Welcome to the Arteles Creative Centre in Finland, where I will be spending the next month of my time as an artist in residence. The purpose of this residency is to start writing something new. I tell myself this something new is a novel, though I have no idea what shape it will have, only that it will be a tiny, wild thing. Caffeinated, feverish, perhaps with teeth, the baby kind that fall out and get buried under pillows and stolen by fairies.
At Arteles, I am joined by 14 other artists of different shapes and sizes and mediums, some writers, a printmaker, an architect, a woman who writes kids books and wants to try and sneak Finnish birch bark back past American customs for healing purposes. I love her. I love all of them. It has not yet been 24 hours in this place and I feel as though I am thriving. As I write this, I am sat in my room at an enormous desk made for people who work with much more tangible materials than a laptop, facing a large, splendorous window, on the other side of which it is raining soft rain onto an impossibly green stretch of field and a little tin-roofed house and a distant, stoic pine forest. If I were not myself inside this scene, I would tell my student who wrote it that it was not realistic, too purple, too cliched. This morning we spent an hour and half being shown the sauna by a Finnish man, Teemu, who is very passionate about saunas, though not as passionate as the man he spoke about who has saunas tattooed on his body – I have tried to picture what this looks like and my creative brain fails me. He teaches us a word: löyly. This is a word that encompasses the atmosphere of the sauna, the steam, the air, the heat, the feel of it on your skin. The way he speaks about löyly is reverential, religious. That’s what things are like here. No one laughs at the Welsh woman who goes to walk barefoot in the grass and the rain around the circle of standing stones. Because it looks like it feels incredible. She is beautiful. It is all beautiful. Later, I will go practice yoga in the meditation room above this little yellow timber house. My hands will graze the rafters as I Urdhva Hastasana. I will become the physical embodiment of a spiritual young ‘writer’, with all the quotation marks entail, though I promise not to stoop so low as harem pants. It has stopped raining now and the sun is bursting through the clouds. The weather changes so quickly here. I hope my writing will follow it; I hope that I will let it meander any way it wants to, let it follow a fox into the forest or thrash itself with birch leaves, dehydrated and blackened in a smoke sauna one minute, awash and contemplative in a wild lake (of which there are three within walking distance here) the next. In Finland, they have a law called ‘Everyman’s rights’, which means that anyone is allowed to roam free in nature, or ‘the nature’ as Teemu puts it, so long as they are not causing active harm. Let the writing I produce here be as free and roaming as the place itself. The purpose of this now somewhat long-winded introduction is to present to you a new series I will feature on this blog while I am here in Finland. As a way to ensure I won’t get completely distracted with yoga and saunas and walks in the forest, I have decided to start a regular practice of Morning Pages. Instead of reaching for my phone in the morning, I will reach for my notebook. For those unfamiliar to the process, Morning Pages is an exercise in free-writing, where one wakes and immediately writes anything and everything that comes to mind, no filtering, no editing, a morning sickness of words on the page. It is supposed to be moderated either by page length or by timer, but setting a timer requires using my phone, and the pages of my notebook are small. So instead, I will go until it feels natural to stop. This I have always been good at; it is the art of the short story, in a nutshell. I dream a lot, so I imagine these pages will often take on the shape of my dreams, will often be delirious, will often be a great net striving towards the butterflies of indescribable dream feelings, which will always slip through too-big holes in the webbing. My commitment to this blog and to its one, maybe two, readers (Hi Mum!) is to re-type these pages here without editing or moderation. It could get embarrassing. But maybe this is the point. I hope you’ll come along with me either way. Let’s wake up in the creative lap of Finland together and see where the day takes us. Much love, Gillian xx
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Love in the time of the pre-apocalypseWelcome to my blog! And good luck to you. What you'll find here are the musings, anecdotes, and anxieties of a young suburbanite in the 21st century. Archives
January 2024
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