Sunday Retrospective: In Conversation with Caro Giles

Enter into the world of the carer-creative... Plus a collaborator call-out

A full twelve lunar cycles have passed since the hardback edition of Caro Giles’s memoir, Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky was published, and what events that moon of ours has witnessed.

We look up to steady ourselves in times of earthbound tumult and trauma – be they personal, political or otherwise – hoping that the cycles of our “timeless” moon may “offer a sense of return and renewal.” Hope. For though it’s ever-changing across its month-long cycle, it’s predictable. The kind of change we can cope with. Even when stubborn clouds obscure it for days and sometimes weeks at a time, we know intrinsically it is still there. Still waxing, waning and causing us to catch our breath when it appears suddenly bold, bright and big like an unexpected gift.

We forget, momentarily.

Welcome to What Now? with Lindsay Johnstone. I’m a writer, reviewer and workshop facilitator based in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2022, I ended a three-year psychotherapy journey asking myself, ‘What now?’ I vowed I’d replace those thrice-weekly therapeutic hours with something, but wasn’t then sure quite what.

Enter Substack.

Here, each Sunday, I hold the necessary space for myself and others entering midlife while very much still figuring things out. This week’s post is part of the Cost of Caring Series. If it’s within your means to upgrade to the Membership for access to the archive, our Friday Chat thread, my courses and my podcast excerpting my memoir, Held in Mind, I’d be so delighted to welcome you in. I’m here writing because you are here reading.

and maybe that’s OK

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Hi friends,

The quote at the top of today’s post is a sneak peek of my forthcoming words for Glasgow Review of Books on one of the most affecting memoirs about motherhood, caring, divorce and our relationship to the natural world that I have read.

Caro Giles

celebrates its paperback release this week and you can buy it here from my local indie, Mount Florida Books, through bookshop.org.

Caro also wrote about the experience of launching work like this into the world this week:

A Year In Moons

This Sunday, I wanted to invite you all to share half an hour or so with us in a conversation from August 2023. I’ll say no more, other than encourage you to click through to watch and then return to this post if you’d like to collaborate with me in a similar co-authored video conversation. There’s more on this at the bottom of this post, as well as all the details you need to take part.

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A Collaborator Call-out

This Series is now OPEN to collaborators, and I’d love to share time with others who class themselves as carergivers who also create. Maybe you’re also a parent-carer? Perhaps you give care to a partner, a relative, a friend? I’m interested in all the ways that your caring responsibility intersects with your creative practice.

Interested? Here’s the Google Form you need…

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I’ll be back with you next Sunday with an intimate piece on grief for my Members’ community, prompted by the letter exchange, Memories of the Future, between

anna wharton

and

Lily Dunn

. We’re two letters in and I am hooked. If you’re yet to delve in, please do.

Lindsay x