Welcome aboard The Life Boat
Writing from a windswept island about art, creativity, books and other buoyancy aids for turbulent times.
Hello and welcome to The Life Boat, a weekly newsletter and creative community.
This Life Boat from the Orkney Islands launches every week to bring you writing and art at the confluence of creativity, contemplative practice, nature and community.
Here’s what some regular readers say:
“Your weekly writing keeps me grounded in this busy, anxious time.”
“Your writing is unique, profound and lyrical.”
“I find your writing beautiful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking".
"You always visit interesting places & people, and your attention to detail is awe-inspiring, you are so centered, and I always learn something new from your posts."
“I have loved seeing your art work and reading your letters -- the depth, flow, light -- grace. So Orkney.”
I’m a visual artist who writes. I help other visual artists develop their writing as part of their creative and professional work.
I believe in creative work as a devotional practice, a place of refuge, a wise teacher and a means of connection. I love words and images. I love how they connect us across distances of geography, time and culture. I love how making and sharing our words and images teaches us about ourselves, each other and our fragile, gorgeous, troubled world.
The art critic Robert Hughes once said, in an address to the Royal Academy:
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water.
I love this idea that art can hold time, that a painting is like a vessel brimming with the moments of its making. Writing too, gathers time up, as each revision the author makes folds time over and over itself, lets its meanings and resonances deepen. The writer Sven Birkerts points out:
Art is an act of concentrated attention, and engaging with it asks us to match that level of attention. Our involvement with a genuine work of art…asks from us some of the same attention that first triggered that artist’s creative impulse.
Art contains the enormous compacted energy of its making and makes it available to others. It asks us to rise to its pitch, lifts us to its level, but also gifts us with a kind of energy in return, in the form of attention. It recalibrates us, offers a balance to the dissipating pull of information glut and electronic distractions. Art connects us with our own inwardness and depth, even as it entrains our attention on what is around us.
This is why we reach for good art and for good writing when we experience times of turbulence and storm, either inward or outward.
This is why I launched this little Life Boat. I want to share with you the art and writing that helps me to stay buoyant, and the creative practice that has been my own personal buoyancy aid. I want to help you find your own creativity and resilience, whether you build it out of words or pictures, or maybe both.
I hope my little Life Boat will sally forth into the storms to reach wherever you are and help you stay afloat too. She sets sail every Wednesday.
I look forward to voyaging with you.
Sam
To help others find The Life Boat, I'd be so grateful if you would consider sharing it or tagging a friend you'd like to invite.
Life has a quirky sense of humor. I forwarded a link to The Life Boat to my wife just now. A writer and painter in her own right. I hesitated for a second. The “Life Boat” symbolism turned my head to a living room wall. There, attached to one of Beth’s paintings, is a solid brass sign: “TO LIFE BOATS”, supported by a long pointed piece of solid metal. A left over from a former relationship/partner. She indeed had need of a life boat during our time together.
Finally, after receiving ECT, shock treatment, she considered herself a burden to me. That event provided a crystal clear window to understand what Ernest Hemingway meant, before he suicided, that ECT had taken away everything that had once made him a writer of considerable acclaim.
She left her job and moved back to “home” to live with her severely alcoholic mother and her younger schizophrenic sister. The Maelstrom.
We’ve not communicated since.
I occasionally go off on tangents.
Hi Samantha,
Now in possession of The Clearing, more than ever the expression, Pearls Before Swine, resonates with my view of your writing. For clarity, you and your writing are the “pearls.” The swine? Present and accounted for, though I do sometimes sniff out truffles.
Long ago I purchased a chapbook of poetry from a writer in England. As a bonus she included her preferred recipe for scones! An interesting touch. Certainly not a veiled complaint that I can’t find a recipe anywhere! More than likely I’ll find greater treasures on the pages of The Clearing.