Jan on writing life

I’ve written before about the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson and her remarkable collection A Responsibility to Awe, written when she was terminally ill with the blood cancer that killed her at 39. Her poetry is full of hope in the midst of facing her own mortality, but there is nothing romanticised or saccharine. Rather, […]

There are competing theories about how human language originated, from sign language that became associated with gestures. It may have developed from a combination of anatomical and brain evolution or, perhaps from song—rhythmic sounds that began to accrue meaning. The archaeologist Steven Mithen thinks that music comes before song which comes before language. Something he […]

  The human species is wildly and wonderfully imaginative. We plunge into the tiniest intricacies of our world—exploring DNA and finding the parts of a molecule. We compose music so energetic it alters our thinking and so sublime it transports us beyond ourselves. We search the stars and we go on chasing the mysteries of […]

It is always enriching and empowering to make space for inspiration—to nurture our creative practices and allow  for intuition as we listen to our bodies and the earth, as we work with dreams or metaphors or whatever the unconscious brings us… Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about inspiration and intution in creative […]

Intuition is an extraordinary faculty to be valued and nourished by every writer or artist. However we conceptualise it, the sense of knowing something in the gut, of  finding our way through inference or listening to the heart, is ancient and powerful. We do it when we pick up unspoken signals in a room that […]

This year in these blogs I’m thinking about what it means to live as kith—with others, with groups, with all of life—and the ways in which the art we create reflects and influences the values we live by and vice versa. To do so requires a level of permeability to the world that can make […]