Pink Roses & Custard
Last week was tough. Last week old ghosts came in full force, haunting, creaking, whispering their dissent. My mornings have been punctuated with the familiar heaviness of nihilism. Self-loathing chewing on the mind like a frenzied terrier with a bone. Memory re-living the mistakes. The things that were & could’ve been. For a second there, I really thought he had a grip on me. That old miser Depression. The treacle’ly descent down into the doldrums. Thankfully, there are flowers and allotments and plants and soil and trees and golden mornings & fresh apples and the smell of ripe quince and fires and new friends who are really kind. And there are lovely cards from my mother, poetry and Adrienne Rich. There is custard. Yes, custard. Morrisons best Madagascan vanilla custard. There is also death. My own death. Your death. And time. And the passing of time. And, how I’d really rather not spend any more time depressed. So. There are choices. Roses & chrysanthemum choices. Mugwort choices and leftover jam-roly poly choices. Gratitude choices. Honesty choices. Choosing life choices, choosing presence choices. Writing this is a choice. Choices. Nice word isn’t it. Kind of juicy in the middle with an explorative hiss. Anyway.
I’ve been making some choices. I’ve been doing some stuff & before I went into Vipassana I said I’d share some of that with you. So here you are.
Courses
In July I opened Hedge School. Hedge School is a project with an unruly heart. A yearning for defiance. It’s a place which homes my ideas, research, activism, art & passion. Hedge School is the fruiting body of over a decades worth of research, community activism, community organising, lived experience & observation. It’s a combining. A merging of worlds that are historically perceived as disparate entities: traditional craft & theoretical rigour. I’m not interested in theory without application. I’m not interested in theory which alienates us from the earth. I’m interested in an engaged ecology, an ecology of place, holism, something which weaves together the gnarled tongue of the forest & the polished world of academia.
I’ve been busy crafting offerings for Hedge School, for my community, both locally & nationally. These offerings are day workshops which run alongside my longer courses SEED, ROOT & GATHER. They are the manifestation of many years of studying, researching, thinking & practicing within & amongst marginalised communities. The courses have emerged as an interdisciplinary response to the Polycrisis & what I’ve observed to be an integral, yet missing ingredient within the services supporting folk with recovery. It feels good, to finally be in a place where I can share this.
All the courses I offer through Hedge School are interdisciplinary & earth focussed. Theoretically, they are rooted in a developing pedagogy & theoretical enquiry titled ‘Unruly Bodies: A pedagogy of Recovery’. The name of this keeps evolving, first starting as ‘Ecologies of Place: A pedagogy of Recovery’, moving to ‘Recovering an Ecological Body: A pedagogy of Recovery’, finally to Unruly Bodies. Where - I suspect, it will stay. As my understanding & research deepens so too does the title. I’ve avoided speaking too much about this up to present & perhaps it will continue to remain this way. For now, I can say my work on this theory has been strongly influenced first & foremost by communities, particularly the people of South & West Yorkshire. It’s been influenced by people’s stories. Cultural history’s. My family & our struggles. It’s been influenced by 12 step meetings & fellowship. Thinkers: Vandava Shiva, John Moriarty, Paulo Freire, Bell Hooks, Rosi Braidotti, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Le Guinn, Gregory Bateson, Nora Bateson, Spinosa, Derrida, Korzybski, Bertrand Russel, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Melissa Febos, Fahira Roisin amongst others. Unruly Bodies is a combination of Deep Ecology, Depth Psychology, Cooperativism, Batesonian Thinking, Eco-Posthumanism, Participatory Research, Feminist- Marxism, Oral Histories, Critical Herbalism, Defiant Pedagogy, Pedagogies of the Oppressed amongst others. It’s juicy & exciting & invokes much aliveness.
So here they are, my debut workshops: Plant Folk, Herbs for Women’s Health & The Colour of Place.
Plant Folk is a grass roots offering whose focus is to strengthen mutual aid & co-operativism through Plants. This gathering will focus on affordability & access. Through the plants, we will reinvigorate our attention to curiosity, wild food, wild medicine, seasonality, bodies & emergence. This gathering has emerged as a response to the destruction of the commons. A major theme in my research. Plant Folk is a means for me to cultivate spaces that re-introduce folk customs, practices of commonage & the ideology of the commons back into communities. Hacking the infrastructure that has seen to the demolishing of common relational bonds & transforming it into something which fertilises alchemy.
Herbs for Women’s Health has been a sell out! Tickets sold within 2 weeks of advertising. It’s been so popular I’ll be running this as a recurrent course. This course has been largely inspired by my research, with specific reference to Sylvia Federici’s tome of a book, ‘Caliban & The Witch’. This offering’s intention is to share the histories Sylvia excavates in Caliban, framing them within the epistemology of Western History & Medical Science. My hope for this course is to break the silence(s) surrounding systemic violence towards women & to share skills, practices & customs of resistance that have been celebrated by other women throughout the centuries.
The Colour of Place is a course whose intention is to provide space to connect meaningfully with earth through pigment & colour. The course will cover practical skills, how to forage & gather your own pigments, how to make your own paints, inks & tools from natural pigment & the history & usage of pigment throughout history. This course intends to create opportunity for folks to engage with the rich history & materiality of our local pigments as a means to strengthen reverence & appreciation for Place.
Publications & Podcasts
In July I was interviewed by Robin Harford. Founder of Eat Weeds, Host of
and Author of one of Britain’s most popular foraging books ‘Edible & Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain & Ireland.’It was such an honour to be asked to speak about my work at such an early stage. You can check out the podcast here: https://eatweeds.transistor.fm/51
My essay ‘Paradox & The Edge’ was published by
& on the 29th September. It’s an essay about complexity, Palestinian conflict, yew trees & care. My work was read at the Tenth Anniversary Event in Edinburgh by Julia, Editor of Unpsychology Magazine. You can view the magazine online or buy a copy through their website: https://www.unpsychology.org/
Very soon, my poem ‘Nostos’ will be published by Tom Hirons of Clarion Journal & all being well, I’ll read at the launch for Issue 3 :)
Hedge School Projects
University of Stirling - Petri-Dish Pedagogies: Exploring the Potential of Creative and 'More-Than-Human' Teaching Practices in Lifelong Learning.
This research project was centred around place-based pedagogies (creative education practices involving art and connections to land) and fabulations (the creation of new, potential realities through storytelling, science, and folklore). Building on UNESCO's (2019) call to address learning in a world of complexity, uncertainty, and precarity, it aims to explore if, and how, place-based pedagogies can influence the future teaching practices of adult educators. This research project brought together participants from the Adult Education and Community Learning Development sector to think through their own land-based histories and traditions via methods such as art and poetry, addressing the research question: What impact does engagement with these pedagogies have on their future teaching practices? Thinking-with the local land and and water in Stirling, Scotland, we also explored the life of bees as a means of learning from educators who are more-than-human.
In this commission I worked alongside animal behaviour psychologists, bee scientists & other academics to deliver an inter-disciplinary programme. We blended the richness of our disciplines, using bee sonographs to inspire mark-making with foraged golden ochre; understanding bee behaviour & foraging habits so we could more deeply empathise as we engaged with the plants through foraging.
RASAC
Last month I received the incredible news that I’ve been awarded funding for a 6 month community arts project with RASAC, Kirklees Rape & Sexual Assault Charity. The project will conclude with a Community Exhibition centred on the theme of Rape & Sexual Abuse titled ‘Rape is not a Four Letter Word’. I’ll be working with the women at RASAC, sharing a series of courses grounded in the Hedge School pedagogy which build up towards the presentation of their work. I’ll work with the women on their performance pieces & art work in preparation for their debut exhibition. We’ll be working with Yorkshire Wool, Weaving, Natural Pigment, Plants, Plant Medicine, Myth, Storytelling, Movement & more.
Our goal for this pilot is to generate enough evidence for a funding bid that would allow me to deliver this work across 4 other RASAC’s sites in Kirklees & Calderdale. Bringing & sharing Hedge School pedagogy & practice to marginalised communities & women across Yorkshire.
Creative Recovery Barnsley
This year I partnered with Creative Recovery in Barnsley South Yorkshire & have delivered numerous projects over the last year. The last being a 6 week project funded by Public Health England for Suicide Innovation. Working with members of the community who have attempted suicide, have experienced the loss of a loved one through suicide or folks who feel suicidal. This funding came about as a response to the mental health crisis in Barnsley & the rising rates of suicide in this region. Rates that are now above the national average. As a woman from Barnsley, a woman who has lost people to suicide & been at risk of suicide, I feel a deep responsibility to give back to this community. To share what has been shared with me through my recovery.
What I love about this project is sharing the unruly & defiant histories of our people & the way people have used plants as an act of radical resistance. How herbalism in itself is a radical act. Something which affects the fundamental nature of a being. Herbalism sinks beneath the over culture. It drips into a place of remembering. Sharing knowledge & pollinating our tongues with the names of our hedgerow plants is an act of rebellion for me, particularly in the context of communities that have long been severed from place. Teaching these skills, in my community is my activism. A loving act of unruliness, an invitation to disobey the rigidity of Class; what it demands of our bodies & our being. To disobey the whispers of what working- class culture says we can & cannot do, who we can & cannot be. Working with this community is an act of defiance. Rebellion. Kindness & heart. I love them & I love having the opportunity to tend to the emergence of a culture which wasn’t available to me growing up.
University of Huddersfield - Round Table Panel for Cultures of Creative Health & Exhibition at the University.
I was so delighted when a student & all round inspiring woman Michaela Lesayova asked me if she could interview me for her Residency with The University of Huddersfield on Cultures of Creative Health & Green & Blue spaces. Michaela is an artist working primarily with Natural Dyes & like me, her work stretches across many different spheres. Combining arts with creative health pedagogy & approaches to recovery. As part of the residency Michaela & I will be joining forces and collaborating on an exhibition that will be showcased at the finale of the Cultures of Creative Health Project in January. We’ll be creatively responding to different habitats around Kirklees, including the Moors, Woods & maybe the River.
As part of this project I’ll be speaking at the Round Table event, sharing on my work at Hedge School & my research alongside other amazing local initiatives such as Edibles in Marsden. I’m super excited for this project & collaborating with other folks in West Yorkshire who are doing amazing work.
CRITICAL THEORY CLUB
Something I’ve always done, from being a young one to present day is read. I’m particularly interested in & passionate about critical theory. Critical theory has had a huge impact on my life & it’s something I’ve dedicated to my life to in a way. Researching, learning & translating theory into radical community education projects. In April I set up a book club for women, reading Caliban & The Witch. I’ve been so inspired & held by this group that I’ve decided to create a CRITICAL THEORY CLUB. A place where community can join, free of charge, to read critical theory in a held & nurtured space where we can digest & metabolise ways in which this knowledge can be applied to the everyday.
Creative Projects
I’M WRITING A BOOK
In the next 10 days I’ll reach the halfway mark 30,000 words on the first draft of my book. A wild, incredible & immensely difficult journey. I’ve got no idea if it will be published. No idea if anyone will ever want to read it. But, I’m writing it. Writing the first half of this book has been one of the most insane processes I’ve ever engaged with. Starting first as a poem, developing into an epic poem, into a performance piece, into a fictional book & finally into Auto-Theory. In the coming months, as I get closer to finishing the first draft I’ll be sharing excerpts from the book - for those who are interested in reading. <3
I’M RECORDING AN ALBUM & preparing for performances
Something I have shared very little about is my singing. Singing is an element of my creative practice & since getting into recovery it’s something I’ve been building up my confidence to share. Last year I was asked by Linda, Ballad Scholar & widower of Duncan Williamson, whether I would be willing to receive Duncan’s ballad tradition. This was a huge surprise & honour. Strange to say the least, as a person who isn’t of Scottish descent. Nonetheless. I wasn’t about to refuse something of such generosity & antiquity. Linda tells me such things don’t matter anywho, that there is something of Duncan in me, though I couldn’t tell you what. What’s more, Duncan & I were born 1 day & 50 some years apart. So, over the last 9 months I’ve been learning ballads from Duncan’s tradition, that of the Scottish travellers & next week, I’ll finally be getting some of these songs recorded, in preparation to share with folks. Next year, I’ll hopefully (if folks will have me) be touring a performance titled ‘Kith & Kin’ - sharing these ballads alongside Linda.
As ever, there are other things on the boil for next year. Storytelling performances. Poetry Collections. Ideas simmering away in the oven of my imagination. But, I’ll leave it there for now. That’s enough for you to get a taster of what I’ve been up to & what’s been emerging over here at Hedge School in the last 6 months.
Keep that hearth fire tended, eat custard, smell pink roses,
Hannah-May
What a marvelous tangle of doing and being! I discovered your writing via Carly Wright & have been creeping my way through the archive of your work here. Your Substack is a treasure.
Wow, what creativity! I second Emilia Jane's comments and request to join the book club. I wanted to acknowledge that in the midst of all that wonderful and giving creativity there is still room for depression, we humans are such convoluted creatures.
I can't wait to hear your singing and look forward to the book. I loved the previous installments where you read the essays to us. I live overseas now in Australia now and it's heart-warming to hear your voice and accent (my father was a Yorkshire man).
More importantly, the custard here is different (read sub par). You can get double thickness and chocolate custard, but it's not the same. They don't sell the Bird's custard powder either which is my favourite.