My dear Tŷ Newydd.
Always a kind of homecoming, this lane to the centre of writing again.
In my twenties, I drove it for the first time with trepidation. Writing was a moth inside my throat, never before let out.
I thought perhaps the feather-light wings of my work would disintegrate along the ear canal.
But you opened the door, took me in to the beautiful ink.
Since then, so many doors.
And last weekend, in the listening of teaching at Tŷ Newydd again, a psychedelia of butterflies!
No one in the library except me and these ferocious creatures in my book, who won't shut up even for a librarian. Especially not for a librarian. Church bells and bluebells outside ringing and ringing. Graves like old books in the churchyard.
The library's covered in scaffolding. They're trying to solve the leak in the roof. I've got scaffolding up around my novel too. Stopping up leaks. Exhausted workmen crawling all over it. Promised it'd be done in X number of years like a bad builder didn't I. Sometimes novelling's a fight to the death. Here lieth the body, say the graves. Whose body though, say the creatures. Enough chatter already.
Ma'r gwanwyn yn galed hefyd. Toman o waith i ffermwyr dros y dyddia diwethaf i gadw ŵyn newydd-anedig a'u mamau yn fyw. Gafo ni genllysg cyn yr heulwen, ac wedyn daeth yr ias 'ma o oerfel eto. Tywydd garw i eni unrhywbeth. Ond ma'r tripled 'ma o ŵyn wedi goroesi i brancio. Bore 'ma o'n i'n drysu rhwng y fechan yn galw o fyny grisia a sŵn yr ŵyn. Yn y cae, ma nhw'n galw nôl a mlaen fel ni, yn rhwymo edefyn galwad trwy'r awyr wen.
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Spring is hard too. A heap of work for farmers in these days to keep newborn lambs and their mothers alive. We had hail before the sunshine came, and then came this shiver of cold again. Hard weather for birthing anything. But these triplets survived it all to spring about. In the mornings, I confuse the sound of our little one calling from upstairs with the sound of the lambs outside. In the field they call back and forth as we do, attach the thread of a call through the white air.
Diolch i'r gynulleidfa hael yn Bangor, ein trysor o ddinas fach, a ddaeth yn llu i'r digwyddiad ddwbl yn Pontio a Blue Sky wythnos yma i ddathlu lansiad Folding Rock, i ddarllen a gwrando, ac i ymhyfrydu mewn llên gyfoes ysblennydd o Gymru.
Thanks to the generous audience in Bangor, our gem of a little city, who came out in force to this double bill event this week in Pontio and Blue Sky, to celebrate Folding Rock magazine, to read, to listen, and to delight in the spectacular contemporary writing of Wales.
FOLDING ROCK magazine launch (issue 4: Telling Tales) and literary open mike Date: Tuesday 17.03.26
Time: 18:15pm
Venue: Pontio PL2 and then on to Blue Sky at 19:45pm onward for afterparty/writers open mike
Join the editors of the celebrated new literary magazine Folding Rock, to celebrate the launch their new issue, which has a broad ‘folklore’ theme. The Editors Kathryn Tann and Rob Harries and contributing editor Dr Alys Conran will present readings by some of the issue’s extraordinary writers and artists @jadebradforduk@marthabowen a @pandy_writes ac @abbypoulson at the launch in Pontio (PL2), to be followed by a post launch party/ open mike for writers afterwards in Blue Sky!
Free / All Welcome
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Lansiad Cylchgrawn FOLDING ROCK (rhifyn 4: Telling Tales) a meic agored lenyddol
Dyddiad: Dydd Mawrth 17.03.26
Amser: 6.15pm
Lleoliad: Pontio PL2 ac ymlaen wedyn i Blue Sky o 19:45pm ymlaen ar gyfer parti/meic agored lenyddol
Ymunwch a golygyddion y cylchgrawn lenyddol newydd Folding Rock, i ddathlu lansiad eu rhifyn newydd, sydd a ‘chwedloniaeth’ fel thema eang. Bydd y Golygyddion Kathryn Tann a Rob Harries, a Dr Alys Conran fel golygydd cyfrannol, yn cyflwyno darlleniadau gan rai o awduron ac artistiaid arbennig y rhifyn@jadebradforduk@marthabowen a @pandy_writes ac @abbypoulson yn y lansiad yn Pontio (PL2), sydd i’w ddilyn gan barti/ meic agored lenyddol wedyn yn Blue Sky!
Am Ddim/ Croeso i Bawb
In the Highlands I've come out to take a break from writing about Barcelona's textile industry and all I can see is the thread and fleece, the bobbins and lace, and the reams of soft textiles among the lichen, heather, frost, dew, and the gorgeous woolly cows of Moniack Mhor.
9am on a Monday. Poor time for you to read this - that's relevant. I'm on the train up to Scotland to think about giants.
A giant I'd cut from my novel, specifically. He's still standing there, playing the long game, waiting til I realise he endures.
I'm sitting with my cup of tea, whirring on as millions of other little humans commute to work too, and I'm thinking of giants of all kinds: mountains, trees, great old stars, nuclear power stations, or the processional giants of Barcelona tended to over generations in community centres, returning each festive day repainted, repaired.
In my home life, the giant shoulders around me are the mountains I live with in Eryri. The way they are usually portrayed makes them sublime, separate. A Tolkienesque imaginary landscape with little to say in daily life. That's not the kind of giant that interests me.
But I was reminded this week that these hills are giants with whom we share a tenderness, the familiar shoulders of giants with fingerprints, who have pervasive skincare issues, slow dilemmas, and a need for headspace. We can rarely hear them think, as we're so poorly attuned to slow things, and mountain time and sense must be so different to ours, our human lives so fleeting to them. Our individual visits to their slopes are just a tiny tickle, or the slight disturbance of a single strand of hair, if even that. Sometimes we do engage in things of seismic scale like quarrying or deforestation, which are a particular kind of obvious violence, but we're mostly invisible or inconsequential to them except in the collective effects we're having over generations. Erosion, climate change, species destruction. We must be mostly like radiation to them, our individual particles invisible and quick, like an insect's humming wings, or even more microscopic than that. But we are dangerous precisely because we are fleeting, inattentive. It's 8.55 now just past Crewe, thinking of why the giant in my novel is there, standing on La Rambla, turning his head slowly toward the approaching demonstration as it muscles through the city. He's there, whether I write him in or not. He's doing giant time. As are you if you're still reading!
