If we were to meet in person, you would’ve heard me say “Hello love”, long before I told you anything about who I am & what I do. You would’ve first heard the mossy tones of my regional dialect, followed by an embrace, of head, heart & hands. It’s in this manner that I welcome you to
r o o t & r o c k a substack offered to you by writer, plant-worker, maker & grower Hannah-May Batley.
r o o t & r o c k is a substack that tends to the practice of recovery, reconnection & restoration. It is an exploration & meditation on the work of weaving many threads, thoughts & inspirations from multiple contexts, with the hopes of creating a vessel. My intention here is that this vessel can offer you a remedy, a soothing balm for the sensorium.
r o o t
“the part of a plant which attaches it to the ground or to a support, typically underground, conveying water and nourishment to the rest of the plant via numerous branches and fibres”
I think as a people, many of us have become placeless. Uprooted. Displaced. If not geographically, emotionally, symbolically & spiritually. I’m curious about the role & journey of seeking roots. Root is a potent medicine, in both a literal & poetic sense. Root is a process. Root is a means of recovering, reconnecting & restoring our relationship to kith & kin. Root is a way of resourcing the body.
r o c k
“rock is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its chemical composition, and the way in which it is formed”
Like rock, I too am a naturally occurring organism who is an aggregate of minerals & matter. Rock is a story of our ancestors, of our beginnings. Rock is a practice of stillness. A practice of being with & staying with the trouble. Rock is an embodiment of transformation. Collapse. Cataclysm. Change. Rock is observation, consideration. Rock is Deep Time. A way of holding & supporting. Rock is a being of strength & beauty.
I am so delighted & honoured to have you here. I give thanks to all of you who subscribe & join me on this journey.
O F F E R I N G
For some time I’ve been exploring what feels right & how to decipher what I do & don’t charge for on here. What I’ve found is that when I set arbitrary deadlines for X amount of essays I feel overwhelmed & more often than not, the quality of my writing suffers as a result. I’d initially set out in this post a tier between free & paid subscribers. But, since writing this & setting the tier I’ve felt increasingly conflicted. Thing is, what I write & when I write is very intuitive. Some months you might receive multiple posts, others you may only receive one. This is the nature of my creative practice & try as I might, when I write things I don’t care about it’s obvious.
What I’m trying to say is I need a system that works for me & works for you.
This is what I’ve come up with.
Most of what I publish here will be free. You’ll have access to recipes, stories, songs, essays, writing exercises, meditations, poems & art. You’ll find out about my upcoming courses, events, interviews & work that I’ll be having published.
Amongst that, I will be sharing longer more in depth essays & for these you will need to be a paid subscriber.
What I’m trying to curate here a system similar to what Blindboy promotes on his podcast: those who get something out of my writing & can afford to pay a monthly or yearly subscription can & this would be marvellous. Those who get something out of my work but can’t afford a monthly or yearly subscription needn’t, since the person who pays is also supporting the person that can’t.
This feels like an equitable & supportive system that invites creativity rather than pressure, it invites a space that enables my best writing rather than a space I want to avoid.
What you can expect is a minimum of two posts a month. Sometimes this will fluctuate & you may well receive 5 or 6. I want to keep what I’m curating here alive & agile. I want to curate something that mirrors where I am in this particular time-place.
Right now I’m thinking about kinship, place, place-lessness, indigenous scholarship, queer theory, feminist theory, the epistemologies & ontologies of Woman-Body©, stochastic process, theory of mind, complexity, plant work, pigments, ecologies of place, ecologies of oppression, violence & the haptic.
Really, my intentions here are to be of-service; to create a space where community, learning & honesty are cherished & I can give back what has been given.
I would love to hold such a space for you all & to gather here with you, across lands, across seas, across screens.
Subscribe to r o o t & r o c k: lets learn together. x