The Cotswolds

A few days from now, I'll board a train for London.

From there, I'll make my way to Oxford, then onto the Cotswold Way for a ten-day solo walk. I'll be walking alone through villages, fields, churchyards, and old paths before ending in Bath. I'll even have lunch in Painswick! (If you've read Apricity, you know.)

The timing feels strangely fitting. The summer solstice is approaching, and although I have no plans to visit Stonehenge itself, I'll be walking through a landscape that has carried stories for far longer than any of us have been here to tell them.

I've spent much of my life taking the long way round. Not intentionally, at first. I studied philosophy in college, continuing on to my Ph.D., but I petered out.

I earned a master's degree in architecture. I got married, had kids. (That's a story I'll save for another day.) Then came improvisation. Scary? Yes. Freeing? Absolutely.

Then very suddenly, I became a licensed math teacher. It was a whirlwind of a summer, learning how to be a teacher. I was a natural, and I could feel that in my bones. I taught middle school math for years before ever writing.

Last year, I moved from the United States to northern France. At 54 years old, it felt like the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

Throughout it all, I accumulated books, dogs, stories, maps, grief, and a persistent fascination with the history I'm now surrounded by.

Lately, I've been thinking about how often the things that shape us arrive indirectly. A village becomes a novella. A word becomes an obsession. A walk becomes a story. A loss becomes a question that takes years to answer.

When I wrote Apricity, I wasn't trying to write about plague. I was trying to write about a feeling: the warmth of the sun on your face when the air is cold. I was writing about women who live on the edge, about how the body knows, about the quiet power of femininity.

Apricity. The word came first. I didn't know it at the time, but I distinctly remember sitting on the playground in 2nd grade away from everyone else, just tingling from the feeling of the sun on my face. I learned the word a few years ago. The story followed.

That seems to happen to me often. The feeling arrives first. Meaning catches up later.

Silence & Flame was the first fiction I ever wrote. Sure, I had published poetry, but that was a slow fire that burned until I had accomplished it. Silence & Flame was my first story. It came from grief, from vivid dreams, from feeling the pull of parallel worlds. I put it away for awhile, overwhelmed by other things. Then, after self-publishing Apricity and Juliet Becoming, I brought it back out and metaphorically dusted it off. (That, too, is a story for another day.)

So this is an experiment. Not a newsletter, exactly, but not a travel journal. Not quite a blog. Instead, think of it as a collection of observations gathered along the way. A conversation. A line of poetry. Something noticed and something remembered. Something that refuses to leave me alone. I'd like to share this with you.

If you'd like, you're welcome to come along.

Notice things, my darlings. Oh...and feel free to comment with your own stories. I'd love to get to know you all.

~ Shannon ᭄᭡ ͏ ͏ ͏

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