Love List: November

time slips | the wolf | passing ghosts

It was on a November Sunday that we climbed to the Iron Age hill fort. The boys were still small enough then to slip a hand into mine as we made our way up through the bronze leaf-littered woods to the hilltop ramparts. Deep in the pandemic, we climbed in search of perspective—on a clear day, the fort offers far-reaching views, across the valley and over the Severn river to the mountains of Wales. But on this November Sunday we tumbled out of the woodland to find a hilltop smothered in fog.

The past feels closer in the fog, as if the landscape could return to its Iron Age state. Roads and houses disappear and shapes beneath the soil emerge more clearly. A hill fort, for me, can feel like a thin place—somewhere the distance between our world and the ancestral Otherworld may diminish to a faint shimmering membrane. It is a place where time quivers and flickers.

In the woods behind our house there is a smaller Iron Age hill fort that is like our own. The boys have grown up there, picnicking and playing, roaming with wooden swords and homemade bows and arrows, the hill and its surrounding ditch woven into the imaginative landscape of their games. In the spring the ramparts are carpeted with white wild garlic flowers, in the winter they are dusted with snow. My boys have sipped flasks of hot chocolate there, they have lit small fires, they have gathered and whittled sticks.

Susan Cooper wrote (in Dreams and Wishes) that ‘no child is wholly wrapped up in the present who has grown up […] walking over the slope of a Neolithic hill fort’. Growing up in a layered landscape they ‘acquire by a kind of osmosis a sense of the continuum of place and time.’ It is this awareness that allows a child to hold on to what Cooper sees as their innate acceptance of mystery. Children, she wrote ‘are us, not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time.’

Time, on that Sunday, was not a heavy jacket, but a light gauzy shawl through which the light of the past visibly shone. We scrambled up the ramparts into a swirling heart of fog. The fog, making silhouettes of us, pulled us in to its cool embrace as—hand in hand—we passed momentarily out of our own fraught and fearful time and through the November veil.

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Five years ago, through

Beth Kempton

, I discovered the wonderful work of memoirist and teacher

Beth Kephart

I read her words, I took a couple of her workshops, and as I was writing, I always kept on my desk a copy of her brilliant book Handling the Truth: on the writing of memoir. I read it over and over, until many of the pages were more pencil underline than words. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Beth Kephart reached out to me here on Substack saying that she had ordered a copy of my book, Chasing Fog. I was astounded, and thrilled, and more than a little nervous for her to read it—no one has taught me more about the writing of memoir than Beth Kephart. True to her word, Beth read Chasing Fog. But that was not all. She created a piece of artwork in response to it, and she wrote an incredible essay in which she calls my book a prayer. She writes of ‘a hand extended, through the wide white dark’. Somehow, in this place, my hand found hers.

This is what she said:

Chasing Fog

An update: I’m still working on the Chasing Fog book club, but I have decided to commence in January — now such a busy time, and a read-along feels like it could be a lovely, mindful way to begin the new year. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in the first post, you can add your question here.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: