Tanya Shadrick
@tanyashadrick
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Author #TheCureForSleep : a Waterstones book of 22 | Creator #WildPatience mile of writing, #BirdsOfFirle & #ConcentratesOfPlace | Founder @SelkiePress | FRSA
///woof.published.absorb
Joined April 2016
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Thank you to
@ErnestJournal
for inviting me to speak of my
#ConcentratesOfPlace
- a slow rest-of-life response to the sudden near-death at 33 that is also at heart of my memoir
#TheCureForSleep
@wnbooks
…
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My mother’s last months are become weeks, days.
After four lost decades, so much truth & trust.
Silly, I know, but I don’t want to be cold underground, she said.
So I’m making a blanket to wrap her in. Wool the colour of late summer sun
#TheCureForSleep
#AtTheEndWeWereGentle
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Me to husband, months ago: ‘So for your 50th: shall I surprise you with a solo or shared trip abroad…’
[He waits, eyebrow raised]
‘…or you could have a whole day in the garden & I could be in the kitchen with the back door open baking pasties & saffron buns for tea?’
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My mother, 80 today & happy at last
Who divorced during pandemic after 40 dark years
Who lives now in the light of new friendships
Who let me share her story in
#TheCureForSleep
so ‘other women wouldn’t waste so much time worrying what people think’
Inspiration to me & others
102
83
2K
To my mother being divorced at 80, I say: ‘Shall we change your name in the new year? I’ll help with phone calls & paperwork?’
YES PLEASE she says at once. And not back to name of first husband who cheated, left; not name of her bullying father. Her gentle mother’s maiden one...
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I’ve a friend (never married, without children) who, in his 50s, is main carer for his 90yr old mother. He has made this beautiful room for her last months. She calls for him in the small hours - ‘as I did her 50 years ago’ he writes ‘a beautiful return symmetry.’
#LovingKindness
54
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2K
#ConcentratesOfPlace
: even before the lockdowns, I rarely had the health to travel often or far. Every trip near or far was precious so that I tried to bottle them, like preserved fruits. Opened all the tins today for a deep inhale of elsewheres. Heather, moss, sand, slate...
90
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Our girl cat - the runt in her litter - is old now & getting frail. She has always yearned to join us for roast dinners & has never, of course, been allowed. But tonight, feeling her near end-times, we gave her a plate of the leftovers & let her sit to table...
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My disabled mother been divorced by husband of 40-yrs during pandemic, having to sell her home & halve their savings. But today she exchanges contracts on a tiny flat in the seaside resort she loves, where she has new best friend: women taking care of each other
@eliistender10
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Learned today that Mum has just a few months left of her late-made new life. None of my work as a hospice scribe will make letting go easier; nor this book I wrote to honour her. But it DOES matter, very much, that she got free at last so that I can be with her and give care…
My mother, 80 today & happy at last
Who divorced during pandemic after 40 dark years
Who lives now in the light of new friendships
Who let me share her story in
#TheCureForSleep
so ‘other women wouldn’t waste so much time worrying what people think’
Inspiration to me & others
102
83
2K
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Exercises for a Nature Writer
Chronic pain has often kept me house & town-bound. I still make nature notes, but my finest times are when I can (for a while) rise early, range widely. This written from that - & as a keepsafe for times when my world slows & shrinks again...
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795
Tired but happy face of a wife whose husband is up after nine days fully in bed with Covid. He’s a double-vaccinated mask wearer, in such robust health usually that he’s only seen a GP twice in 25 years. Frightening to watch this virus do its work on him.
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790
Some unpleasant stuff happened to me here this week. But I stood my ground, despite disliking conflict. Other writers & readers rallied round me. Good new mentees were met. I’m grateful. So replacing my old eyes-closed profile photo for one that looks world in the eye.
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I’ve watched my quiet husband grow into a gardener over last fifteen years. Slow & steady - in this, as in marriage, fatherhood. A believer in caregiving & constancy. Just went out back to stop a fight between cats & saw it all anew: what comes from his mostly unseen efforts...
25
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A much older woman, once my closest friend, looked confused in town today. She'd forgotten where she lived; had forgotten, too, she ended our friendship when I pursued something unwise she couldn't approve. I made some calls. Then we held hands, remembered our love for eachother.
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A great sadness has left my soul. After years exhausting myself in many effortful ways to escape it, the last of it went in the end all of a sudden: a cliff-fall on a clear blue day. What remains is terra firma: art & books I made from the struggle; friends met through that work.
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"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now."
–– Annie Dillard
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My darling mum is in her last months. Driving the deep Devon lines of her childhood - something she often did with her own mum - is too hard now. So I’ve come home this weekend with my own girl to do a final visit to her important places. This is where Mum was born in wartime…
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@SalSimply
Thank you. It has been beyond cruel & gruelling of course. Almost too much bear. But from tomorrow - for however little or long she has left - we’ve agreed she is (my phrase that she loves) ‘on holiday in her own life.’
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2
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Happy Tan. At my own publishers
@HachetteUK
as a judge on a prize for working-class writers like myself. Only wish I could have sent this to Mum - first month I can’t share the best bits of my late-made writing life with her (who wanted more for me than she had herself).
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So. Friendship. At any age. When it comes...it always feels like this I think. A beautiful bloody miracle that transforms the everyday.
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I’ve long used old sweet & tobacco tins to make ‘concentrates of place’ - souvenirs of the outside for when I’m laid up with chronic pain. Recommend it as a way to get flow going on family walks at this uneasy time. Bring the outside in...
#COVID
ー19
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On this day 3 years ago, my father died after a long illness, taking his lifelong refusal of me to his grave. I was not named in the obituary. My small family have designated this our annual day now & hereafter to let me celebrate these three who do want me...
#TheCureForSleep
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So so happy. After three decades of constant chronic pain I began training last midsummer. Just walking. Four thousand steps a day. Five. Six. Now 100,000 a week. Then weights. And this was my goal & beautiful reward. Not weight loss. Weekly roller discos with my teenage girl…
19
1
331
I nursed Mum for 10 days & finished her blanket on 31 July (date she refused: when her father went). She got stuck in a terrible limbo then: a night, a day. The next night I lay beside her; listening but no longer needed. Sometime after 4 I slept; woke at 5 to life without her
My mother’s last months are become weeks, days.
After four lost decades, so much truth & trust.
Silly, I know, but I don’t want to be cold underground, she said.
So I’m making a blanket to wrap her in. Wool the colour of late summer sun
#TheCureForSleep
#AtTheEndWeWereGentle
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Friendship. A short true story.
My 80-yr old mum was served with divorce during lockdown. Terrible. House to sell. Flat to find. (She's disabled, I'm an only child, far away with young children)...
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We said goodbye today to the brave & beautiful Margaret Annie Dunn (Maria in
#TheCureForSleep
). She was buried with this, her maiden name & the blanket I made during her last days. Her 5 surviving siblings lowered her into the ground, near to their parents.
#AtTheEndWeWereGentle
My mother, 80 today & happy at last
Who divorced during pandemic after 40 dark years
Who lives now in the light of new friendships
Who let me share her story in
#TheCureForSleep
so ‘other women wouldn’t waste so much time worrying what people think’
Inspiration to me & others
102
83
2K
51
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Whenever I pod peas all the grannies & other old women of my childhood come back for a few delicious minutes…
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A free-wheeling feeling: chronic pain has kept me from cycling for thirty years. Six months of Tai Chi & weights has worked wonders - been out since 5am alone on Sussex Downs: this home for decades I’ve never been able to travel through this way...
16
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My dear neighbours, no adult children of their own, had to move. Their large, separate garden behind our terrace houses they could have sold intact for great profit. Instead they gave a portion us for a token fee, knowing how my quiet husband would treasure it
#LovingKindness
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“If you are not sure what you think about something, the most useful questions are these,” she says. “Are you being kind? Are they being kind? That usually gives you the answer.”
— Jan Morris (& sent to me by a wise & very kind mentor figure)
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In certain lights, this shelter at Seaford always looks like a portal to the afterlife
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Exercises for a Nature Writer
#1
Rise like a farmer at five,
and sit in kitchen silence.
Shepherd thoughts.
Dress for the weather,
taking pen, paper, pocketknife.
Stay out all day.
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My husband grows oak trees. Pots three hundred acorns a year. He’s fifty now and hopes at least one will thrive out where its transplanted so we can go visit and sit in its shade one day…
13
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To have
@waterstones
say this of my attempts to transform my life after near-death at 33 while remaining a steady-seeming wife & mother in a small town? A ration of courage for a debut author risking such an intimate story at almost 50...
17
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Screw it. Best new dress coming off its hanger for early evening trip to supermarket.
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My grandfather, like most men of his class & generation, kept tobacco tins for nuts, bolts, nails, fuses. Felt deep peace alongside him long hours while he worked wood. I use my hands differently, to write, but keep tins with me too: make samples of sand, soil, seed, blossom
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Off to fill my skirts with field & flowers. Back in September.
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‘A real writer’s writer…’ I’ve put on my best blue dress to go eat alone at an outdoor table in town. Celebrating, savouring, my first - my only? - book going off today to be typeset, & the extraordinary generosity of established authors who are already reading & responding…
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Birthday in bed. Books. Blanket. Alone but feeling part of a rich web of connections. I first read in public on my 42nd birthday (a short local essay); 5 years later my life has been expanded by writing more than I could have imagined. All the good people met on here. Thank you.
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@KimRowellTV
Tears seeing this. My single mother sold her beloved typewriter (bank prize for opening most new accounts) to pay for my 5 yr old birthday & Christmas. What a beautiful thing to do for your mother. So moved on your & her behalf.
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‘We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a clear, rested, embodied voice. Our life as a suddenly emphatic statement and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.’
#DavidWhyte
9
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In two weeks,
@wnbooks
publishes my late debut
#TheCureForSleep
- memoir of a life before & after sudden near-death at 33. And because I have some fear around that, it is time for courage. So here is a short reading from it, on fear, on effort…
28
22
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Just received contract from W&N
@orionbooks
for my first book
#TheCureForSleep
: love how it has come 5 years after I gave up my dream of being an author & committed instead simply to finding ways to share, seek & celebrate stories. Thank you all here who encouraged & inspired me.
25
8
185
To see the late Lynne Roper's
#WildWomanSwimming
- the only book from my own
@SelkiePress
- among such fine company in the
@wainwrightprize
: what I wanted for her. She entrusted her diaries to me a month before she died, & I let her life divert the course of mine
#SoulSwimsWild
15
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The last 6 months have been humbling: good friends from years ago who I hid from after the mistakes in love & life I describe in
#TheCureForSleep
- they’ve read the book & every single one has welcomed me back into their homes. No shame, no blame. Just love & understanding. Wow.
15
2
201
‘Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.’ — Sylvia Plath
2
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179
@HayleyThough
I make
#ConcentratesOfPlace
in old tins & matchboxes & I retweet anyone who makes one & uses the hashtag. It works with all age groups & fits with health/time limitations too (both of which I’ve had)…
Would you like to make
#ConcentratesOfPlace
?
With summer holidays in mind, I’d be thrilled if anyone taking care of children wants to use my simple art practice - recently featured
@NatGeoEducation
, with teacher
@Braca_M
showing how it works with classes
10
41
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2
17
187
I have written in my car, in cafes, at the kitchen table before 5am when the babies woke at six. Now, just sometimes, I can afford two or three days away. Not far, just down the road. A love affair with effort, words, the sound of birds & church bells.
9
7
188
Bad news last night about my mother’s health had me drive through the dark to Firle Beacon: wild high point on the Downs where I go to confront my choices when choices diminish. The strange & bracing consolation I get from standing in a storm that shakes my braver self awake…
26
4
193
Would you like to make
#ConcentratesOfPlace
?
With summer holidays in mind, I’d be thrilled if anyone taking care of children wants to use my simple art practice - recently featured
@NatGeoEducation
, with teacher
@Braca_M
showing how it works with classes
10
41
194
@electra_rhodes
It’s taken us years to feel that our introverted ways of celebrating are absolutely fine. Times to push outside comfort zones - other times lovely to stay right inside them!
7
3
195
Shutting myself in a hut for a while. A book of my own finally after years of helping others with words. First people I’ve read the beginning to have had goosebumps, tears. Effect I’m after in a book called
#TheCureForSleep
(with thanks to
@rcaskie1
for waking me up to it).
24
4
171
Breath-held sensation: my little writing room made ready for my mother’s first ever Christmas visit in her new (& newly-single) life. I set out at 4am for the West Country to fetch her up to Sussex. Aware how many of us are measuring out these days in LFTs as much as mileage…
16
1
184
What To Look For In Autumn
(When children small this was a moment of great ceremony each Sept: lighting first fire, shuffling Ladybird books so this new season was first on the shelf. Now it’s just me doing it as they go to & fro around me. Good to be keeper of the flame though)
13
14
177
Using my birthday to begin in earnest new season of bird-watching. In Autumn/Winter 18 I weathered drawn-out loss of a loved one by losing myself in looking long hours at rooks, ravens & jackdaws. This season I bring to it nothing difficult; just attention.
#BirdsOfFirleBeacon
13
21
167
Forty years of constant reading makes this small morning moment all the sweeter: putting my first (perhaps only) book on the shelf among the authors whose worlds enlarged mine…
17
9
180
A long-held daydream made material, all of a sudden, unexpectedly. My debut book on display
@LewesWstones
earlier than I imagined. As daughter took a photo, a customer asked about it & I did my first signing there & then! Have face ache from smiling…
#TheCureForSleep
@wnbooks
25
5
178
My dear friend, sole carer of his beloved mother for a long time, forewent even short walks in company in this long pandemic season. His wish that she die at home, in peace, with him beside her has now this evening come to pass. Such love, such care, such grace.
#LovingKindness
I’ve a friend (never married, without children) who, in his 50s, is main carer for his 90yr old mother. He has made this beautiful room for her last months. She calls for him in the small hours - ‘as I did her 50 years ago’ he writes ‘a beautiful return symmetry.’
#LovingKindness
54
169
2K
10
9
173
Family sofa worn through at the seats & can’t afford (& don’t want) a replacement. Four charity-shop jumpers to the rescue...
#TheRomanceOfMaintenance
7
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@carolyn_Yates
This is one of only three places she (barely travelled, as I am too) wants to visit! I've said we will fly up and take trains or I'll drive her about in a camper van. None of this was possible when she was in the marriage. Hoping we get some good years to try a new relationship.
1
2
168
So moved. A year ago I got up courage to read the first lines of my first book to a trusted friend, doing so in the little shepherd hut where it began. Today I showed her the finished draft. In return she sent a photo from my first reading I didn’t know she took
#TheCureForSleep
8
2
167
‘One of the most calming & powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up & show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit & willing to show it’
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
To a new decade of showing up & sharing.
4
42
150
‘Him to me: so quietly at home in his bones, his clothes…’
Husband’s 50th. Our 30th year. His quick mind still catches me by surprise daily, but my first impression endures too. Supple, kind, grounded. Loving what is slow to grow. Then, now…
12
7
167
The first online life hack I’ve tried that has worked [getting inside an empty duvet case & aiming a fan inside]
5
5
163
When heavy rain comes in autumn our street floods fast due to a drain in a dip. When we moved in 15 years ago several elders always rushed to clear it. Now they are all dead or moved away & so our watch begins says my husband today (who I love for his love of quiet caretaking)
5
5
153
‘Stay this moment...’ —
#Woolf
To spend the day walking where she did, now I’ve sent a book of my own to its editor, & having written myself, like her, into this landscape - this, now, is my beautiful reward. Flask, cheese, oatcakes. Miles & miles before bed.
#TheCureForSleep
13
7
161
A troubled friend from my 20s, lifelong bachelor, who let me in a while, has died alone in his 50s. Will have a brief public health funeral. His books & sketchbooks cleared away. We shared a love of old films; agricultural shows. Tiny public epitaph for a large lost private soul
12
9
146
#BirdsOfFirle
: a single book of rooks that began, on NYD 2020, a decade-long flight to recipients worldwide inviting words on grief & hope as the things with feathers. This year’s responses at & its origin story
@LittleToller
3
35
155
‘Where does it begin, our turn away from risk and adventure?’
Oh how many years I hid away. But now here it is, about to go open-hearted into the world: story of my fear-bound first life & bolder late one. Rabbit-heart pounding!
#TheCureForSleep
@wnbooks
17
9
146
At almost fifty, with my mother not needing it after all, I have it at last: the room of one’s own I always read about/visited with yearning at Woolf’s house, Hepworth’s. And husband of this last quarter-century has put me on a residency at home in it until 10 May when book done.
14
1
140
@Ravilious1942
@TownerGallery
You’re in Sussex! How lovely! If you have a car and can drive to the end of Folkington village (no through road) then walk to the right into the fields you will see a view that is pure Ravilious!
3
6
151
#1
A true story of chance, risk & reward, for anyone creating in isolation (or for whom building & sustaining a creative life has few precedents in their family/class/culture)
[a winding
#AmWriting
#FridayFeeling
thread for a rainy day]
20
35
134
‘One of the most calming & powerful actions you can do…in a stormy world is to stand up & show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit & willing to show it’ — Pinkola Estes
To a new year of finding (safe) ways to share our souls & grow them
5
14
144
Never asked for Twitter Christmas magic before & I’m pretty hidden in algorithms. Asking for a mentee who wrote this very moving piece about a precious stolen book she’s been trying to replace for decades: if only she knew edition not only cover colour...
17
73
151
OUTRO: ‘you have been listening to a Weidenfeld & Nicolson audiobook
#TheCureForSleep
’
Such a moving experience: to read in my West Country accent a book I wrote to honour the rural women who raised me.
The producer’s last book before retirement too - so emotional all round…
11
9
143
Thank you to brilliant bookseller Lily
@Foyles
for such a warm welcome. To see
#TheCureForSleep
@wnbooks
keeping such fine company among new titles AND in literary biography right beside authors I’ve read for years: worth all the decades-long trial & effort in private notebooks.
19
5
138
Birthday morning in bed. When husband & I met at 20 (almost 30 years ago), we lived through biographies of dead & distant authors, & decided our presents would always be pens, stories, letters each to each. Now finally, I’m the writer of a book which honours our shared life.
22
8
136
‘We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a clear, rested, embodied voice. Our life as a suddenly emphatic statement and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.’
#DavidWhyte
2
26
134
‘One of the most calming & powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up & show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit & willing to show it’
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
via
@carolineinblue
photo Paul Shergold
2
33
122
I never lose thrill of driving solo the sinuous stretch of road from Beachy Head, through the Z-Bends, down to the diminishing cliffs of Birling Gap. (My MA was on trains & other sightseeing journeys through pre-war England - this is where I feel most to be in a Shell Guide)
6
6
132
This by me has been used by male nature critic
@RSmythFreelance
as example of bad nature writing - so be it! But his is a take down piece that I fear will discourage more emerging writers than it inspires. I give free mentoring to those hesitating to risk publication: DMs open...
Exercises for a Nature Writer
Chronic pain has often kept me house & town-bound. I still make nature notes, but my finest times are when I can (for a while) rise early, range widely. This written from that - & as a keepsafe for times when my world slows & shrinks again...
63
167
795
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4
130
1: Seven years ago this month: when I (always so shy & conventional) changed my story forever with nothing more than a few rolls of paper & a stubborn hope held onto from childhood…
that an act of fairytale labour composed of love, patience & generosity can transform us, others
3
28
139
Beautiful young fox cub bold sunning itself a few feet from me in our small brick backyard. Started visiting at evening a week ago but now its sharing shade & water with the cats. What a vivid creature
6
3
140
This is me at 37 after 2nd child; I'd almost died in minutes soon after birth of my first 2 years before, so delivering again was a risk. Next year's
#TheCureForSleep
is about embarking on a second life. On last draft now & struck anew by how unmarked I looked (on the outside)...
7
0
127
‘We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in...a clear, rested, embodied voice. Our life as a suddenly emphatic statement and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.’ Whyte
4
24
115
I’ve been alone in bed since 8pm in the guest suite of my mum’s new retirement complex, with a supper of Nice biscuits & a flask of tea she made for me, & now watching a TV show about steam trains (one of my passions). After 14 years raising children, this is me living the dream.
5
0
124
To mark
#publicationweek
of
#TheCureForSleep
@wnbooks
, my fable-like memoir, I have a single fairy-tale box to give away:
The book, handwritten note & artefacts of its places & people (incl
#VirginiaWoolf
&
#WildWomanSwimming
)
Retweet by 20 Jan to enter
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Double denim!
Just gave my mum her first denim jacket as a belated 80th birthday gift & another small way to celebrate her new single life by the sea.
Bude here we come…
12
1
120
My father left. My mother had to get whatever work she could to fit around me. Grocery shop: not what she was trained to do. But she was glad because she survived on its left-overs. Just. Would faint. Showed bones. Always cold. I got enough - from good, big cooked school dinners
2
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116
Someone who rang for advice last month got the agent they wanted within days afterwards; another writer I’ve mentored has just been offered a deal. This side of writing life as exciting & satisfying to me as my own work. Abundance mindset (taught opposite as a child).
10
4
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