Nimue Brown's Blog, page 450

Badger spirit

Here in the UK the government are planning the mass killing of a resident mammal. The badger. Now, if someone was talking about killing a third of all African elephants, a third of the wild lions, lemurs or anything else that iconic, the whole world would be up in arms. We don’t have much in the way of big, majestic wildlife here in the UK. This is because we already killed off the wolves, bears and giant, hairy cows.

There can be a tendency in nature conservation to support the cute, the memorable and the iconic. Getting people to save tigers is always going to be easier than trying to interest them in some ugly bug.

Badgers are lovely. They are very communal, living in big, extended families. Nocturnal, they roam around at night, mostly rooting up earthworms. They eat most things though, they are slow moving, wide arsed opportunists and they adore peanuts. Seeing their cute, stripy faces appear out of the darkness is a joy. Watching them play and feed together is delightful. I’ll say it again: Badgers are lovely.

However, badgers suffer from tuberculosis, and are probably implicated in giving TB to cows. I‘m not convinced it’s just the badgers, I think a closer look at the frequency with which we move livestock about in the UK needs considering. But, badgers have long borne the brunt of the blame. For all of my life, farmers have been trying to get badgers killed. My grandmother used to go out to try and prevent the then popular solution of filling in most of the holes into the set, and gassing the trapped badgers.

If we were talking about a really careful, well organised system of putting to sleep those badgers who are suffering from TB, I could see the point. We aren’t. We’re talking shooting badgers wherever there is a lot of TB, on the assumption that this will help. If the science said that yes, a badger cull would be bound to reduce TB in cows, and overall reduce animal suffering, then that might be tolerable. The science says it probably won’t help, and there’s evidence it could make things worse. So that’s a lose for the badgers, the cows and the farmers. This is madness.

The solution is to vaccinate badgers. If we eradicate TB in the badger population, they can’t spread it, the cows are fine. There are vaccines available, there are test studies. It will take time and cost money, but the key thing is, it stands a fighting chance of working. It will work for the badgers, who get to carry on their badger business, neither being shot at, nor getting a horrible disease. If the badgers really are causing the problem, it will work for the cows, and if it doesn’t, it might get us closer to nailing the sources of the problem. Solving the problem is what the farmers need here. Actions that do not solve the problem, do not help the farming community. Gassing the badgers did not solve the TB problem when I was a child. Shooting them now will not solve it either.

Please help. Go to www.teambadger.org/ to see where you can get involved. Make noise. This shameful act should not go ignored and uncommented on. If we were talking about lions, there would be international outrage. I move that badgers are just as alive, just as lovely and just as important as any other, more iconic creature out there. Let’s not send a message to the world that government sponsored wildlife massacres are ok.

Pagan confession

Confession turns up in a number of spiritual traditions – it’s most strongly associated with the Catholics, but there are Jewish practices around confessing and seeking forgiveness as well. Asking forgiveness from God/s comes up often enough in different faiths and implies an act of confession as well. We don’t really have a Pagan tradition of confession, at the moment, although I have no doubt one of you, more erudite readers will be able to point me at something historical. Looking at modern practice, there’s plenty to see online though.

The facebook confessional is popular with people of all and no faith as far as I can see. Rare is the day when someone doesn’t air a shortcoming, failure or ‘sin’. One of the things that makes this work, is that other people will then admit to the same, or put it in a less alarming perspective. We all have moments when we feel like we’ve failed, and keeping sight of the essentially human nature of these failures is important. None of us is perfect, and by sharing our shortcomings, we are also sharing our humanity.

Confession can easily be the prelude to a pledge to try and do better. Not one of Yoda’s do or do not moments, but an act of trying, that brings every possibility of adding another failure to the heap. For the addict trying to quit, or the parent who needs to learn patience, for the person learning to manage anger, or working out how not to self destruct, it’s always a learning curve. You might want to change, but the odds are there will be false starts, hiccups, relapses along the way. Confessing them, recognising them, we become stronger, not weaker.

I’ve tended to attract confessions. I’ve heard some heavy and challenging ones down the years, as well. As far as I can make out, I landed with an ability to listen compassionately, and people who need to confess have always sought me out. I believe that whatever a person has done, when they get to the point of being able to own it, recognise what was awful about it, and think about trying to do better and making amends, they’ve turned a corner. Even though this can be the first contact you have with the horrors in a person’s past, this is the critical moment not to reject them, and to give them a chance to move on. The person who voluntarily says ‘I have messed up, really badly’ is the person who probably wouldn’t do exactly the same thing again. Much of what underpins the worst kinds of behaviour is a belief that it was justified, or there was entitlement. Once that belief is let go of, a person has grown and changed, even if they aren’t totally sorted yet.

I am pondering what I’m going to be doing with myself in the longer term. One of the things I’m wondering is whether actively setting up as a confessor would be productive. Not to tell people they are forgiven, or to dish out Hail Odin’s or anything daft like that, but to listen. I don’t think it’s my job to forgive anyone or to tell anyone that gods, spirits or victims would forgive them, but to help people figure out what would take them forward, what would enable them to earn forgiveness where it is needed, and to help people forgive themselves – that might be a line of work to explore. I’d be interested to hear what everyone thinks, for or against.

The big hairy work conundrum

How many hours do you work? It’s a staple question of forms, and I imagine for the regularly employed, it’s a fairly simple thing to answer. People who are on salary and not paid by the hour tend to know roughly how many hours they are expected to put in, I believe. And then there’s self employment. How do you explain to the tax office that they’ve just asked a most ponderous, philosophical question? You can’t, you just put down a best guess, safe in the knowledge that no one else has any clue what hours you work either.

What to count? I put in maybe fifty hours last year on a project that in the end I had to shelve. No one paid me. Was I working those hours? If I stand at a stall all morning and no one buys anything, was I working? If half the day was dead, and in the last hour a lot of people buy art, when, exactly, was I working? And if I wander off to listen to a talk, still technically responsible for the stall… working, or not working?

A frequent conundrum for me is that I read books for pleasure, get some distance in and see the research application. Radio programs the same and daytrips out. What of that time is really downtime? I plan work while on the school run. I think up plot lines whilst doing the dishes. Some of this leads very directly to me getting paid. And again every so often I put in a lot of hours on a book that I then either don’t finish, don’t like, or can’t figure out how to pitch. Do I count those hours as work?

Selling books is a weird sort of business. You have to spend a lot of time chatting to people, being shamelessly interesting in public places and so forth. Networking: It’s strangely like having a social life sometimes. Want to be a professional Druid? You need to spend time hanging round moots, conferences maybe doing some volunteer work, otherwise no one will have heard of you, no one will know what you do and no one will book you. This blog is very openly part of my cunning plan to sell you books. (see my complex reverse psychology at work here) I write blogs every day. But no one pays. It is part of the marketing plan, (my gods, what do I sound like?) but is it work?

Go on, define work.

Because I’ve got this nasty suspicion that really speaking, if I’m awake, I am at least to some degree, working, and I think this is probably true of most, if not all self employed folk. And I still don’t know what to put on the forms.

The other sort

You know who they are. The ones who don’t contribute anything. The ones who take up space and no one would miss if we culled them. The ones who are a veritable misuse of carbon atoms, and whose demise would improve the overall state of the planet. Who you are will determine who you define as being the other sort. And somewhere, there will be someone who would be very glad to put you on the ‘cut’ list.

Wouldn’t it be better if we got rid of the (insert name of hate object here)?

My prejudices include those who are wilfully stupid (not biologically disadvantaged) abusers, those parasites who make fortunes that cripple nations, and the politicians who let them get away with it and keep bleeding the poor. And there are days when, if someone suggested we line them up against a wall and shot the lot of them, or course I’d be tempted. I have the distinct impression this whole ‘them and us’ mentality is pretty much hardwired into how a lot of us think. It’s easy to play on and manipulate, as well.

It is the sure and certain knowledge that plenty of people would put me on their extermination list, that keeps me on my toes with this issue. It’s when you start getting smug and comfortable in your superiority, along with other people who support that sense of betterness, that the trouble starts. The people I hate most, do this. They sit around in their very plush ivory towers and condemn others by the thousands for being poor, under-educated, desperate. I will not get rid of them by emulating their methods. Even if there are days when I think that a hungry crocodile roaming the corridors of power might be a good thing.

What makes me endlessly frustrated is the people who participate in their own oppression. The whole system depends so heavily on this. The folks who get into debt buying overpriced Christmas presents. The folks who have so bought into the myth of consumption that they barely see their own offspring. The people who do not realise that identifying when you have enough is the most liberating thing. We do it to ourselves, aided and abetted by media, government and advertising. Not that there’s always much difference between the three.

The question that plagues me, has this sort of shape. How to reach out to the people who are, from my perspective, blithely oppressing themselves, damaging the planet and facilitating the crap? How to lure them over to this side of the fence. I know, when I blog here I’m mostly talking to people who think in the same way. Short of standing on street corners with placards, how do I reach out? Has anyone else had any luck trying to do outreach work?

Of life and risk

I’ve spent this morning putting in a tout to a publisher to see if I can find a home for the new steampunk novel, Intelligent Designing for Amateurs (it’s got comedy Druids in it). This never gets easier. I’ve been sending books and stories places for more than ten years now, and it always scares me witless. Yesterday I had a flash fiction rejection. Every time I go round a ‘no’ I wonder if I should quit. Every time.

By the time I was twenty three I had a rejection slip from every major publishing house in the UK to my name. This tends to be the way of it with first novels. Looking back, I have no idea how that didn’t stop me. I suppose I was young, and enthusiastic and not quite so easily crushed. Oddly enough, these things seem to get harder as I get older, not easier. We went round it with Hopeless Maine before Archaia took us in. The waiting, the hoping and the anxiety and then either progress, or another blow. Do not let anyone tell you that the life of an author is inherently easy. The rejection process knocks the will to write out of plenty of good people. Being a good writer is not a sure fire way of becoming a published writer.

Getting up to speak in public, is risk. I’ve never had an audience throw fruit, but there’s always a first time! Sharing an act of creativity is risk, and always invites rejection, criticism, negativity. Stick your head above the parapet in any capacity, and some git will take pot shots at you.

The other way is safer, easier. The path of no risk. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. It’s there, all the time, as an option. Every time I float a blog out into the world, every time I try anything, there is always the option of fail. For a writer, there is no choice to do, or do not (as Yoda would put it) there is only try, or don’t try. There are never any guarantees.

This week for extra anxiety value, I’ve been writing someone else’s character. Now, from a creative point of view, I love doing this. Salamandra (from Hopeless Maine) was Tom’s before I took on giving her a voice. Getting into someone else’s head, trying to grasp the essence of someone else’s voice and style – these are wonderful, creative challenges. Then comes the time of reckoning, when you turn it in and find out if they hate it. I’m waiting to hear on one of those too. If I was a nail chewer, I’d probably be down to the wrists by now!

Every time I think about choosing the other way, the easy way, I remind myself that there are options. You can live without exposing your soul to people. You can go through life without pouring your heart’s blood into projects only for others to disparage them. There are always easy options. Every time I run up against the doubts, I come back to the same, very simple thought: the easy option would be death to me.

There is only ‘try’.

Love and inspiration

I’ve always been a creative person, not just in the writing, but in any aspect of my life where I could figure out how to apply it. My talents vary, mind – I can only do abstract art, not things that look like things. I’m a mediocre sort of dancer, but my cooking is pretty decent and I can sing a few songs… For me, love and inspiration have always run close together. I’m not sure there’s any way to tell them apart sometimes.

I’ve never found it hard to love, I’m an inherently emotional entity, I love easily and with considerable intensity. Where I am inspired, I love, and where I feel love, I am inspired and round it all goes. That said, I feel a profound language fail around the whole topic. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love, and this would be useful. All too often I find myself wanting to be able to say ‘I love you’ to people without the connotation of ‘I would like to get in your pants’. I worry that I will say the one thing and people will hear the other. Not least because I’ve got that bit of my life all covered and am not looking.

The trouble with being hugely inspired and emotionally affected by people, is the desire to mention it. If someone brings a rush of awen into my life, and I create as a consequence, I want to be able to say not only what I did, but what it means to me. It’s also part of the desire to praise – people who do things, inspire me. People with talents of their own, wonderful ideas, people who undertake heroic acts of service – this kind of thing fills me with emotion, awen, love. I want to praise and cheer anyone doing such things.

And I fear, always, sounding like the drunk person at the end of the party who lurches around near the toilet, grabbing folk who are desperate to pee and saying ‘you know I really love you’. I also fear frightening people off. In my early days, I cocked this one up badly, and repeatedly. Not least because I had no idea how to tell between the awen rush and being in love. As commented before, there’s not always a lot in it, but I can awen-rush over a lot more people than I can realistically sustain relationships with. Looking back, there were people I bothered, and I wish I’d handled it better. (If any of you are reading this and it sounds like you, it probably is, and I hope this at least helps make more sense of things.)

I did a lot of awen-crushes. It was only when I really seriously big time fell in love that it became possible to realise there was a difference between that which comes from inspiration and admiration, and true love. I still get the awen-crushes, but I have a better sense of what they are. I treasure them. People who inspire me are a wonder to be around and I’m blessed with some truly amazing folk in my life, and I love them dearly.

So if I do sidle up to you after a gig, or at a book signing, and use the ‘L’ word in a way that makes you do a double take, this will be why.

You know, I really love you.

Money for old Druids, rope, books…

What, exactly, are we willing to pay for? Money is the primary energy used to move things round in our culture, but the ways in which we deploy it are… curious. We’ll pay more for a cup of coffee than we feel comfortable about handing over for ebooks, for example. We’ll pay well over the odds for food at railway stations, then quibble over a milk price that has farmers working at a loss. I think there’s also an interesting question around what we’re willing to charge for.

It would, for example, be totally self defeating to charge for this blog. Authors are two a penny. We’re like a rampant disease spread over the whole internet, and we all want your cash in exchange for our scribbles. I was, quite literally, falling over authors last weekend. It felt like every third person who came by the table was an author, or wanted to be an author. I understand this urge, but it’s also a bit frustrating. I’d like to be an author too. Some 250,000 books now get published a year. It used to be more like 40,000. The number of books sold hasn’t changed. You do the maths. I’m in favour of more democratic and accessible systems, but I also have aspirations about being able to pay the bills. Me, and everyone else.

I have no doubt that Druidry will go the same way. Right now, Druid celebrants are not numerous, and people will pay for handfastings and whatnot. The more Druids there are, the more people will be looking to live by their Druidry and the harder this will consequently become. The more popular a thing gets, the less we are willing to pay for it. Take a look at book prices in the supermarket next time you go by. This isn’t going anywhere dramatic, I don’t have a grand plan on this issue, I just find it interesting.

My bloke is an artist. We were not falling over artists at the weekend, although there were plenty of folk who confessed to dabbling, but were quick to acknowledge they aren’t in his league. It’s easier to tell at a quick glance how good an artist is. We sold a lot of art. There are days when I wish I did anything other than write. There are so many other creative fields that are not being choked to death by the sheer number of people wanting to have a go. Part of the trouble with writing is that we all learn to write at school, and there is a widely held myth that anyone can do it. This is, in fact, bullshit. Good writing is as difficult as any other art form. We don’t all imagine we have an opera in us, or a sculpture. I’m all in favour of people having a go, exploring their creativity, I just wish it was a bit better distributed.

It also bugs the hell out of me that it tends to be hype, and not quality, that sells books. When an author is great, then seeing them top the best seller lists is a happy thing. But when we’re talking Twilight, Dan Brown, Fifty Shades and other such work that becomes famous for being famous it’s not good. I also get very grumpy about people who get famous for being famous, all the two dimensional celebrities. There are a lot of deserving, talented, innovative people out there who don’t media whore and who merit the attention. I’d rather hear about sports heroes than yet another drunken idiot in designer clothing.

But we pay, and every time we pay, we choose what kind of market we have, who will thrive, who will fall. And if we choose to spend a lot of money on mass produced plastic and nothing on originality, we will end up without originality. If we won’t pay for Druids, ultimately we won’t have any professional Druids. Some may argue this is a good thing. There’s an interesting discussion to have there. We also charge, and in choosing what we charge for, and what we do not, we also shape our material world. We pay others to clean our homes, but we do not value it when it’s done for free by an unpaid wife.  Child care the same. I don’t charge to blog. We can end up devaluing what we don’t pay for. I’m doing this for free because I hope to interest you in my writing, so that you buy my books, book me for events, come to my table, etc.  Funny sort of business, this.

Madness and Creativity

This may not bear much resemblance to what I said at Asylum, because I was winging it, but following on from Tom’s Guest blog, some more thoughts about the curious relationship between the two.

The list of identifiably mad creative genius types, is shocking. Depression and mental instability are widespread in the creative community and always have been. However, there are also far more ill people who do not produce great works of art or literature. Being mad means not working, usually, while suicide has cut short too many lives. How different would the world be if Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath Thomas Chatterton and others had not taken their own lives? How much more could Poe or Tennyson have done if they’d not been fighting demons? Periods of madness tend to be periods of creative inactivity.  I don’t know if having poor mental health is more likely to attract you to artistic professions, or if the irregular hours and it being okay to not work when you can’t is a part of the correlation. Perhaps being creative runs the risk of driving you mad…

Mostly we measure madness as deviation from normality. You only have to go back a few hundred years and the people we would now medicate, were considered mystics. These days if you went into the desert and heard a voice instructing you to kill your son, you’d be taken into care, you wouldn’t be founding Judaism. It creates some interesting questions about the history of religion, too. Go into a supermarket in your Druid regalia, or your steampunk outfit and if you are the only one, people will look at you like you are crazy. Go in with twenty other folks who are also dressed up, and its instantly more socially acceptable. The impression of madness can be all about the numbers. This rather suggests that if enough of us take up the alternative, the crazy fringe stuff, we could make it normal. There are interesting and amusing implications to this.

To do anything creative, you have to think of things no one has ever thought of before. An excess of thinking things no one else thinks means dislocation from consensus reality. This alone would account for the close relationship between insanity and genius. It’s a bit of a balancing act and for some of us there is a choice. Plunging into the deep waters of awen in search of the salmon of wisdom, can be a deliberate action. Stay in there too long, and you drown. You can also chose not to plunge, to control the mind so that errant thoughts are quickly discarded. We construct our own realities and we have a lot of scope to choose and manage our own thoughts.

There’s a lovely Robert Holdstock term for people who stay too long in the magical forest: Bosky. I have been there. I write about madness. I voluntarily enter into situations that alter my state of consciousness (not drugs, brain chemistry). I am not afraid to think the wilder, more dangerous thoughts, and a great deal of my writing comes out of these journeys. However, I also know how to walk that tightrope, dancing down the edges without falling into dysfunction. I know how to stay real, when to step back from the computer and clean something, cook something, reassert regular reality.

I also know from experience that mental ill health is not creative. Depression and anxiety knock the inspiration out of me, leaving me in a dead and useless head space. Creativity actually takes a lot of discipline, a loss of mental balance does not give you that, wild flailings are seldom creative, which is why merely being a bit mad will not make you a creative genius. It may be true that some of our great creative minds took substances to help them, but taking substances will not turn you into Coleridge, or Hendrix. Vision without discipline isn’t enough.

Playing with that which seems like madness can be a very good thing. It is only by thinking of that which does not exist, has not happened, is not currently possible, that we get innovation, and that’s as true for science as for fiction. I think it’s the person who makes those journeys alone who is most vulnerable. Tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back, have someone watch your back. Test the ideas on one you trust so you know if you’ve come back with poetry or bat shit crazy. A little more of the right kind of madness would make the world a much better place.

Magical reality bubbles

Reality is how we make it, and that’s never more obvious than when a group of people undertake to make a new one for a little while. I’ve done pagan events, folk festivals, re-enactment, and now steampunk. With enough people, a good setting and a little time, it is startlingly easy to break out of normal, consensus reality, and be something else. It rather flags up how delicate the conventions of the consensus really are.

Coming back down after an event is something I’ve always found hard. The bumpy return to normality, putting away the costumes, remembering not to act like I’m still inside the reality bubble.  Every time I go through it, I’m aware of how much I don’t want to make the journey back. I want to spend my whole life being a steampunk-folk-pagan-druid-author-etc. I don’t want to live in the ‘real’ world, it’s far too drab and depressing. The flip side is that I need to eat, and I don’t actually have the nerve to wander the supermarkets in any kind of regalia, and I certainly couldn’t cycle in it.

It’s an ongoing issue for Druidry that, without the context of Celtic society, there’s only so much we can revive. This weekend got me thinking about the first lot of revivalists, the sheer creative craziness of Iolo Morganwg and his contemporaries. As far as I know no one is currently doing Steampunk Druids. I ran into the 3rd Foot and Mouth Battalion, the Tea Army, airship pirates, all kinds of lovely, crazy folk. And then at his gig on the Sunday night, Professor Elemental announced a desire to become Lord Summerisle.

What would it be like to have a wider social context for Druidry? There’s no scope for recreating Celtic society, but… Steampunk is very much a heroic culture, so that’s a start. It values creativity, this is no bad thing. It does have a kind of warrior class. Some of the core components are there.

What would it be like to revive the revivalists, to play shamelessly with all that is silly about the history of modern Druidry and at the same time, to be entirely serious about the Druidry?

I have absolutely no idea how this would work or whether there would be enough interest to do anything entertaining. However, there’s three of us here, including the boy, and Lord Summerisle, and by historical standards that certainly is enough to found an order. We need an ancient history, the more ridiculous the better, and the more random famous people we can attach to it, the more accurate a revival-revival it would be. We also need a pretentious and inaccurate name, and once we’ve been going about a week, someone needs to hive off, claim even more ancient and prestigious origins and found a new one.

I also propose that only people who know nothing at all about actual Druidry should be given big and shiny titles. This would be funny, for one thing, and might appeal to folk like me who deeply resent structure, hierarchy and whatnot where it exists to fuel self importance rather than to get a job done.

If anyone would like to join me in making a little bit of crazy reality bubble, do say. We can have competitions for the best beard, and everything!

Guest Blog: After the Asylum

(At Asylum this weekend, Tom told a story that he had promised to share when the time was right – one about the origins of Salamandra. I’m re-posting it here for the various people who didn’t catch the panel, and because I feel this is a good sort of story and that there is a lot of power in sharing it. The panel was about the relationship between creativity and madness, this was Tom’s bit.)

 

After The Asylum, by Tom Brown

 

A while ago, I made a promise on Facebook that if Hopeless Maine were to become successful, I would tell you all a story. Well… I’m here, at this event with all of you present, sharing a stage with Professor Elemental. People from Poland, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and other exotic, far off places have been kind enough to tell us that they have enjoyed their stay. Finally, we share a publisher with the creations of Jim Henson (A personal hero of mine. A man who embraced his quirks and ran with them) Jeremy Bastion, creator of Cursed Pirate Girl, and Chandra Free of The God Machine. I think we can at least declare a qualified success. So… here we go…

Salamandra, our young Experimental Occultist, the heart and soul of our story, was born in a transitional homeless shelter. At the age of forty, I went mad. I had what is commonly referred to as a nervous breakdown. It’s sadly a very common event (especially amongst creative types) I became unable to work and lost my home and many other things I had taken for granted for my entire life up to that time. I simply had not seen this coming and there was no way I could have been prepared for it or what was to follow.

So, after spending some time in a crisis centre, I was delivered to the shelter. I will always be grateful to the staff there who treated me with care, and, the thing I most desperately needed at that time, respect.

I am… an odd sort of person. Those who know me might well protest that this would be an understatement. Therefore, I became focussed on the question ‘what would be a good thing right now?’ Well, as Neil Gaiman said recently (I paraphrase) No matter what happens, make good art. That’s what I set out to do. I had an old project that I thought had unrealised potential. I was called New England Gothic: A dark story with a Victorian setting, on the island of Hopeless, Maine. I started writing and drawing pages, sat at the common table at the shelter. A wonderful thing happened, actually, several. Salamandra came to me. (At that point, her middle name was Weaselgrease. Remember, please, I had just had a breakdown.) I say she came to me because it did not seem to me that I had invented her at all. She was much too real for that. I was just the lucky creator she chose. The other good thing that happened was that other people in the shelter took interest and sat and talked to me, and watched me work. Their mood visibly brightened. There was not much to be excited about in that place. Sal was already tuning out to be a good thing.

The road back from being broken was long and not without complication. I did travel tht road though, and I brought Sal with me. The most important step in that journey, for me, and for Sal was when I was assigned a cover job for a book by Nimue. I fell in love with the writing (firt) and I knew this was the person I wanted to write a short origin story for Sal. It was clear to me immediately that Nimue understood Salamandra better and more deeply than I did. As you may have gathered she did agree to write Hopeless Maine, and then later, to marry me.

Why a I telling you all this? I think it’s important for people to know that it’s possible to fall and find your way back up again. It’s even possible to find something that shines and has worth, at the darkest times.

 

(Nimue again… writing about Salamandra always felt like writing about someone I had met. It’s been an epic journey for all three of us. Sal has grown up in the stories, and developed a family tree of considerable complication. I fell in love with the art, and rapidly with the man behind the art. I also got to watch about two thirds of the journey, knowing from early on in our working partnership that Tom had walked through hell and survived. He’s done a lot more than just survive though. Out of a harrowing experience, he’s built something magical and profound, his work, and his attitude to life continue to inspire me. The decision to talk publically about such deeply personal things, was a big one to take, but one of the things we have both found is that sharing makes a difference. So many people go through times of intense pain and crisis. In Tom’s case, it was precipitated by horrendous pressures and a very dodgy prescription for ADHD. No two stories are ever quite the same, but knowing it is possible to come back makes a world of difference. I took a long, dark walk in recent years, and knowledge that it could be endured, that it did not mean the end of my creativity, my usefulness as a human being, helped me enormously. And so we share.

Much love to Professor Elemental, who shared in this public exploration of the relationship between madness and creativity, bringing some much needed lighter notes to a hard topic. Living through madness is hell. Playing with madness is wild, and being creative is always a bit insane. )