Nimue Brown's Blog

Shuck – A Review

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

https://glottalstopbooks.sumupstore.com/product/shuck

This week, author Craig Hallam has a new novel out. I’m in the happy position of having already read it and am able to heartily recommend it. This is a gothic novel with strong folkloric elements and some horror. It’s more crepy than overtly violent. It’s a strong story with engaging characters as you would expect from Craig.

In this book Craig has done something very interesting. He’s taken the usual features of a gothic novel, but told a story that radically departs from usual gothic fare. Rather than the more usual aristocratic settings with big houses, this is an overtly working class novel. The setting is primarily urban, and the characters are dealing with some of the very real horrors of poverty. I’m keen on this new movement towards a more socialist take on the horror genre, and Shuck is a great addition to that.

Folk horror can often be about treating the folk as other. That doesn’t happen here. The folk element is rooted in the landscape and part of the culture of the people dealing with it. Those people are not threatening Others, but quite regular individuals, making this distinctly different from the Summerisle approach. The fantastical elements are spooky and compelling. Mingled with the gothic tradition of possible madness, there’s ambiguity in the threat, and for much of the book it isn’t clear what is real.

I very much enjoyed this spooky tale. If you’re looking for a seasonal read, it’s a perfect book for Halloween. It’s also entirely readable at any time of the year. Creepy things are not just for October.

Singing to the River

(created by Nimue, written down by James)

At the weekend, my feral folk choir – Carnival of Cryptids – took part in a celebration of the River Severn. This meant that we got to stand near the river and sing across the river in the direction of Newnham. We sang Ivor Gurney’s Fisherman of Newnham as set by Johnny Coppin. There’s something really powerful about getting to sing a song in the landscape it relates to. For me, singing to the river, about the river was magical experience. There were also people who listened and enjoyed what we did.

Across the river, another group of people had assembled with drums. We could hear them, and they could hear us, although the river is too wide for other kinds of communication. Once upon a time, it was possible to ford the severn at this point, but not anymore. The river is changeable, and wild, and I feel very strongly about the importance of keeping that wildness alive.

I’ve come away from the event with ideas about how we might participate in future gatherings and what I might write or borrow to that end. Having my creative process so informed by the landscape and the community here is an exciting possibility. It feels resonant to me and gives me a sense of how I want to take my bardcraft forward.

Living with Tradition

(Spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

Folk music has been part of my life since childhood. There are songs I know that date back to my early years. Most of the material that I sing I picked up in my twenties when I started attending, and later running, a folk club. I have dabbled with song-writing along the way, and there are a lot of people who write songs in the folk tradition. In my twenties, I decided that writing material was not going to be my focus, and I’ve stayed with that.

Every song starts somewhere. The ones we think of as traditional must have originated with someone. The nature of oral tradition means that they change and evolve over time. As a consequence, some songs have multiple variants in terms of words and tune. Some songs may well be what people have cobbled together from what they recollected of a song they once heard. It’s a very organic process, and therefore a bit messy. For a song to travel from the person who wrote it into tradition, it needs more people than the songwriter to pick it up. What I’ve been doing since my twenties, is picking up more recently written songs that I want to carry forward and keep alive. Some of the songwriters I draw on are not well known. Several are no longer with us. Keeping their work alive feels really important to me.

One upshot of this is that there are now a number of songs other people only know because I’ve been sharing them. James (hi) sings several things that he’s learned from me, not from the original songwriter. Those songs change as they get passed along. While I make a point of saying where I got songs from, I’m quite aware that people may just remember that they learned them from me. For me, this is part of being involved with a living tradition. I’ve got songs I only sing because my grandmother sang them. Some of them I only ever heard from her. And on it goes.

This year, I’ve been really glad of the treasure hoard of songs, stories, and tunes that I learned by heart when I was younger. From here, it will be harder learning new material, thanks to the limited vision. However, I know a huge body of folk, enough to be going along with for the rest of my life. The things we bring into ourselves endure in a way that casually consumed media cannot. If your brain is at all open to committing things to memory, I can heartily recommend it. Not everyone is able to do this, but if you can, it’s a really good choice.

Colour and Poetry

(created by Nimue, typed by James)

I had to use a large marker pen to be able to write. It took ages. but it is readable.

The wonder of trees
Green leaf glory
Framed in perfect blue
Of early autumn
Car park margins
Vanished gift of sight
Returning impressionist
Miraculous after months
Deprived of such beauty

Gods at the Dawn of Time

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

For most of the time that there has been life on Earth, that life has taken the form of single celled organisms. However, most creation stories postulate the existence of human-ish gods existing before anything else. Clearly, gods focussed on farming, and human concerns make no sense at all in the context of single cell lifeforms. You can get a fair amount of drama into the life of a bacteria, or similar. They’re born, they die, they eat, the survive. It is possible to imagine that even a single cell entity, if it could think, might have some use for deity.

As an aside, we don’t really know how consciousness works, and we have no idea how the tiniest living things understand themselves or the world. Maybe, there are gods of viruses.

If you think that humans are the whole point of life on Earth, then human-ish creator gods make some sense. This is a story in which everything has been set up from the beginning to result in us. On the whole, I think humans suffer a lot from hubris and might benefit form considering stories in which humans are not the be all and end all.

We know that the conditions for life were created by the geology of the planet as it settled. We know that those first single cell life forms led to more complex life. We know that early life forms transformed the world in ways that make it possible for life to exist in the many forms it now takes. I don’t think evolution is especially intentional. We are what happened, or at least part of it, but we do not represent a pinnacle, or an end point, and maybe we need to get over ourselves as a species.

Human gods can only have evolved alongside humans. To me, there is no other way of squaring spirituality with science. I don’t think this means that human gods are therefore pure fantasy. I think it means that everything at every level is evolving or could be, and we’re all doing that together. We are able to evolve because others evolve.

Casting the Runes

(made by Nimue, written by James)

I came to divination about ten years before I came to Druidry, and it’s always been part of what I do. I have cast runes for other people, but not often, and not in a long time. I find it too emotionally demanding, and prefer to keep this personal.

This year, I’ve mostly not been able to see the runes as my eyesight has been too poor. I have however managed to keep casting. This has been entirely due to willingness from Keith to assist me. Keith has no history of working with runes, so we’ve had a process where he tries to describe each rune to me. Visual descriptions are interesting things – what seems important and what a thing seems to be like turn out to vary a lot. At times, we’ve resorted to him drawing them on my skin with his fingers as we try and work out what he is seeing. As an aside, we’ve been round parallel issues identifying plants and birds, only with less of the drawing. It’s been possible to work this way, and means I have to visualise the cast in my head based on what I’ve been told I’ve put in front of me.

This has also resulted in a lot of conversations about meaning, interpretation and the process of divination. There are many ways of understanding what divination is, and how it works. I use it primarily to clarify my own understanding, and as a psychological tool. At the same time, I am aware that a rune cast always has the potential to be a conversation with some other part of the universe. The act of divination is a way of inviting magic into everyday life. Sometimes it feels as though that invitation is being accepted, and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, I find the process useful.

Excitingly, My most recent rune cast did not involve me having to get help. I can only see the runes if I lift my stones very close to my face, and even then it isn’t easy to make them out, but it is possible. In some ways, barely being able to see something does not represent a whole lot of anything. At the same time, the line between not seeing something, and kind of seeing it a bit is a huge difference. It’s a funny business.

Checking In

(narrated by Nimue, journaled by James)

This week, I’ve been back on some meds that leave me tired and not very clever, amongst other side effects. Why I have such a strong averse reaction to these tablets is anyone’s guess, and unfortunately, there aren’t any other meds out there that can do the same job, so this is mostly a check in post as I am a bear of little brain.

It’s a bit potluck whether I’ll be ok with any given chemical intervention. Mercifully, I seem to do fine with anaesthetic and am very glad my body can cope with that one at least. This stuff seems to be playing badly with the hypermobility, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I’ll be coming down to a half dose which I know my body can tolerate so things should be easier next week.

In the meantime, life with a bubble of gas in my eye continues to be weird. On the plus side, I am seeing a lot more detail including leaves. Green things close up are a lot more like a proper green now. Unfortunately, green at a distance is still grey so trees and landscapes look like old photos. Still, there’s a way to go and I’m hopeful that I will see more green and see it further away eventually. In an ideal world, I might get to see the green of this years leaves before they all change colour, but if I get to see the autumn colours, I certainly won’t complain.

Here There Be Monsters

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

https://amzn.to/3VEInrE

I’m delighted to announce that I have two stories in this anthology of monstrous tales. I don’t know everyone in the collection but I know enough of my fellow authors to be confident that this will be a strange and unusual gathering of tales. Steven C Davies is an author of very dark fiction who will no doubt have drawn all manner of monstrous contributions.

This is the first time I’ve had a story in an anthology alongside something from Jessica Law. With Keith Errington also in the book, that’s three quarters of Jessica Law and the Outlaws. As James mostly writes flash fiction it may be a while before we get all four of us. Life goals.

People familiar with my partner Keith’s more usual writing may be surprised by this one. Normally, he tends towards gentle humour. Especially in his Rostov persona. This tale draws attention to the colonial nature of some gung-ho early sci-fi and is deeply disquieting. Not his usual sort of thing at all.

One of my stories “Interview With” amused me and is more of a comedy horror piece. It may resonate with anyone who would use immortality to get a lot of reading done. My second story “Freak Show” is a much more troubled piece with a lot more rage and pain and a lot to say about the process of being made into a monster by someone else.

As yet, I’m not familiar with other contributions, but live in hope of being able to read them at some point in the future.

Healing by Getting Worse

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

Yesterday, I had more eye surgery. Today, I can hardly see anything. This was the entirely expected consequence of taking out the blob of oil that had been holding my retina in place and replacing it with a gas bubble. For the next week or so, all will be chaos as my vision will change all the time. On the far side of that, things should be better.

Sometimes healing is not linear at all. It seems to me that part of how we do medicine at the moment often involves things needing to be much worse before recovery becomes possible. Fixing human bodies is messy. Today I am groggy from the anaesthetic, and a bear of little brain, but I’m also hopeful. It will be some weeks before I’m fully recovered and we do not know what that will be like. I’ve probably lost the sight in my right eye, assuming no sudden medical advances come along to fix me. I face a future of shitty balance, and no depth perception, but so be it. I should get some of the things I care about back and that feels like a tremendous blessing. When this started back in February, I was entirely blind, and thought that was going to be the size of it for the rest of my life, so this amount of rescue seems pretty amazing. I’m very grateful to the NHS.

Oral Tradition and Writing

(created by Nimue, written down by James)

I’ve read several books where the authors have speculated about the impact of writing on the human psyche. Living in a literate culture makes this difficult to think about, but it must have been a huge shift. Experiences this year have taught me some interesting things about how the written word has impacted on my mind.

I have a huge body of songs, stories, and tunes that live in my head. Some of those I learned without ever seeing them written down. For a modern person, I’m pretty good at learning by ear, but not that good. Listening to audio books in recent months and relying on others to read me important documents, I’ve found it much harder to absorb information. My brain is used to reading as my primary way of learning. I have a hard time remembering names, especially where I haven’t seen them written down. I have to take more breaks to let my brain process audio information, compared to when reading.

In the past, I’ve used writing to help me process my thoughts. I find it helps me deal with emotions and consolidate other kinds of learning. Digesting things is considerably harder without the ability to write. What I can do by dictating blog posts to James(hello) is far more limited, but better than nothing.

I’ve been utterly stuck around creating longer works. Further, I absolutely cannot write poetry purely in my head. My whole approach to working with words is hard-wired for those words being written down. Obviously, this is because I grew up learning to read and write alongside learning how to think. I cannot separate the two. The written word and the inside of my head are deeply connected.

For much of human history, we didn’t write things down. The ancient druids were infamous for being an oral culture, and not leaving us written records. This is a totally different way of thinking and being, and one that we can’t hope to understand if we haven’t lived it. The loss of reading and writing has shown me something about how the written word exists within my mind. Curiously, during this time, I’ve dreamed repeatedly about writing. Most often, I’ve dreamed about posting things on Facebook. It’s curious what turns out to be important!