#35: although we are faithless
Plus Witchcraft in Exeter 1558 - 1660, robot liberation and hot Tudor gossip
You’re reading This Might Resonate, a monthly-ish newsletter from me, Emily.
Writing
About “temporary villages” and creative energy in our review of
’s first gathering, back in September 2024. A flavour of our feedback from participants:“My partner, not a man for hyperbole, said to me yesterday: “Foregather was the most influential weekend of your life”.”
— Lizzie
Speaking
I’ll be talking about chronic illness grief and why I started
at the first Chronic Oversharers Club event in January.The Chronic Oversharers Club is a new initiative exploring chronic illness within the arts, founded by Anna van Miert and Roxana Muñoz. They aim to spread awareness and start conversations by curating a series of events with guest artists who create work informed by their own experiences of illness.
We hope to create a safe space for chronically ill and able-bodied creatives alike to listen, learn and ask questions. Ultimately we want to provide visibility to a chronically overlooked community.
The event will take place the evening of January 30th 2025 at Riverside Studios in London. Sign-up link coming soon, follow @thechronicoversharers for more info (or message me directly if you’re interested and I’ll send the link to you when it’s live).
Reading
A Place of Greater Safety. The only Hilary Mantel novel I haven’t read and I am determined to complete it but at 872 pages and 100-odd characters my phone-addled brain is struggling. I can’t say I’m hugely enjoying it but a novel about the French Revolution in these post-Mangione times is a relevant read. A society collapsing under the weight of inequality and uncaring elites, radical and violent acts and a memeified culture of glib, ironic detachment. Related: how societies behave in the lead up to collapse (it’s worth reading the whole extract in Wheatley’s article from 2020):
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanaticism, and other negative attributes, attitudes, and behaviors suffuse the population”.
— William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, quoted by Margaret Wheatley in Why are we behaving so badly?
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. Also a collapse novel about a society eating itself. An easy read, well plotted, extremely Gen X (not a bad thing).
The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain's Greatest Dynasty. Full of hot Tudor gossip. For those that cannot emotionally recover from The Mirror and the Light (oh Crumb!).
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. Shamefully, reading this book was the first time I’d heard about Britain’s genocide of Tasmanians in the early nineteenth century.
Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community by
.Veg in One Bed New Edition: How to Grow an Abundance of Food in One Raised Bed, Month by Month. I love to read gardening books and then fail to do even the smallest amount of gardening.
I happened upon the below memorial on a walk, and shortly after was browsing the RAMM museum’s excellent bookshop where I found this little volume: Witchcraft in Exeter 1558-1660. If you’re interested in Witchcraft in Exeter in the years 1558-1660, this is surely the book for you. I’m moved by the votives left at the memorial, new objects each time I pass: flowers, charms, candles, bunches of herbs threaded into the rock. A few times a week, I bring offerings from my (overgrown) garden and pour water.
i played so much tennis my tendons cried.
can write about absolutely anything and it will be stunningRe-reading Saving The Indigenous Soul: An Interview With Martín Prechtel (Prechtel is one of the teachers I look to as I develop my grief tending practise)
Re-reading Grappling with Our Own Power by Miki Kashtan while preparing to co-facilitate a workshop about power for a regenerative economics social enterprise
The five-minute city: inside Denmark’s revolutionary neighbourhood
This very strange and true story about a robot
kidnappingliberating some other robots in a factory, featuring this exchange:
“Are you working overtime?” the small robot asks the large robots.
“I never get off work”, one of the other robots replies.
“So you’re not going home?”
“I don’t have a home.”
”Then come home with me,” the little robot says before leading the way out of the showroom.
“Then come home with me”! My heart.
Most read from the last edition:
An open letter: why I'm leaving the cult of wokeness by Africa Brooke
How to build a village: ‘Be the person who asks twice.' by Rosie Spinks
Sorry I'm Late - I have shingles: and nearly killed a man named Gregg by Jess Pan.
Watching
Films at the cinema: Queer, Wicked, Conclave (my favourite).
Films at home: Joy and Blitz. About Blitz, I thought, “why has auteur Steve McQueen made this conventional film?” By introducing empire and the full spectrum of human behaviour in times of disaster, including selfishness, into the narrative, he complicates modern Britain’s origin myth. The plucky underdog keeping calm and carrying on, prevailing against all odds, the little rain-soaked island that could and so on. I don’t believe this country will ever reckon with colonialism until we can recognise that “Blitz spirit” is only part of who we are, the savage imperialist parts always hovering just out of frame. Big mass market films that widen the lens are necessary correctives.
Documentaries: Exterminate All the Brutes (a good primer on colonialism), Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem (melancholic), Martha (a hoot).
TV shows:
Transcendant: The Mirror and the Light, After the Party
Excellent: Day of the Jackal, The Listeners, Say Nothing
Good fun: Bad sisters season 2. Silo season 2, Black Doves, The Great season 3.
Listening
Still feeling ineffable feelings about…
Do you know someone who is growth-oriented and wisdom-seeking? Someone who loves unusual ideas and great reading recommendations? Perhaps they’d like This Might Resonate; please consider sharing this newsletter with them.
You might enjoy my other newsletters: GriefSick (about chronic illness grief) and Foregather (about women’s creative energy). Yes, I agree that three newsletters is too many newsletters.
Lastly, I write about my facilitation, organisational design and coaching work in LinkedIn weeknotes every Friday.