some posts I'm proud of
on grief, witnessing, women, words and the body
Hello friends,
Welcome to the next of my summer archive posts. I’ll be sharing like this for the month of August, back all bright eyed and bushy tailed on Friday September 5.
Also, paid subscribers - a note for your diary that our Sitting in the Dark sessions will return for an 8 week spiral on September 19 and we will be back with another MULCH meeting in September, too.
Ok, let’s dive in to the first of my archive posts!
Layla x
To finish up this series (I’ll be back next week) I wanted to share with you some posts which I am proud of. Reading back over them, they are not perfect, but they do feel honest and raw and true, which is what this newsletter is about.
The first was written less than a month after my brother in law died suddenly in an accident last year. Hard to believe a year has passed now. I know when I originally shared I got so many messages from people thanking me for sharing of a grief they were also feeling for loved ones gone, so perhaps resharing will land where it needs to again.
some notes on grief
In this post I write about something deeply personal that happened to me and my family recently. Most of it is behind a paywall because it feels safer to write about it there. I write about grief, I write about finding beauty in the shards of this loss. Having read the excerpt below, if you feel you would like to read on, but are not currently a paid subscriber, please do reach out and I will arrange access for you.
This second post was written in the aftermath of October 7th, an attempt to work out how I was feeling at the time. Devastatingly, not much has changed since …
witness
We are approaching a year since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in which over 42,000 people have been killed - over 41,000 in Gaza, including 16,500 children and 1,139 Israelis. And now this horror has spilled out and is ripping apart life upon life in Lebanon and beyond.
I remember I wrote this post quite quickly, it is a series of thoughts I’d been having about women and words, and I like how it weaves from one to the next.
Finally, this post was written just after coming back from the first ever writers retreat I went on. It speaks to my biggest obsession - the body and how writing is such a visceral, somatic act for me.
Thanks friends, I hope you’ve found something to whet our appetite here, and I am really looking forward to jumping back in with you all with fresh ideas and news next week!
Layla x