Hi friends! It’s me, journalist, editor and v-e-r-y slow runner Hannah James. How are you?
Yesterday I finished writing a story I’d been worrying about, and went for a brief - slow - run along the Manly-Spit path. I was listening to a high-energy remix of a song I love (Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’, don’t judge me) and the skies were clear. All the colours were bright - grass richly green after the rain, the harbour that intense Brett Whiteley blue, white sails drifting between the Heads - and my whole body responded with joy. It was that brilliant Australian light I’ve missed all summer, when the sky was bushfire brown and the air choking. This morning is cloudy outside and slightly hungover inside, but yesterday’s perfect moment is carrying me through.
News
I’m interviewing the artist Karen Black on stage at a Creative Women event in the North Sydney Community Centre on Saturday 29 February. Come along if hearing from some very cool, very creative women about their artistic practices (which cover visual art, music, ceramics, writing, podcasting and more) sounds like your bag. Tickets available from the link above.
I am operating on high levels of excitement this week, as you’ll know if you look at my Instagram Stories.
I think the March issue of ELLE Australia is the most features-packed I’ve ever done, and definitely explains why over Christmas I barely moved from the sofa except to go to the beach. We pulled together a sisterhood-themed shoot starring Miranda Tapsell, Jenny Kee and many more incredible women (all of whom I got to interview) to highlight the strength of their female friendships. And I wrote the cover story, an interview with actor Phoebe Tonkin, AND I wrote about Little Women, as well as coordinating many more features, so please do check it out.
What I’m loving
This Instagram account, Meet our Bush Friends - beautifully illustrated native plants with witty captions by Alannah Milton, a law student in Sydney. One of her hashtags is #endplantblindness, which is something I feel strongly about. The moment I started learning plant names, the undifferentiated mass of green along a path I walk almost every day suddenly came into focus, and I started noticing how the plants are constantly changing. It’s slow TV with the benefit of exercise. And once you notice and name plants, and see how they change through the year, you are truly getting to know your bioregion, as Jenny Odell recommends in her sterling book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I love that something as simple as learning plant names (which I do by Googling, honestly) can take us out of the capitalist machine and into the natural world. Eshana Bragg, an ecopsychologist I just interviewed for an ELLE Australia story, recommended exactly this: getting to know a wild area near you - the green space can be as small as a single street tree - and watching it through different weather and changing seasons. This is a simple, beautiful way of getting all the mental and physical benefits of connecting to nature, and it’s so powerful. And you can start out by just looking at lovely illustrations on Instagram. What a world.
What I’m listening to
I have a new podcast obsession: Growing Wild. It’s a UK podcast from a host who lives near where I grew up, on the south coast - so a lot of the references give me a warm nostalgic glow. The blurb says, “Charlotte Petts shows you the wonderful opportunities for connecting with nature in both the countryside and urban spaces. Covering wild food, foraging, allotments, environmental issues, adventure and more!” which is, hello, very relevant to my interests.
The episode I particularly recommend is this one from December 2019, where the host, Charlotte, highlights three excellent projects, including Foundle. This is a Sussex dialect word that three women - two writers and one stonecarver - carved onto a chalk boulder on the South Downs. It’s a gorgeous art project and story of a growing friendship. Check out the project’s Instagram here, read an essay by the three women here, and give the podcast a listen - the host is engaging and down-to-earth, and the people she talks to are invariably fascinating.
No nature book review this week as I’ve been busy writing - more on that next week. Go well!