A WIDENING FIELD
news on the coming year at What the Snail Knows...
I know, I know. Another post? In the same month? What’s happening!?
Long time subscribers here will know that this is most unusual. But I have some news that I wanted to share with you all and I thought it better to let you know now before I get too entrenched in life again.
Some of you might remember that last year I made an un/announcement - a declaration about very reluctantly turning down a place at New School for the Anthropocene (NSotA).
Well, today, I’m really totally, utterly thrilled to say that this year I’ve taken my place and I start on Friday.
NSotA is an anti-university driven by a desire to do academia differently. The emphasis is on trans-disciplinary, non-hierarchical education. The School describes itself as ‘an experiment in counter-nihilism’ and ‘a response to the inability and unwillingness of the mainstream university to engage with the condition of social crisis and ecological ruin that characterises the 21st Century.’ I am very excited - and honoured - to be part of this project!
Some of you might remember that I wrote a proposal hoping to expand my work on menstrual cycle awareness as embodied resistance to systems of harm.
Frustrated by how so much menstrual cycle awareness work exists in a vacuum, I wanted to connect with other people from different disciplines and cross-pollinate, especially those engaged in ecological and climate justice. I thought that maybe NSotA might be a good step towards this, given that the common thread between everyone who studies there is a curiosity about how we engage with the world’s polyphony of crises.
I also wanted to continue to ask questions such as (but not limited to): beyond health, reproduction and gynocentricity, what powers might the menstrual cycle hold? How might the menstrual cycle queer our experience of time? What might the cycle teach us about mutual aid, interdependence and our connections to the earth and the more-than-human world? What are our menstrual futures?
Although I’m still fascinated by all these questions, I feel myself getting looser and less attached to these ideas or how they might manifest. My field is widening.1
This past year I’ve been exposed to new strands in my working life, some borne out of necessity rather than choice. Working at a drama school, leading on their EDI work and experiencing first hand how challenging it is to enact change. I’ve also spent a good amount of time workign closely with a friend on a slow-burning project to make end-of-life & death-work education more accessible. Through crafting many funerals, ritual and ceremony have become even more important to me. New threads are spinning their way into my work.
Something that I also overlooked was that this course at NSotA is assessed on 50% written and 50% creative work. I’ve always known this - it was part of the reason I wanted to do the course in the first place - but I’ve been in denial about it as well. I remember last year I told you all that I hoped this year of study might lead to a book, but now I am not so sure. I think I might want to experiment with transmitting my ideas by other creative means.
I’m simultaneously thrilled and terrifed at this prospect! I have a thorny relationship with my creative self, mostly caused by a disasterous stint at university doing Critical Fine Art Practice at Brighton in my twenties, where I dropped out, then came back, repeated a year… and still didn’t manage to get my degree. (It’s a long story.) Also, the emphasis was very much on the ‘critical’ bit: long, painful ‘crits’ where we all took turns to show our work to each other, whilst touting our academic prowess to our lecturers by slinging unnecessarily challenging questions and comments at one another. God forbid actually saying you enjoyed someone’s work. (And yes, I know, that’s art school for you, I just wasn’t cut out for that level of intellectual battling).
Consequently, I feel very cautious about myself as a ‘creative’. A writer? Yes. A ceremonialist? Yes. But beyond that my creative practice is hidden and quiet and ever-so shy.
In preparation for NSotA, I’ve been making space in our study. This has involved moving countless old sketchbooks, diaries, photographs and other half-finished projects. It’s given me a new sense of compassion for the younger me who was often clawing away for a sense of how to express all the tangled ideas in my head. I had some half-baked ideas, yes, but looking back I also see the germ of my later obsessions: time, cycles, decay, in-betweenness, uncertainty.
Seriously: it feels like a big privilege to be getting to do this.
And I’m really looking forward to sharing more of what spins out of me in the months to come.
This leads me to my other piece of preparation to start the course, which is that I’ve decided not to take on any funerals for the next year.
I write this with huge reluctancy. Crafting ceremonies is my favourite thing, but I know that I won’t be able to give the people I work with the same level of care and support if I’m juggling NSotA and working at the theatre school too. As much as I want to pretend I can do everything, I can’t. It feels better to have some boundaries around this now instead of burning myself out trying to Do It All.
My hope is that whatever I end up creating and dreaming-into this year, will inform my celebrant work in some way too. We’ll see…
Right, that’s it for now.
Thanks for reading.
Love, Lottie X
The title of this post - and this turn of phrase - are borrowed from A Widening Field by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, a book I’m enjoying a lot right now and that features on the NSotA reading list.
I am SO excited for you, congratulations!
Wow Lottie - this is so exciting! Huge congratulations and bigups :) xx