David Lynch
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. If you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
Indie Author Lab, London
Key Takeaways from Jo Penn’s talk at the Indie Author Lab, London.
Jo Penn at the Indie Author Lab, London
I have no good reason to go to literary events, except that I just love them!
I love meeting other writers and buying their books. I love learning about emerging technologies and literary trends… And I love listening to how the most profitable writers run their business.
Joanna Penn is one of my favourites. I’ve never read her fiction books, but her podcast is super interesting. Here are some key takeaways from her talk this week:
1. What do you really, actually want [from your writing]?
2. What do you need to do to get that?
3. What are you doing instead?
4. Stop doing that!
In other words, (talking to myself here), are you SURE you want to run an author business? Because if so, you’ll need to do a million things you don’t really want to do. Namely, build an email list, grow social media, implement a marketing and promotions strategy and on and on and on until the end of time.
Or, you could just write books for the love of it. Because it’s fun.
xo, L
Keats House, London.
Yoga and Writing Workshop at Keats House, London.
just a little journaling
A Yoga and Writing Workshop
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Aboriginal Art
My Grandmother's Country VI (2024) by Artist Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi.png
Books Read in February
Books I read in February 2026
The Names by Florence Knapp
The book opens in 1987 as a woman is choosing a name for her newborn son. She wants to call him Julian. Her daughter wants to call him Bear. Her abusive husband insists on Gordon — after himself. From the day the name is chosen, the novel revisits the boy every seven years to trace how a single word shapes an entire life. I'm not quite finished yet but I'm absolutely riveted. If you like quietly devastating literary fiction that plays with fate and identity, this one will get under your skin. Loving it!
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
A memoir about a woman's marriage — what she thought it was, what it actually was — told in the aftermath of having the rug pulled out from under her. It reads like a juicy Vanity Fair article, and it sparked some controversy because of exactly how much she was willing to say.
Well, you know what Anne Lamott would say, right? "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Arthur Less is a mid-list novelist who, to avoid his ex's wedding, books himself a round-the-world tour of literary events that any author of repute would turn down. I’m a total sucker for a novel about a novelist, and this one is great. The globetrotting adventures make for a story that’s fun, fast, and surprisingly tender. Read it if you like novels about writers - but I have a feeling I might forget I read this book by the end of the year.
How Yoga Works by Geshe Michael Roach
A parable about the living the philosophy of yoga, so that you don’t actually have to read The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. This was required reading for my yoga teacher training and… well, it does what it says on the tin. If you're a yoga practitioner who wants to understand the deeper philosophy without your eyes glazing over, this is your book.
Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
Part memoir, part craft guide, this is Dani Shapiro's love letter to the writing life. I have a stack of creativity books that I look at whenever I’m in need of inspiration or understanding - this will go on the shelf (see my Creativity Bookshelf on Goodreads). And as it turns out, Shapiro has a serious yoga and meditation practice which she weaves through the book in the most wonderful way. It’s a must read if you are a writer. But if you aren’t, then it’s probably not your thing.
Viktor Frankl
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Gertrude Stein, Salons, and the Women in the Kitchen
Art/Lit Salon at The London Library
I went to a wonderful event at the London Library the other night — an Art/Lit salon devoted to the life and work of Gertrude Stein.
As you probably know, Stein was an American woman who went to Paris, declared herself an eccentric genius and then proceeded to act like one. Her salons were notoriously not for everyone. Even her closest friends (Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse) found her exceedingly difficult.
Salon de Fleurus is an artwork, a contemporary reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon that existed at 27 rue de Fleurus from 1904-34.
Here’s the part of the story that always rubs me the wrong way. While Stein held court in the salon, her partner, Alice B Toklas entertained the wives in the kitchen.
Which is strange because Toklas was Stein’s editor, manager and literary advocate. She was absolutely essential to Stein’s intellectual life and social network.
So why did Toklas so readily “keep the wives occupied” while Stein conversed with the writers and artists in the other room?
I’d love to go back in time and pull those women out of the kitchen and sit them down. What did they think about all this?
The woman behind the woman. Cecil Beaton Archive / Condé Nast
Meanwhile, in New York City….
A different movement was afoot. Female artists, writers and patrons were founding what would become some of the world’s most celebrated institutions. MoMA was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the Whitney by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the Guggenheim by Hilla von Rebay.
And then there was Florine Stettheimer: An artist who hosted salons in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan - and encouraged creative exchange between artists of all genders.
Florine Stettheimer - Studio Party (Soirée)
Some women waited to be invited into the room. Others built the room.
P.S. For when I have time for a deep dive…
"Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife" by Francesca Wade, and "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein and illustrated by Maira Kalman.
She Called it Channelling
At last night's salon, we got to talking about female artists who quietly fueled their husbands' genius — and this morning I fell so far down a rabbit hole I barely made it out in time for dinner.
Let me tell you a story.
It's October 1917. Georgie Hyde-Lees (25) has just married W.B. Yeats (52) who is - embarrassingly - still pining for another woman. In fact, two other women. He'd proposed to Maud Gonne (his great obsession) and she rejected him. Then he immediately proposed to Maud's daughter Iseult (eww) who also rejected him. And then finally, in fit of romantic desperation, he marries Georgie. But on their honeymoon, in a Sussex forest hotel, he is still freaking out, brooding and writing letters to Iseult. Georgie can see exactly what's happening and decides to do something about it.
I mean, the guy had a type. Left, Maud Gonne - Right, Georgie and W.B. Yeats. Not shown: Iseult Gonne, Maud’s daughter (eww).
So, what does Georgie do?
Four days into this honeymoon from hell, she picks up a pencil and begins to write automatically - meaning, she began channelling spirits and dictating what they told her. (It was a thing back then. Georgie’s good friend - who was the wife of Arthur Conan Doyle - also had this talent.)
Georgie’s idea was to fake a sentence or two that would get her husband to calm down and be a decent human being. The first message went something like "What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare" - the cat being Georgie, the hare being Iseult. Yeats was immediately captivated and evidently soothed by this wisdom.
Georgie later told a friend that she had planned to own up to her little ruse, but it had worked so well that she decided ah well, what’s the harm? ... (New York Review of Books)
Ashdown Forest Hotel, wherein the honeymoon suite, Georgie begins automatic writing / saving her marriage.
Couples counselling + metaphors for poetry
In their first three years together, the couple averaged three automatic writing sessions a week, creating 4,000 pages of material. The spirits - who had names like Thomas of Dorlowicz, Ameritus, Leaf, and Apple - handed over poetry and story ideas. But they were also quite practical! They suggested Yeats switch to a healthier diet, hinted when Georgie was ovulating so the couple could have a baby and even offered helpful suggestions on how Yeats could make sex more enjoyable for Georgie. (How much do you love this woman?)
Eventually the writing became speaking. Georgie would sink into a half-sleep (the hypnagogic state) and the spirits would speak: different ones at different times. And all of it became the raw material for A Vision, Yeats's great mystical work. When the spirits were asked what their purpose was, they said: "We have come to give you metaphors for poetry."
Yeats family portrait
Was she faking it?
Almost certainly she started out performing, but scholars think she fairly quickly entered into something she couldn't entirely explain herself. As time passed, the script became more legible, structured, and comprehensible, and this has caused many critics to wonder just how "automatic" the script really was. The answer seems to be: both. She was a highly intelligent woman working at the edge of her own unconscious, in genuine collaboration with her husband.
Notes from Georgie’s spirit guides.
In the end…
Georgie outlived Yeats by 30 years. After his death, she took up A Vision and edited it for immediate republication - correcting, shaping, controlling the legacy. She spent the rest of her life deciding who got access to his papers and who didn't. She bequeathed W.B. Yeats's manuscripts and papers to the Irish nation.
“Portrait of George Yeats” painted by William Rothenstein (1918)
What do I think?
I think this is a story about a woman who gave her creative gifts to a man and called it channelling. Whether she believed it or not, she clearly had extraordinary imaginative and intuitive powers - and the only way she could express them, in that marriage, in that era, was as a medium. The spirits were her.
Or at least, of her.
Grief Astronomer by Andrea Gibson
A difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one.
Joy is simply easier to carry
than sorrow. And your heart
could lift a city from how long
you’ve spent holding what’s been
nearly impossible to hold
This world needs those
who know how to do that.
Those who can find a tunnel
that has no light at the end of it
and hold it up like a telescope
to know the darkness
also contains truths that could
bring the light into its knees.
Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,
Look close, tell us what you see.
Women's Prize Nonfiction Longlist 2026: Three Books I'm Watching
I love the Women's Prize. I attend their summer events, I've been a patron, and I try to read the shortlists for both fiction and nonfiction.
They just announced their Longlist for Nonfiction, which is a relatively new category for them. I’ve got my eye on these three :
The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet - if you don’t know her by name, you’d know her voice and face. Along with Christiane Amanpour, Doucet is one of the world's most prominent and respected international correspondents. I met her at a party once and we discussed cheese.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick - another book from another foreign correspondent. It’s almost like we need independent journalism to shed light on stories around the world. Who would’ve thought?
Indignity by Lea Ypi - I enjoyed Ypi’s first book, Free (a memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval in Albania), so I’m willing to give her second book a try.
You can find the entire longlist - and learn more about the Women’s Prize - here.
Agadir, Morocco: Notes from Yoga Teacher Training
I went to Agadir and all I got was food poisoning. I didn’t even take this picture. (Thanks Caroline Gautier.)
Hello friends,
In my last post, I went on and on about how excited I was to go to Morocco for my Intensive Yoga Teacher Training. Well, I’m back!
And… it was a total disaster! I had three good days of yoga training - followed by four days of food poisoning.
It was beyond awful.
Still recovering.
xo, L
Cartography for Beginners
by Emily Hasler (an excerpt) -
Take a little license with rivers, especially their curves and estuaries. Add an oxbow lake if at all possible. If the area you are mapping has no seas/lakes/rivers/streams, I have to question why you are bothering.