#quotes keziah

[lyralu91]

Still holding out for season two... I live on hope and fanfiction.

Quotes by Nitya Prakash

[lifehunted]

demigod family tree + keziah's connections to it (+ hallibell)

includes my own hcs for sibling age order, + melina's inclusion as far as all the clues are pointing. (also marialle again, owned by @/caputvulpinum, because sometimes she is here)

pop out or right click for a better view i guess. yeesh

[kammartinez]

By Keziah Weir

Frieda Hughes and I are an hour into our conversation when Wyddfa the snowy owl enters the chat. With some coaxing, he has hopped down the hallway, lined with woven rugs, to perch next to Hughes in her high-ceilinged kitchen. The pair of them, framed by a Zoom square, are in their home in Wales, where they live with 12 other owls, plus “five chinchillas,” Hughes says, “one aging ferret, a python called Shirley, and the two rescue huskies.” By publication of this piece, she has added a fourteenth owl.

Wyddfa, who is so dapper that he immediately elicits very silly comments from this interviewer—Hello, sir! He’s a little gentleman!—joined the household in 2016 after a zoo could no longer care for him because of a damaged wing; another of the owls has “wonky feet.” All of them have an avian forebear, without whom the parliament might never have found their way into Hughes’s care: an orphaned fledgling, now the eponymous subject of her new book, George: A Magpie Memoir (Avid Reader Press). The book chronicles the five months in 2007 during which Hughes hand-raised the magpie after finding it tossed from a nest in her garden. “I had no idea how much I was going to fall in love with that bird,” Hughes tells me. “Oh, dear.”

London-born Hughes, a painter and poet, describes her growing up as peripatetic. “I felt as if the ground on which I stood was constantly changing and shifting,” she writes in the introduction to George, “because, following the suicide of my mother, Sylvia Plath, on 11 February 1963, my father, Ted Hughes, found it difficult to settle.” Her parents play a small role on the memoir’s pages, though the reverberations of their loss are felt throughout; most explicitly, Hughes notes the surreal feeling of strangers knowing, or believing to know, the intimacies of her personal history. (In the early aughts, the filmmakers behind the 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sylvia requested that Hughes grant them the right to use Plath’s poems. The film, Hughes wrote in her own poem, “My Mother,” would be “for anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven, / Orphaning children.” Needless to say, she did not grant the request.)

As a child, the ability to keep animals became an elusive sign of permanence—“if I had a pet it should mean that I’d have found a home in which to be stationary,” she writes—something she says she has finally found. 

During the five months of George, Hughes was grappling with the impending dissolution of a marriage—she and her husband had, three years earlier, moved together from his native Australia to Wales and he longed to return home—and her own chronic fatigue. An incessantly needy and increasingly tricksy young magpie proved to be a consuming diversion for Hughes, though not everyone was as charmed by his penchant for stealing food off plates or landing on heads. “Oh, there’s a magpie on the sofa,” Hughes quotes one visitor saying “with an offhand sort of grimace.” As a reader, it’s hard not to fall a little in love with him, an attachment aided by Hughes’s illustrations of him that run throughout the text.

Hughes has long been attracted to what she describes as “the wounded and the limping.” As a child, she says, “there were lots of little tragedies because I wanted to save everything, and couldn’t”—a theme that continues in her memoir. “If only I could have found it before the cat and the fly eggs,” she writes of another orphaned bird that died in her care, “if only I had a magic wand.” Still, as much as she acknowledges the difficult inevitability of death, she clocks lifeforce all around too. Of the wiggly garden creatures she collects to feed to baby George: “If worms had only a single thought in their little nematode bodies, it was that they wanted to LIVE.”

Before our interview, Hughes had been riding around the countryside on her motorbike when it broke down, stranding her, but she seems unbothered by the hiccup outside of apologizing that it had made her late for the call. There’s a forward momentum to her, a sort of indefatigable sense of thrust. One accepts difficulty, and moves forward. “He’s stuck on the ground,” she says fondly of Wyddfa, before we say goodbye—but “he makes the most of it.” 

Here, we discuss George, learning to open up after years of secrecy, and how to love despite the promise of loss.

Vanity Fair: I’m always interested in the why now of memoir. What made you want to revisit this time with George?

Frieda Hughes: Well, actually, I wrote it as George happened. A year later, I turned it into a book and then I tried to get it published. I had a publisher who was interested and then, I'll be perfectly frank, my brother committed suicide, and I thought I can't actually cope with the book and dealing with my brother's death at the same time, and so I put it on the back burner.

When, finally, my brother's affairs were all sorted out, and everything else, I thought, okay, I can revisit the book, I can get back to my art, I can get back to my painting and my poetry. I think I probably rewrote the book over the following years. Then I wrote an article about keeping owls for the Financial Times, and Cecil Gayford, my editor, saw this article and said to my agent, would Frieda consider writing about her love for birds, and she said, well, she already has. 

I have a new appreciation for magpies after reading the book—I had always really loved crows and ravens, but I hadn't thought so much about magpies. 

Where I live in the country, magpies are not regarded with great affection. They're regarded as pests and killers of baby birds. They get an awful lot of bad press, but in fact, all corvids are more interested in clearing up dead things. Ravens are apparently the supreme intelligence of the corvids; crows are very serious—so smart, so clever, but very, very serious. Magpies are complete imps, absolutely mischievous, curious. Honestly, I swear they have a sense of humor.

I remember a couple of girlfriends coming to visit and one of them was taking loads of photographs, and George was performing for them. He sat on my head, he nibbled my eyelashes, which is a bit unnerving because I could feel his beak against my eyeball, but he was adorable, and afterwards, my friend contacted me and said, "Frieda, I took all these photos and you can hardly see him. He's just a little bird." The thing is, we can't photograph the personality, can we, and that's what's so frustrating. His personality was extraordinary, and one of the things that really hooked its way into my heart was the fact that he related to me. The dogs would come up for a pet or a stroke or a snack, but George would look at what I was doing and play with it. When I was doing sketches of him, he would come and sit on the paper and try and pull the lines off the paper. 

He was probably only a couple of days old when you found him. I wondered how you think that played into the attachment that you had to George, that you had rescued him and that he needed you.

Hugely, because the more needy and desperate an animal or bird is, the higher up the priority list they come. George really needed feeding. He had the droopy wing, I didn't even know if he would ever learn to feed himself. It wasn't until I was working in the garden and I would uncover, on more than one occasion, a dead mouse, and George would be watching and suddenly, he appears and grabs the mouse and flies off and I thought, you know what? I think George is going to be fine. 

It is such a different project to raise an animal with the hope that they will be able to return to the wild. I think that's something that most people don't experience. Usually, you're raising an animal who you hope will be with you till the very end. In some ways, your experience seems almost much more like child-rearing where the goal is for children to grow up and take care of themselves.

In George's case, I was very, very torn. Part of me wanted him to stay, desperately. But it doesn't matter how much we love people or animals. At some point, we are going to have to let go, if we don't die first. They are going to go off to a new life; children grow up and leave home. Some parents are really happy about that, other parents, less so.

It's the same with partners. Sometimes we die, sometimes we fall out of love. We only borrow people. I believe in making the most of it, but also I believe in not ever keeping anything or anyone prisoner of one's own affectionate imposition. There are people I love, but if they feel that they need to go, I ain't going to be the one to stop them. I would only wish them wings, as it were. Loving people and animals so that you can let them go when you need to, if you ever need to, I think that is the best—difficult, but the best.

In the book, you wrote about your now ex-husband. There was a mirroring going on—him wanting to go back to where he was from, and dealing with that in the relationship as you were also dealing with the fact that your bird was wanting to go back to the wild, where he was from.

Yes, very much. He had said that he wanted to move back when he got old, only he wasn't able to tell me what old meant. He was 14 years older than me, so he was 14 years ahead of where my head was. He, too, ultimately needed his freedom. One might make all the effort one could to make things nice, but if somebody wants to go, they want to go—and also, quite often, by the time they want to go, we are quite glad for them to go.

In George's case, not. But having said that, he was complicated by these bad habits he developed, like the one of jumping on heads, which scared my elderly neighbor to the point where she wouldn't go out of the house if there were magpies in the garden. Hence the aviary, that enormous aviary, now populated by six very large Eurasian eagle owls.

They are alluded to at the very end of the book. I want to hear about who you have right now.

The first owl was Arthur, with the broken wing. Three of the owls that I have were given to me by other people who could no longer look after them; one had an operation on his shoulder, and another one was just incredibly sick and had diabetes, and so I got these owls and they came with two eggs. So I bought an incubator and hatched Charlie and Mac in 2015, and then two years later came Eddie, and they are fabulous. They're very, very handleable. They come in the house for a couple of hours at night just to play around in the kitchen

In the time period of the book you were working on a collection of autobiographical poems, which seemed to take a lot out of you emotionally. Over the years, how have you juggled a desire for a certain amount of privacy, but then also wanting to draw from your life and feelings in your writing? 

I'm working on balancing it all the time, because the answer is I'm not sure how to balance it. When I was younger and my father was still alive, the wish to be private on his behalf, not to say... I'll give you an example. The other kids would come back from a weekend and say, we did this and we did that and we did the other. I wasn't ever sure what I could give away or not give away, what would be okay.

In my first book of poems, it became really difficult because that's where we start, with our innermost emotions and feelings. I had all these poems boiling away. For years, I wrote poetry and never told anybody. Ultimately, I worked up to showing my dad my poems. He'd have criticism, and finally one day—I think I must have been about 15, 16, 17—I said, "Daddy, don't you have anything good to say?" He looked at me in complete surprise and he said, "But I thought you knew they were very good. I was only mentioning the bits that need pushing.” From then on, he would say, “Okay, this bit's brilliant and that works really well.” He was a very good teacher, but at the same time, I was trying not to read any of his poetry or my mother's poetry because I didn't want to be influenced.

My first book I wrote while I had chronic fatigue. I wanted to be autobiographical and I didn't dare. I'd trained myself so seriously to be private for the family's sake. So allegory became my best friend. And then in 2007, I set myself certain parameters for the autobiographical poetry book, 45. One was that I could be open about myself. When you say it must have been emotionally taxing or challenging, it was, because it was like stripping my skin off because I wasn't used to it. I hadn't had that practice.

In the end, as I get older, I think, does it matter? I'm getting older. One day, we're going to die. If I was publishing my autobiography at the age of 96, I wouldn't care much about what I put in it. I'd just put everything in it, but I'd have to be 96 because then I know I was probably on the way out. So I don't know. I'm working on it. 

You wrote in the book about the strange ways that either people react to you once they realize who your parents are.

It's very odd because until they bring it up, I labor under the illusion that I'm the only person standing where I'm standing. The moment they bring it up, I feel the spot on where I'm standing is now quite crowded with all three of us.

In your poem “Mother,” you’re writing about the strange idea that there are people who are portraying your parents in different ways and dramatizing, or writing biographies or making movies. Is that something that has gotten easier, emotionally, as you have dealt with it over the course of your life?

One of the difficulties is when people make up whole sentences and relationships and ways of speaking and there's nothing to support it. I've been very determined to make a home in which I feel safe, and create my own support and not look at those things because there's no point. I could rant and rave. I'm not going to change anything. 

So poetry is where I put things I feel very, very strongly about, and reading a poem like that on stage, you feel as though you're delivering it as a killer blow. It might only be for one moment in the ether, but it's something. When people reinvent my parents, it'd be like anybody reinventing yours or anybody else's parents. It's wounding and it takes them away. 

When articles or books have come out that depict negative versions of your parents’ relationship, do you just try to steer clear of that as well?

Well, they're rehashing it. It's been written about a lot. There was the very good recent biography by Heather Clark, Red Comet, very thorough. I had to read that for permissions, and I thought it was a really masterful piece of work. It didn't impose judgment and it didn't guess at anything. Everything was backed by research and reading, and for that reason, I found it really impressive. 

You have this rule, you wrote, to live each day the best you can no matter what—having experienced significant and public loss, and then also dealing with chronic health problems, how have you kept that up?

I can't believe I was in such pain when I was looking after George. I still get back pains, I still have problems with it, but I'm so much better. I work out at the gym three times a week, I do the gardening. I'm actually in better nick than I was then, and although they say that we never get rid of chronic fatigue, it's like a little warning sign; if I ever feel that coming, I now know, hey, I'm doing something wrong

A journalist actually asked me after my brother died, "Do you now want to kill yourself?" Part of me wanted to slam the phone down on her, but I thought, I actually think I know where that question's coming from. Because it would be what's in everybody's mind, or certainly a lot of people's mind, she just spoke it, she just put it out there. I'm the only one left in my little family. Somebody has to live life like it matters. My attitude is very much that I need, for my sake and for theirs, to make my life matter. 

[alexzalben]

Starz Renews Outlander For An Eighth And FINAL Season

As the headline says, that's it for Outlander. In addition, Starz has greenlit the 10 episode prequel series, "Blood of My Blood." Quotes, as well as a synopsis for the prequel and a video from the stars of the flagship show, below:

The 10-episode prequel series, “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” will center on the lives and relationship of Jamie Fraser’s parents, Brian Fraser and Ellen MacKenzie. 

“‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ is, at its heart, a love story. It will explore what lengths a person will go to find love in a time when love is considered a luxury, and when marriages are made strategically, often for political or financial gain,” says Matthew B. Roberts, showrunner and executive producer. He continues, “the title is a nod to Jamie Fraser’s marriage vow to Claire and there will be several names and faces that ‘Outlander’ fans will know and recognize. Jamie and Claire’s TV story may be coming to an end with season eight, but Diana is continuing on with their literary journey in her wonderful book series and is working diligently on book ten. With Jamie and Claire, and now Brian and Ellen, there is still so much more to come in the ‘Outlander’ universe, and we cannot wait to continue sharing these stories with our dedicated fans.”

“For nearly a decade ‘Outlander’ has won the hearts of audiences worldwide and we’re pleased to bring Claire and Jamie’s epic love story to a proper conclusion,” said Kathryn Busby, President, Original Programming for STARZ. “But before we close this chapter there is plenty of their passionate story to tell over the course of 26 new episodes and even more to explore of this dynamic world and its origin story. We’re thrilled to continue to partner with Matthew, Maril and Ronald and can’t wait to see where their alluring storytelling takes us next.”

“Outlander” showrunner and executive producer Matthew B. Roberts is signed on to write “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” and will also serve as showrunner and executive producer of the prequel series. In addition to Roberts, Ronald D. Moore will also executive produce the prequel along with Maril Davis. Moore and Davis developed “Outlander” for television, under their production banner Tall Ship Productions. Story Mining & Supply Company will also executive produce, and Diana Gabaldon will serve as a consulting producer. “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” will be produced by Sony Pictures Television. STARZ’s Executive Vice President, Original Programming, Karen Bailey, will oversee the prequel on behalf of STARZ. “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” will be available across all STARZ platforms in the U.S. and Canada and on LIONSGATE+ in the UK, Australia, Latin America and Brazil. The eighth season of the flagship series, “Outlander” will consist of ten episodes, following an extended 16-episode seventh season, which is currently filming in Scotland and will air this summer on STARZ. 

“Outlander” stars Caitríona Balfe as “Claire Fraser,” Sam Heughan as “Jamie Fraser,” Sophie Skelton as “Brianna MacKenzie,” Richard Rankin as “Roger MacKenzie,” John Bell as “Young Ian,” David Berry as “Lord John Grey,” Caitlin O’Ryan as “Lizzie Beardsley,” Paul Gorman as “Josiah Beardsley” and “Keziah Beardsley,” and newcomers Charles Vandervaart as “William Ransom,” Izzy Meikle-Small as “Rachel Hunter” and Joey Phillips as “Denzell Hunter.”

[lyralu91]

(except it doesn't and I will never stop craving this man)

— Richard Siken

[stardusteyes]

More Zanma Taisen Demonbane insanity™️ pt 2

Alright, here’s more weird shit from this book! I told you I was just getting started!

Starting off strong with this chick, who is apparently Nodens.

Yup, Nodens got hit by the Anime Beam too.

She is also a whole living ship (similar to both the humanized grimoires and the Deus Machina robots) that the King of Ilek-Vad AKA Randolph Carter pilots. Or piloted, I should say before his self sacrifice.

She is said to be representative of the ultimate good, with “a pure soul and an indomitable spirit” to quote the fan translation. Damn.

Also she has the silver arm Nuada Airgetlám.

(Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this story wants us to ship Carter with her? I mean I'm not necessarily against the idea I guess but it feels weird here)

This appears to be this universe’s version of Keziah Mason. I have no idea what that first name is supposed to be (I’m 90% sure the katakana spells out Sororu, but I can’t connect it to any possible name for the life of me), but that last name is undoubtedly Nahab.

And if you want more proof, she has Brown Jenkins as her familiar, along with Walter Gilman and Frank Elwood from Witch House as her underlings! (RIP)

Anyways, I’m guessing this witch probably found some way to make herself immortal and keep her looking young and hot, if she is that same character, assuming she’s not a descendant or something.

It seems she works for Black Lodge, taking on a similar role to what Dr. West had in the original continuity.

Speaking of Brown Jenkins, I present you… him.

No, I’m not kidding.

Brown Jenkins is a marketable plushie. My god. I never thought I’d see the day.

I don’t think any other words are necessary.

I also didn’t know where else to put this but straight up Conan the fucking Barbarian is here too! I mean yeah, his stories were always interconnected with the Mythos but I’m still surprised he’s here!

Here’s, he’s called Conan the Savage, a member of S.T.E.E.L. who was recently awakened to modern times, though nothing I’ve read clarifies how. I’m assuming he also might have gone a little cuckoo in the process, based on the name.

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Keziah Weir

Frieda Hughes and I are an hour into our conversation when Wyddfa the snowy owl enters the chat. With some coaxing, he has hopped down the hallway, lined with woven rugs, to perch next to Hughes in her high-ceilinged kitchen. The pair of them, framed by a Zoom square, are in their home in Wales, where they live with 12 other owls, plus “five chinchillas,” Hughes says, “one aging ferret, a python called Shirley, and the two rescue huskies.” By publication of this piece, she has added a fourteenth owl.

Wyddfa, who is so dapper that he immediately elicits very silly comments from this interviewer—Hello, sir! He’s a little gentleman!—joined the household in 2016 after a zoo could no longer care for him because of a damaged wing; another of the owls has “wonky feet.” All of them have an avian forebear, without whom the parliament might never have found their way into Hughes’s care: an orphaned fledgling, now the eponymous subject of her new book, George: A Magpie Memoir (Avid Reader Press). The book chronicles the five months in 2007 during which Hughes hand-raised the magpie after finding it tossed from a nest in her garden. “I had no idea how much I was going to fall in love with that bird,” Hughes tells me. “Oh, dear.”

London-born Hughes, a painter and poet, describes her growing up as peripatetic. “I felt as if the ground on which I stood was constantly changing and shifting,” she writes in the introduction to George, “because, following the suicide of my mother, Sylvia Plath, on 11 February 1963, my father, Ted Hughes, found it difficult to settle.” Her parents play a small role on the memoir’s pages, though the reverberations of their loss are felt throughout; most explicitly, Hughes notes the surreal feeling of strangers knowing, or believing to know, the intimacies of her personal history. (In the early aughts, the filmmakers behind the 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sylvia requested that Hughes grant them the right to use Plath’s poems. The film, Hughes wrote in her own poem, “My Mother,” would be “for anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven, / Orphaning children.” Needless to say, she did not grant the request.)

As a child, the ability to keep animals became an elusive sign of permanence—“if I had a pet it should mean that I’d have found a home in which to be stationary,” she writes—something she says she has finally found. 

During the five months of George, Hughes was grappling with the impending dissolution of a marriage—she and her husband had, three years earlier, moved together from his native Australia to Wales and he longed to return home—and her own chronic fatigue. An incessantly needy and increasingly tricksy young magpie proved to be a consuming diversion for Hughes, though not everyone was as charmed by his penchant for stealing food off plates or landing on heads. “Oh, there’s a magpie on the sofa,” Hughes quotes one visitor saying “with an offhand sort of grimace.” As a reader, it’s hard not to fall a little in love with him, an attachment aided by Hughes’s illustrations of him that run throughout the text.

Hughes has long been attracted to what she describes as “the wounded and the limping.” As a child, she says, “there were lots of little tragedies because I wanted to save everything, and couldn’t”—a theme that continues in her memoir. “If only I could have found it before the cat and the fly eggs,” she writes of another orphaned bird that died in her care, “if only I had a magic wand.” Still, as much as she acknowledges the difficult inevitability of death, she clocks lifeforce all around too. Of the wiggly garden creatures she collects to feed to baby George: “If worms had only a single thought in their little nematode bodies, it was that they wanted to LIVE.”

Before our interview, Hughes had been riding around the countryside on her motorbike when it broke down, stranding her, but she seems unbothered by the hiccup outside of apologizing that it had made her late for the call. There’s a forward momentum to her, a sort of indefatigable sense of thrust. One accepts difficulty, and moves forward. “He’s stuck on the ground,” she says fondly of Wyddfa, before we say goodbye—but “he makes the most of it.” 

Here, we discuss George, learning to open up after years of secrecy, and how to love despite the promise of loss.

Vanity Fair: I’m always interested in the why now of memoir. What made you want to revisit this time with George?

Frieda Hughes: Well, actually, I wrote it as George happened. A year later, I turned it into a book and then I tried to get it published. I had a publisher who was interested and then, I'll be perfectly frank, my brother committed suicide, and I thought I can't actually cope with the book and dealing with my brother's death at the same time, and so I put it on the back burner.

When, finally, my brother's affairs were all sorted out, and everything else, I thought, okay, I can revisit the book, I can get back to my art, I can get back to my painting and my poetry. I think I probably rewrote the book over the following years. Then I wrote an article about keeping owls for the Financial Times, and Cecil Gayford, my editor, saw this article and said to my agent, would Frieda consider writing about her love for birds, and she said, well, she already has. 

I have a new appreciation for magpies after reading the book—I had always really loved crows and ravens, but I hadn't thought so much about magpies. 

Where I live in the country, magpies are not regarded with great affection. They're regarded as pests and killers of baby birds. They get an awful lot of bad press, but in fact, all corvids are more interested in clearing up dead things. Ravens are apparently the supreme intelligence of the corvids; crows are very serious—so smart, so clever, but very, very serious. Magpies are complete imps, absolutely mischievous, curious. Honestly, I swear they have a sense of humor.

I remember a couple of girlfriends coming to visit and one of them was taking loads of photographs, and George was performing for them. He sat on my head, he nibbled my eyelashes, which is a bit unnerving because I could feel his beak against my eyeball, but he was adorable, and afterwards, my friend contacted me and said, "Frieda, I took all these photos and you can hardly see him. He's just a little bird." The thing is, we can't photograph the personality, can we, and that's what's so frustrating. His personality was extraordinary, and one of the things that really hooked its way into my heart was the fact that he related to me. The dogs would come up for a pet or a stroke or a snack, but George would look at what I was doing and play with it. When I was doing sketches of him, he would come and sit on the paper and try and pull the lines off the paper. 

He was probably only a couple of days old when you found him. I wondered how you think that played into the attachment that you had to George, that you had rescued him and that he needed you.

Hugely, because the more needy and desperate an animal or bird is, the higher up the priority list they come. George really needed feeding. He had the droopy wing, I didn't even know if he would ever learn to feed himself. It wasn't until I was working in the garden and I would uncover, on more than one occasion, a dead mouse, and George would be watching and suddenly, he appears and grabs the mouse and flies off and I thought, you know what? I think George is going to be fine. 

It is such a different project to raise an animal with the hope that they will be able to return to the wild. I think that's something that most people don't experience. Usually, you're raising an animal who you hope will be with you till the very end. In some ways, your experience seems almost much more like child-rearing where the goal is for children to grow up and take care of themselves.

In George's case, I was very, very torn. Part of me wanted him to stay, desperately. But it doesn't matter how much we love people or animals. At some point, we are going to have to let go, if we don't die first. They are going to go off to a new life; children grow up and leave home. Some parents are really happy about that, other parents, less so.

It's the same with partners. Sometimes we die, sometimes we fall out of love. We only borrow people. I believe in making the most of it, but also I believe in not ever keeping anything or anyone prisoner of one's own affectionate imposition. There are people I love, but if they feel that they need to go, I ain't going to be the one to stop them. I would only wish them wings, as it were. Loving people and animals so that you can let them go when you need to, if you ever need to, I think that is the best—difficult, but the best.

In the book, you wrote about your now ex-husband. There was a mirroring going on—him wanting to go back to where he was from, and dealing with that in the relationship as you were also dealing with the fact that your bird was wanting to go back to the wild, where he was from.

Yes, very much. He had said that he wanted to move back when he got old, only he wasn't able to tell me what old meant. He was 14 years older than me, so he was 14 years ahead of where my head was. He, too, ultimately needed his freedom. One might make all the effort one could to make things nice, but if somebody wants to go, they want to go—and also, quite often, by the time they want to go, we are quite glad for them to go.

In George's case, not. But having said that, he was complicated by these bad habits he developed, like the one of jumping on heads, which scared my elderly neighbor to the point where she wouldn't go out of the house if there were magpies in the garden. Hence the aviary, that enormous aviary, now populated by six very large Eurasian eagle owls.

They are alluded to at the very end of the book. I want to hear about who you have right now.

The first owl was Arthur, with the broken wing. Three of the owls that I have were given to me by other people who could no longer look after them; one had an operation on his shoulder, and another one was just incredibly sick and had diabetes, and so I got these owls and they came with two eggs. So I bought an incubator and hatched Charlie and Mac in 2015, and then two years later came Eddie, and they are fabulous. They're very, very handleable. They come in the house for a couple of hours at night just to play around in the kitchen

In the time period of the book you were working on a collection of autobiographical poems, which seemed to take a lot out of you emotionally. Over the years, how have you juggled a desire for a certain amount of privacy, but then also wanting to draw from your life and feelings in your writing? 

I'm working on balancing it all the time, because the answer is I'm not sure how to balance it. When I was younger and my father was still alive, the wish to be private on his behalf, not to say... I'll give you an example. The other kids would come back from a weekend and say, we did this and we did that and we did the other. I wasn't ever sure what I could give away or not give away, what would be okay.

In my first book of poems, it became really difficult because that's where we start, with our innermost emotions and feelings. I had all these poems boiling away. For years, I wrote poetry and never told anybody. Ultimately, I worked up to showing my dad my poems. He'd have criticism, and finally one day—I think I must have been about 15, 16, 17—I said, "Daddy, don't you have anything good to say?" He looked at me in complete surprise and he said, "But I thought you knew they were very good. I was only mentioning the bits that need pushing.” From then on, he would say, “Okay, this bit's brilliant and that works really well.” He was a very good teacher, but at the same time, I was trying not to read any of his poetry or my mother's poetry because I didn't want to be influenced.

My first book I wrote while I had chronic fatigue. I wanted to be autobiographical and I didn't dare. I'd trained myself so seriously to be private for the family's sake. So allegory became my best friend. And then in 2007, I set myself certain parameters for the autobiographical poetry book, 45. One was that I could be open about myself. When you say it must have been emotionally taxing or challenging, it was, because it was like stripping my skin off because I wasn't used to it. I hadn't had that practice.

In the end, as I get older, I think, does it matter? I'm getting older. One day, we're going to die. If I was publishing my autobiography at the age of 96, I wouldn't care much about what I put in it. I'd just put everything in it, but I'd have to be 96 because then I know I was probably on the way out. So I don't know. I'm working on it. 

You wrote in the book about the strange ways that either people react to you once they realize who your parents are.

It's very odd because until they bring it up, I labor under the illusion that I'm the only person standing where I'm standing. The moment they bring it up, I feel the spot on where I'm standing is now quite crowded with all three of us.

In your poem “Mother,” you’re writing about the strange idea that there are people who are portraying your parents in different ways and dramatizing, or writing biographies or making movies. Is that something that has gotten easier, emotionally, as you have dealt with it over the course of your life?

One of the difficulties is when people make up whole sentences and relationships and ways of speaking and there's nothing to support it. I've been very determined to make a home in which I feel safe, and create my own support and not look at those things because there's no point. I could rant and rave. I'm not going to change anything. 

So poetry is where I put things I feel very, very strongly about, and reading a poem like that on stage, you feel as though you're delivering it as a killer blow. It might only be for one moment in the ether, but it's something. When people reinvent my parents, it'd be like anybody reinventing yours or anybody else's parents. It's wounding and it takes them away. 

When articles or books have come out that depict negative versions of your parents’ relationship, do you just try to steer clear of that as well?

Well, they're rehashing it. It's been written about a lot. There was the very good recent biography by Heather Clark, Red Comet, very thorough. I had to read that for permissions, and I thought it was a really masterful piece of work. It didn't impose judgment and it didn't guess at anything. Everything was backed by research and reading, and for that reason, I found it really impressive. 

You have this rule, you wrote, to live each day the best you can no matter what—having experienced significant and public loss, and then also dealing with chronic health problems, how have you kept that up?

I can't believe I was in such pain when I was looking after George. I still get back pains, I still have problems with it, but I'm so much better. I work out at the gym three times a week, I do the gardening. I'm actually in better nick than I was then, and although they say that we never get rid of chronic fatigue, it's like a little warning sign; if I ever feel that coming, I now know, hey, I'm doing something wrong

A journalist actually asked me after my brother died, "Do you now want to kill yourself?" Part of me wanted to slam the phone down on her, but I thought, I actually think I know where that question's coming from. Because it would be what's in everybody's mind, or certainly a lot of people's mind, she just spoke it, she just put it out there. I'm the only one left in my little family. Somebody has to live life like it matters. My attitude is very much that I need, for my sake and for theirs, to make my life matter. 



[stephen-wolff]

—¿Y tú? ¿Por qué viniste aquí?

—Decidí dejar mi puesto como Auror Local de Windhill... Fracasé. Fracasé cuando Selene Woollard apareció muerta.

—¿Qué pasó?

—Apareció muerta una mañana de domingo... El 28 de enero del 2028... Era una niña...

—La muerte solo debería socorrer a los ancianos... ¿Por qué dices que fracasaste?

—Debía proteger a esa gente, Stephen. Como Auror local debía proteger a la comunidad mágica, pero también a la no mágica. Es una vergüenza y un dolor inmenso no conseguir algo así.

—Debe de ser muy duro, sí... Aunque... Hay cosas peores, amigo. Yo también perdí a una chica que era un niña... Pero la diferencia entre tú y yo, es que tú la perdiste tratando de protegerla. Yo solo estaba jugando a vivir más deprisa. 

—¿Y cómo...?

—Fue un accidente. La subí en mi moto, y cogí la carretera... De pronto, empecé a conducir tan rápido, como si tuviera mucha prisa por llegar a alguna parte, y al llegar a una curva, ella salió despedida.

—¿Y a dónde querías llegar...?

—A ninguna parte... Solo quería volar... Sentirme libre, saber lo que se sentía al surcar una carretera, a 200 kilómetros por hora... ero lo que sentí, no querría haberlo sentido nunca.

—¿Era tu novia?

—Sí... Era mi novia. La única que he tenido antes de Alice.  Mi primer amor.

—Seguramente hiciste feliz a esa chica, amigo...

[lyralu91]

"Why do I fear becoming a river?"

[wizard-fredweasleyii]

«​No soporto a los simpatiquillos... No sé si llegarás a ser como el amigo de Stephen, pero no debes quedarte muy lejos. Eres similar a tus primos y tus primos son insoportables».  

Keziah Mortimer

[keziahmortimer]

«Quien posea este diamante dominará el mundo, pero también conocerá todas sus desgracias. Solo Dios, o una mujer, pueden llevarlo con impunidad».

—Edra Gastrell

[frindleworth]

It is so rapid that you cannot distinguish the Chuggas from the Choos.

Blood Mage

[lyralu91]

THIS is the James I wish to write.

Joaquín Nin, from a letter to Anaïs Nin, featured in Reunited: The Correspondence of Anais and Joaquin Nin, 1933-1940

[americaackerman]

¿Paz al salir a pasear? Si yo creo que me dais alergia...

Keziah Mortimer

[legoobsessionist]

It's OK, there is both a noodle bar *and* a nude bar.

[lyralu91]

Lorna ❤️ 🌹 Zilpha 🖤🥀

Love should calm the storm inside of you, not provoke it.

k.b. // drowning, resurfacing: notes on heartbreak & healing by frankie riley