Spring Things
'like a perhaps hand'
Quite a few things on the go this Spring (in the global South).
My jasmine bush that I planted once upon a time, now subsumes my entire garden and the air is fragrant with ‘come out and play!’
The ocean has bioluminescent jazz hands waving and I have a very wonderful book launching at my favourite literary festival Open Book Cape Town.
I would say come along, but we are sold out! But please do pick up a copy as all proceeds go to supporting Women for Change. It’s been a labour of love, birthed during those dark lockdown days. My dear friend and colleague, Stella Viljoen, invited me to co-create a post-graduate 6 month course on feminism and film. Over the course of teaching, we have learned so much from our students that we wanted to provide them a platform for sharing their passion and clarity with more than our intimate seminar cohort. So there was a Burning Down the House symposium last year and a writers retreat and now… ta-da… our beautiful book is choc full fab young diverse voices chewing over important issues in fresh and vulnerable ways.
Can recommend.
I’ve got an online seminar and workshop coming up, an outgrowth of the marvelous British Sociological Association’s New Materialisms Study Group’s Materiality, Society and More-than-human conference I presented at at Goldsmiths in London last month and the fellowship at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Sociodigital Futures. So deeply honoured to have received this invitation from my academic crushes. All are welcome. It’s free to attend, just register at the links in the caption.
It’s an exciting time for sure. E. E. Cummings springs (ahem) to mind:
Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window, into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things, while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything
The tremendous gift of a writing retreat facilitated by my darlings Write with Maire and Chantal at The Grail Centre in Kleinmond helped me get on top of The Diss, and develop the ideas I’m presenting at these various fab opportunities. What a treat to selfishly focus only on my writing. It’s a life I love. And to be surrounded by such brilliant writers, including our writing group mama Cathy Park Kelly, really inspired me and got me over the crippling anxiety that was threatening to consume me.
We happened upon Northern Exposure a couple of nights ago on one of the streaming services and started watching it. A show that I first fell in love with at 17, I would faithfully tune in once a week on the radio simulcast, as it was broadcast in South Africa dubbed into Afrikaans.
I was nothing short of obsessed with the quirky cast of characters set in the wilds of Alaska. I stayed in the outskirts of Vancouver, Port Moody to be precise, during the Summer of 1995… trying to navigate the administrative nightmare of getting into the USA to study (and that was then!). Every day there would be a rerun of this wonderful show and many of the gaps… entire seasons… that I had missed, in trying to catch the weekly airing in Pretoria, were filled.
I’d spend most of my days that Summer wandering in the sweet pine scented woods. Pre-cellphones. How I found my way I’ll never know, since those forests are dense and properly wild. I spotted caribou, snacked on salmonberries and even saw a bear! I’d stumble on pristine lakes. It was the 90s, I was young, had quit medical school and was on the cusp of a whole new adventure. It was a difficult time — I was oh so lonely and afraid. Northern Exposure was a real comfort.
Then when we were newly returned to South Africa and living in the Eastern Cape, two babies 8 months apart, our friend Craig sent us a box set of DVDs of this same magic show. It was a balm during that sleepless, overwhelming time. Watching it again, 17 years since that last viewing, I’m struck by how I remember clearly all that Chris in the Morning shares from literature, possibly because I wrote the passages out, illustrated them and stuck them on my bedroom walls as a teen.
The Native American doctor prescribes dancing in the second episode and I so happened to find myself, for the first time in far too long, shaking it loose on Jolene’s dance floor yesterday morning with the spring light winking cheekily through the forest canopy. Chris’s rendition of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence bubbling to the surface:
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I And hailed the earth with such a cry As is not heard save from a man Who has been dead, and lives again. About the trees my arms I wound; Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; I raised my quivering arms on high; I laughed and laughed into the sky...
My kids are now the age I was when my Romantic heart first beat to this drum. We’ve been laughing at the collages and photos and scribblings of young me in my very 90s journal. I wonder if in another 17 years I’ll be ready for another reminder of how great this show/life is?