Encouragement Files

(11-25) Field Notes for Curious Minds

This is the 11th Edition of ‘The Encouragement Files’, little cousin to our weekly (non-Substack) newsletter Field Notes for Curious Minds.

This midweek offering is a chance to celebrate the words, publications and people that have inspired us. Hopefully, it will prove to be an encouragement for you to shout up for the creativity that lifts your spirits, a counterbalance to the downbeat in this world gone mad.

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I love that we’re all living a version of what I’m doing now, as I twiddle my pen, rifle through notebooks and reach into the ether for inspiration. At some point in the past few days, we have all sought the spark, the ignition to our flame. Sure, you’re not sitting there eating leftover sausages while listening to

JoJo Thomson

whisk a buttermilk batter mix for breakfast pancakes (sorry, I’d share but there’s really only going to be enough for two). You might be sipping a lemon water; mine has gone so I am already daydreaming about the new Peruvian coffee from our favourite roaster (Les Cafés de Théophraste, thanks for asking). But while all is calm in the kitchen, I am having trouble cooking up this week’s offering. Anyhow, that’s not the point. Back to the versions of life we are all living in parallel, unseen details, personal quirks, daily happenings, ups and downs; occasionally our lives brush up against one another, often not. Once in a while we realise that this multitude of other lives is underway. There’s a name for that:

sonder (noun)

The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

You probably knew that already. I only found out recently - for a moment it stopped me twiddling my pen as a story came to mind and I emerged from a fiction writing desert into a bountiful oasis where words flowed:

It’s a Sonderful Life

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Beyond Substack

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I N T E R I O R S

We can never resist a coffee shop. Great roasts are the lure, of course, but we’re staying for the aesthetic, hanging out with other creatives coffee lovers in places that make us feel good. This week, we love Grounds Coffee Hub in Prague, or the ‘no distractions’ whiteness of Bloom-n-Brew in Moscow; maybe you prefer bold colours … head to Motín brightening up a trendy neighbourhood in Mexico City

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Word work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison

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A R T

There’s a childish sense of whimsy in these cartoons by Ryohei Kadokura, a Japanese illustrator who challenges social norms through wit and humour.

© Ryohei Kadokura

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Dear writers …

Sunrise or sunset

Prose or poem

It doesn’t matter

Keep going, keep going

Lemn Sissay

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T R A V E L

As tourists, we run the risk of wafting through places, ticking off sights, capturing our moments, focusing on our experiences. And yet, as travellers, we need to connect ourselves to the experiences of the people for whom this is life.

Story by Genevieve Allison for Sidetracked // Photography © Elliot Ross

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Eventually this sort of excessive disregard meant they called my parents, which was the one threshold I had been loath to cross. The chiding of my schoolteachers, the administration, and the system in general was nothing but gentle spring rain upon the pane compared to the fear I felt for the monsoon of my parents.

Clancy Steadwell

- Spelling Bee - a shout out to all the smart but bored kids

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SIX OF THE BEST

1. We love the energy and enthusiasm of folk like

   Emily Charlotte Powell

   “I am filled with excitement and bubbling over with new ideas. The more I create, the more I long to create. Creativity is a tide that rises, each wave lifted by the one before it.” (Making Art to Make More Art)

2. The light is back and suddenly, as

   Laura Pashby
   reminds us so elegantly, everything is possible:

   “Sitting down again at my desk, a cup of coffee in hand, I watch the light stretch long fingers across the walls of my tiny study. I think about the woodpecker, tap-tapping away on the hill behind the house, and the celandines, ready to burst into bloom. The words in my notebook, infused with light, begin to coalesce. Now, in this quiet, sunlit coffee-scented morning, everything seems possible again.” (when the light slips back)

3. There is a celebratory rebelliousness, an empowered gathering of knowledge, a strengthening of resolve and possibility, in this collection of art shared by

   Meredith Lewis
   … women, reading.

4. Mangled words that are extraordinarily better than the real thing … nice work

   Monique Mulligan

5. Susie Mawhinney
   wrote the words we wished we had written:

   I simply want to feel the sigh of a day delivering nightfall, the tremble of the land just before obscurity tricks the eye, rifles with belief before summoning the dark demons of a playful imagination. (Daydreaming in scented wings)

6. Another excellent piece by

   Cole Haddon
   who shared ideas on writing by the legendary Henry Miller.

   And a bonus seventh

7. Which reminds me, I wrote a fictional exchange of letters between Henry Miller and a young woman who should have known better. Salacious, but a favourite of mine, I would venture.

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PS

Maybe, just maybe, this was the week when Spring announced herself to us:

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Back next week, same time, same place.

Barrie and JoJo