Time can be stretchy, sometimes. Despite it rushing by in the last few months - in a flurry of new projects and pre-publication excitement - it also feels as though spring has dragged its heels. Flowers bloom early while just last week, frost sparkled on Millennium Bridge.
But we’re in May now, right? Surely May will bring a breath of warmth, at last? I’ve got the attic window open today, and with that much-missed backing-track of blackbird song and road traffic, I’m feeling hopeful.
Welcome, lovely readers, to the first iteration of this little thing called Dwell. This letter is a bit longer than future ones will be: a few more of the kind of words I’ll be sharing in my mid-monthly essays.
I’ve been trying to go down to the river every day lately. I know it’s good for my body to get out into the weather before I sit down to work at my desk – it helps to carve my own little commute along the Ouse. To move my limbs before I try to shift the gears in my brain.
This winter has been the wettest I can remember – and it just didn’t want to let go. April’s mornings have all been wind-chilled, even when the sun makes its brief appearances.
I’ve felt a bit like the weather: holding my breath as everything teeters on the brink of change. Days creep by, but there’s so much to look toward: new work, new places, the launch of my first book… Major life events that I can almost touch. Milestones written in the near pages of my planner.
I check my junk folder. I wait impatiently for anticipated emails to arrive in my inbox. The boiler rumbles into action each morning. But while temperatures outside remain stubbornly low, things are happening. The bluebells replace the dead-heads of the daffodils, bare trees clothe themselves in blossom froth. One day soon we’ll wake up and summer will be in our street; here, suddenly, before I’ve had time to stow my boots under the stairs.
The other day I went down to the river in a heavy drizzle. The air had found some stillness, and the rain was falling straight and quiet. After a blessedly dry weekend, the Ouse had retreated back to a normal level, and I could reach the lower tow path for the first time in weeks. Rain gathered among all the fists of new, unfurling leaves, dripping overlapping circles into the water below.
I stood under the branches of an overhanging chestnut, noticing. How green everything was now. How quenched and thriving. How the thin strip of silt, between the waterline and the steep thicket on the other bank, was exposed. I couldn’t remember the last time that was the case.
And then, creeping along it, was a fox. Broad morning daylight, and a young fox with a dark back and brindle tail was making its way calmly, steadily upstream; slinking under shrubs and over mud-licked branches. Above it – just a few meters above it – cyclists sailed by inhi-vis jackets, toddles mounted at their backs. And above me, families rushed along Millennium walk, toward offices and school playgrounds.
But here at the level of the river, it was just us: myself, the spring rain, and the silent fox. I didn’t even have my phone with me to puncture the moment with a photo. So I watched, unnoticed by the creature across the water, until it disappeared back up into the tangle.
Change isn’t just in the weeks ahead, it’s here already. I left my job at Christmas, and I’ve been my own boss since. I’ve been sowing seeds and getting used to this new life, reminding myself that yes, I’m here: starting the chapter that everything else has been a preface for. At twenty seven I’ve found myself right where I scarcely hoped I would be… In theory, anyway. Now it’s up to me to take hold of the pen and write.
Once I had lost sight of the young fox, I walked back up the road from the riverside. I slowed outside the house which has flowerpots lined up all along its front. The pavement was overflowing with bursts of technicolour tulips. My favourite, the orange, were frilled and fierce; defiant of this endless rain. I moved to take my phone out for a photo, and again I remembered that I’d left it at home. So I gathered the blooms up in my mind and stored them away, thinking that I must plant some bulbs when we have our own front garden – I must fill it with flowerpots that shout of spring.
This April I’ve been working on lots of bits around Seaglass. My debut essay collection comes out on May 9th and so my publicist and I have been pitching here and there. The idea is to place some extracts in magazines and journals, but also fresh features springing from some of the themes in the collection. One of these, happily, created an excuse for me to go tap dancing for the first time in almost ten years - resulting in a very fun piece about finding joy, for The Scotsman (out next Tuesday).
It’s also meant spending some time back in the pages of the thing I finished a whole year ago now: revisiting the moments and feelings I poured into those essays, ready to wake them all up for conversations in the months ahead. It’s a funny thing, publishing a book. By the time it reaches the people you so urgently wrote it for, it’s become a part of your past. You’re thinking about the next thing…
Coming up in May, I’ll finally be getting my hands dirty on a podcast project I’ve been dreaming up for over a year. After a long winter working on my audio skills (shout-out to DYCP Arts Council funding - writers, apply!) I’m chomping at the bit to get stuck into this. Think ‘sound’ essays with a twist: out and about with a microphone in hand, meeting interesting people in their special places. First episodes will be arriving this summer, and you’ll hear all about that right here, in my letters, when they do.
Oh and then there’s the Seaglass tour, of course! [Did I mention I have a book coming out? Ha!] My lovely publisher Calon have put together some fab events to celebrate the launch - do come and say hello if you’re near any. And if not… it’s not too late to be my hero and pre-order the collection. [Note: Pre-orders are super important for us newbies.]
And if you’re in the car at 6.30pm this Friday… listen out - I’ll be on the Radio Wales Arts Show talking about it all. (Argh!)
Lately I’ve been reading the most brilliant non-fiction book called Nature’s Ghosts. It’s right up my street, this one, and was written by the extremely talented environmental journalist Sophie Yeo. It’s about lost versions of our evolving island: landscapes and ecosystems which no longer exist, or which leave only the faintest footprints. It’s one of those books which reaches across time and outside of small-scale thinking, expanding perspective, both disconcertingly and reassuringly. I enjoyed discovering via an email exchange that Sophie lives not far from me in the North East, AND that she grew up in the very same town and attended the very same school in South Wales that I did! I sincerely hope we cross paths soon.
And I’ve been particularly enjoying the local foxes - I saw two more in a single morning this week! Both out bright and early, sunning themselves in different spots along the river.
I’ve also had some happy mornings in my local coffee shop. It’s just a song’s length away from my front door, I can set myself up there in the window and spend the morning keyboard-tapping away while lovely people pop in and out for their usuals. I feel like I’m starting to grow some roots here in York. I’m recognising passers-by, chatting to baristas, going out in the evenings (like a proper twenty-something!). I’m realising how long its been since I settled into the grooves of a place.
So yes, I’ve been loving these coffee-shop sessions in Busk: a cheerful place with excellent taste in music. Though at £3.60 a drink, I’ve given myself a once-a-week quota… for now.
Oh, and wild garlic. Excited by the change of season (summer IS coming) and inspired by my big sister’s skill for whipping up a salsa verde, we’ve been having a go at this chimichurri sauce - but using wild garlic instead of cloves. It’s fierce and fresh and very, very good.
I say ‘we’ - my partner Andrew has. I’ve been banished from the kitchen while my hand heals from a statistic-confirming avocado injury…
So there we have it. As you can well tell, I’ll be wonderfully busy through the next few weeks, with book events, podcast interviews, time spent back in South Wales and, most importantly, my sister’s wedding in the countryside. (Oh, and Hay Festival!) What a time.
A big fat thank you to everyone who signed up to receive this first edition of Dwell. And an even bigger thanks to those already upgraded: a new essay will be winging its way to you in a couple of weeks’ time.
For now, I’m off for an avocado-stitch check-up followed by a tap class (which apparently is going to be Star Wars themed…). I hope you enjoy your sun-filled month of May, and I’ll catch you on the other side, in June – when summer has arrived.
Kathryn x
Absolutely excellent first edition read of Dwell. Loved it