating the same wonderful soup, thinking of the labour of the cooks at the bakery, the hands it has passed between, the local garden it started in. The Borscht and I have shared so many sunny days, and it was conceived in generosity and abundance. What a pleasure.
Since I started thinking about it I started thinking about all the other little ways I’ve been being fed (literally and metaphorically) by community. Our new neighbours who don’t speak much english but we have a periodical food-gift swap with; the other new neighbours who have invited us for dinner next week; our neighbour-friends Stuart and Sophie who have generously invited us to dinners harvested from veg they grew in our shared back garden through the years, and offered me the cucumber seedlings which are currently ripening in the front; my friend (another Sophie!) who sent me a selection of her favourite asian snacks in the post when I was going through a depression; Cat stopping by with their arms full of treats when they know I’m having a bad day- community food has this incredible presence and power.
On the weekend our neighbours hosted a yard-sale in our shared back garden which we joined in with at the last second. It was such a lovely few hours sitting outside, talking to them and their friends and other neighbours in buildings near ours. People we didn’t know yet came to say hi, I finally spoke to people I’ve known parasocially for years, I got a few new recruits for the knitting group. Partners brought food for people to eat outside, friends picnicked on the lawn. We swapped books and clothes and crafting materials.
As a neurodivergent person and someone who has had a complicated relationship with food, cooking and eating and socialising and building relationships are not always easy or straightforward things, which makes all this food-community chat feel very filled with love and care and joy. I’m sure many others have written about this more eloquently than me, but I hope you enjoyed having this moment to think about it!
Thank you so much for spending this time with me! I really hope you have a lovely day and maybe something here brightens it.
As always I would be remiss if I didn’t share our beautiful knitting patterns that I’ve hardly even mentioned- find them in my linktree below!