Defile the plots of envy
We’re not worthless worms
I love these two lines, attributed to the Cynics of ancient Greece, and to Tenzin Palmo – a Buddhist woman who lived alone in a mountain cave for twelve years.
It sums up what this Substack is about – defiling the plots of envy, because we’re not worthless worms – and the difficulties and pleasures of attempting that in the modern age.
Largely I’m sharing the words of people who’ve lived at the edges of society – hermits and artists and adventurers and so on. They’re complex people. Sometimes they’re railing against their loneliness, sometimes they’re in love with their solitude. Sometimes they’re full of daring, sometimes that daring hurts others too much.
I will share my own thoughts too, about solitude and envy and silence and failure, from where I live in the Canadian Badlands – where the population density matches the remoter regions of Mongolia.
It’s true I am not quite living in solitude. I don’t live alone – I am with a baby all day, and then at night, a husband – but I have my space. Rilke said it: “love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other,” and so even at night, I have my solitude. Not every night, of course.
There are many nights in which I am full of the thoughts of others. I was online during the day, and so at night I am full of the thoughts of others. These voices can be very strong in me. The voices that hope I will buy the duvet cover, the skin cream, it’s not uncommon for them to be with me as soon as I wake.
I am online in order to write, or because I’m bored. For various reasons, really. It is where I can find distraction, when I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.
I write about this kind of thing in my debut novel – Hovel – out with Strange Light / Penguin Random House in March 2026.
Who are you?
I write about people, place, and art for Outside, the Guardian, the BBC, Longreads, National Geographic Traveler, JSTOR Daily, ARTnews, Orion, and the Writers’ Union of Canada. My work’s been syndicated by Cambridge University Press.
In 2019, with the Writers’ Trust of Canada, I was the writer-in-residence at Berton House in the Yukon. In 2022, I was an artist-in-residence in Jasper National Park.
In 2018 I was a Banff Centre resident of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program under the Carlyle Norman Scholarship. My research and creative writing has also been supported by the British Council, Orion Environmental Writers Workshop in Arizona, NES Artist Residency in Iceland, Outlandia in Scotland, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
I grew up in the north of Scotland. I live in the south of Canada now.
Why subscribe?
It’s up to you, and whether topics like the sun, memory, imagination, bodies, landscape, aloneness, rituals, and identity are of interest to you.
A few of the people I’ll be posting about in the following months are: Margery Kempe and Tehching Hsieh and Jean Rhys and the Desert Mothers and many others, if that helps you know more about what this Substack is about.
It’s about mysticism, animals, mountains, gods, rocks and myths. It’s about caves and other enclosed spaces.
For example, upcoming posts are on the following topics:
☾ Cynic philosophy
☾ Anchoresses, acedia and hedgehog skin belts
☾ Loneliness and the imagination
☾ Insomnia
☾ Domesticity and adventure
And on and on.
