28. A date with myself

A BIG thank you to 100 subscribers! Plus: recharging myself, my bookcase and our campervan's fruit bowl.

Dear 100 subscribers,

Before we get to my newsletter, which you’ll find below as normal, I’d like to say a huge thank you! Thank you for reading, liking, subscribing, sharing, linking, commenting and engaging with me and my writing. You’re smashing¹!

Substack for me isn’t really about the numbers: it’s about the opportunity to write, knowing that the virtual shelves of the platform’s library are open all hours to anyone across the world to browse. That said, I’m thrilled to have hit the 100-subscriber milestone this week! 🥳

A few quick thoughts:

1. Yes, for a while I was the only subscriber to ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’!

2. I didn’t have a mailing list to import.

3. I don’t have a social media presence.

4. Organic, Substack-led growth IS possible.

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Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

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Dear Reader,

In a recent post by Holly Rabalais of ‘Release and Gather’ I was reminded of Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’². I had journeyed through some of this wonderful book a couple of years ago, enjoying the daily discipline of writing my morning pages and the creative inspiration provided by my weekly artist dates.

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Photo by Vincent Tantardini on Unsplash

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Cameron’s twelve-week process ‘The Artist’s Way’ offers frustrated creatives a range of powerful lifelines to recover their confidence and artistic identity. I had tackled the book with gusto, enjoying the challenge. However, as with so many things, life got in the way, and my homemade origami bookmark has resolutely remained in the top corner of the first page of the chapter for ‘Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance’ ever since.

Picking the book up again in anticipation of writing this post I found some early advice from Cameron that I must have missed in my enthusiasm to get started:

‘…you may want to glance through the book to get a sense of the territory covered. (Reading the book through is not the same as using it.) Each chapter includes essays, exercises, tasks, and a weekly check-in. Don’t be daunted by the amount of work it seems to entail.’

My bad. Of course, as soon as I’d read the early chapter ‘The Basic Tools’ I had wanted to run with them. The Morning Pages and The Artist Date were my new jam.

‘Your artist is a child… Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds – your artist might enjoy any of these…’

‘Commit yourself to a weekly artist’s date, and then watch your killjoy side try to wriggle out of this. Watch how this sacred time gets easily encroached upon. Watch how the sacred time suddenly includes a third party. Learn to guard against these invasions.’

Oh, Julia, how did you know?

Reader, I hadn’t been ready. Well, I’d been ready to read it, to ‘glance through the book to get a sense of the territory covered’, but, with hindsight, I hadn’t been ready to embark on ‘The Artist’s Way’ itself. I had put the book down at the end of Chapter 5.

I’m no longer in the habit of writing morning pages: a sad but conscious decision made because of a busy life and that special kind of pervasive, dark grey guilt I inevitably feel when I’m indulging in spending too much time on myself.
(I know. That guilt is not a plus point. Acknowledged.)

And on reading Holly’s post I realised with dismay that I’d also got out of the habit of Cameron’s artist date.

Until last week.

We were a long way from home, and to my considerable relief my husband didn’t need me to assist on his early Monday morning shoot, on scaffolding right at the top of the ruins of a sixteenth century building. I had many options for entertaining myself: to sit in the van and work, to sit in the van and write, to visit the adjacent stately home that was open to the public – or at least it would be from 11 o’clock –, to follow one of the many walking trails around the estate parkland, or to mooch around the formal gardens.

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Rather him than me…

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Keen to not get lost – a very real possibility here in rural Derbyshire with next to no GPRS signal for my Ordnance Survey Maps app to be able to accurately pinpoint my location, and the so-called ‘map’ (Reader, with no ‘N’ for north, nor a scale, it was not a map) on the site’s interpretation boards sadly lacking that not-invented-yet mobile ‘YOU ARE HERE’ arrow that I so crave on unfamiliar terrain – I plumped for a walk around the entirely hedge-enclosed formal gardens. Reader, I couldn’t get lost in there.

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The apple orchard was beautiful, but it taunted me: we’d set off on this short trip with no stash of goodies in the campervan’s tiny fruit bowl. Of course knowing better than to think of helping myself to a tempting apple straight from the tree, I enjoyed the rest of the garden in the misty morning light, and on my way out I spotted a display outside the gift shop offering eight varieties of British native apples. A sign read ‘Donations to the till, please’, but it was still early, and the shop was closed.

‘I’ll come back’, I thought. As I paused to fold up the tiny red shopping bag I’d already fished out of my rucksack to accommodate my proposed purchases, the shop door swung open.

‘That’s good timing! Are you my queue?’ The shop manager – Tim, according to his name badge – invited me to choose some apples, telling me not to mind that they’d been out in the rain all night. ‘Picked just this weekend, and they’re beautiful’, he told me. I chose four Blenheim Orange (‘culinary/dessert’, according to the blackboard) and two Egremont Russet (‘dessert apples with a rich, nutty flavour’), popping them into my bag. I was delighted. ‘These’ll keep me going if I go for a walk later!’ I told him. He grinned.

The shop itself was wonderful. I’m no longer an impulse shopper: since the start of the pandemic I’ve been much more careful about where and why I spend my money, but today I threw myself into the heady luxury of hardcore gratis window shopping. There were silk scarves and woollen blankets, silver jewellery and leather handbags, children’s toys and typical gift shop novelties, rucksacks and bobble hats, and bright shelves of tempting books on a variety of outdoorsy themes.

And even more exciting, in the corner furthest from the till, was an open door marked ‘Secondhand Bookshop’.

Reader, I love a secondhand³ bookshop: whether it’s chaotic and musty or dust-free and carefully curated, I’m going to enjoy myself. This one was terrific. I swiftly scanned the shelves for familiar author names or titles to make themselves known. ‘Pick me!’ I imagined them saying.

With time to spend, though, I slowed down. I was on a date, after all. This was my time to indulge my artist child, and that child wanted something to read.

A sign read: ‘All books £2 unless marked otherwise’. That was useful to know in advance: I’d budgeted a frugal fiver to spend here, so taking into account the pound I was intending to donate for my half-a-dozen apples I was pleased to have four more to spend on words.

And there were my books, on the top shelf of the second bookcase, right at the start of the Ls. I had so delighted in Mary Lawson’s ‘Crow Lake’, her first published novel, when I read it last year that I’d added her 2021 Booker Prize longlisted fourth, ‘A Town Called Solace’, to my Christmas list. But here it was now, right next to her second novel, ‘Road Ends’. It was meant. I snapped them both up.

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‘Thanks for supporting us!’ Tim said as he took my money. ‘Come back later if you get through all of those apples on your walk!’

Of course, next to every decent tourist site gift shop is a tourist site café. Reader, I wasted no time. I had my own flask of tea in my bag, as I always do when I’m out adventuring, but this morning I was on a date.

With that in mind I treated myself to an Americano and settled myself at an outside table in the October sunshine with my coffee, my bag of apples and my secondhand books in front of me. I felt a sudden pang of disloyalty. As my two new books vied for my attention I remembered the one already in my rucksack that I’ve been enjoying so much that I don’t ever want it to end.

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Dilemma: Mary Lawson (and if so, which one?) or my livre du jour ‘I Capture the Castle’?

Reader, Dodie Smith won the day: my newly-nurtured artist child told me so. And as soon as I’ve finished reading it I shall remove my origami bookmark from the start of Chapter 6 of ‘The Artist’s Way’ and start Cameron’s adventure all over again. I owe it both to myself and my inner artist.

Love,

Rebecca

PS: Please don’t miss the footnotes below, especially the one about the purchase of secondhand books. Thank you.

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1. From collinsdictionary.com:
Smashing in British English - (ˈsmæʃɪŋ ) adjective. informal, mainly British. Excellent or first-rate; wonderful.

2. From Wikipedia:
The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity is a 1992 self-help book by American author Julia Cameron. The book was written to help people with artistic creative recovery, which teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills.
Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher
Publication date: 1992
ISBN: 0874776945
https://juliacameronlive.com

3. I appreciate that secondhand book sales do not directly support the author. There are many reasons to buy books new rather than secondhand, but there are also valid reasons to buy secondhand which shouldn’t be dismissed.
I found this article on salon.com interesting.

My husband’s book was published this year, and we’ve had many discussions about precisely this point, although at this early stage of its life those discussions have also been about whether the book ought to be purchased at its cover price versus any discounted price a retailer may offer. Of course he would appreciate the sales, but in fact he would like his book to be read, admired and talked about by anyone who picks it up, whether they own it themselves, it’s being passed around a group of friends, or is simply sitting on somebody’s coffee table to be flicked through by anyone who passes.

Brass tacks: books need readers, however those readers have been able to access them.

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Jim’s book. His photographs are beautiful. Have a look at it here on RBG Kew’s website. Foreword written by HRH The Prince of Wales, just a few months before he became King Charles. ‘Meadow’ has been shortlisted in the Garden Book of the Year category in the Garden Media Guild Awards 2022, which will take place in London at the end of November.