Five Fine Things...
*in which I inflict my taste on you, dear reader
Photo credit: . Me at a graveyard in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, on a literary tour to visit Haworth Parsonage - former home of the Brontes - as well as Sylvia Plath’s grave.
Dear Reader,
Hello! And thank you as always for being here! Please do invite your friends along. It is in fact, this very month, my eighteen month anniversary on
so in honour of that here are three posts from May 2023:a poetic experiment inspired by Bernadette Mayer and Charles Bernstein’s amazing prompt-list.
A Fish out of Water true tale about attending church as a fence-dwelling agnostic.
And some Soundbites gathered on the 432 bus to Brixton (this bus is my muse).
To new subscribers the below is a regular and serendipitous list of things I've been enjoying that week/fortnight and more Fine Things recommendations can be found here. I'd love to hear your latest obsessions too, so please do….
Love,
Emma x o x o
p.s. you can purchase my non-fiction book - which is about my grandparent’s lives and the charity they founded (back in 1967) - Roaming Wild, the founding of Compassion in World Farming here, as well as in all the other usual places.
Watching! The TLC Forever documentary on Netflix. The talent, the creativity, the style! These women were groundbreaking and this documentary made me cry more than once. What struck me, perhaps most, was the strength of their friendship and the feeling of real female empowerment within the group and in what they offer creatively. (That is opposed to the so often self-centred, branded, fake, female empowerment and performed vulnerability of today - the type you see a lot of on social media which is really just capitalism branded as Feminism. Rant over!)
Reading! Assembly by Natasha Brown. A compact, experimental, and necessary novel about black female subjectivity in contemporary England. There's so much here in these 100 pages. Totally engrossing. Should be mandatory reading for all Tory party members, should be mandatory reading for all white British people. The Guardian describes it as being like a collab between Virginia Woolf and Frantz Fanon.
Listening! To Classic FM in the mornings 🌄👌! Is this a sign of age? Perhaps. But it's such a pleasant start to the day - unlike watching/reading the news, scrolling through social media, or even a blaring cultural podcast.
Re-reading! Jane Eyre for teaching purposes and my God it's good! A justified Classic. So immersive, so radical (for it's day), and the repartee between Jane and Rochester is 🔥!
Learning! from Eva’s Literary Parlour. Leading on from my re-ignited Bronte obsession I recently discovered this lady on You Tube who has a wonderful, largely Gothic, Lit- focused channel covering everything from the Byronic Hero, to Angela Carter, to the Bard himself. Great for students, teachers, and enthusiasts alike.
Love this pic!