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Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, consultant, and the creator and host of this podcast. For those of you just tuning in, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
This episode begins with a story from Jess Dekker, who shares musings on motherhood and a novel that slows her down. Here's more from Jess.
Jess Dekker: My name is Jess Decker and I'm a bookish content creator. I run the Bookstagram account @jessdeckerreads. I'm also a paralegal and a mom to an almost four-year-old daughter. As a parent, life can often feel chaotic, messy, like you're constantly running at top speed, multitasking your way through the day. At least I know that's how I feel a hundred percent of the time. And when I do get the chance to slow down, it's when my child is already asleep. When I get to relax, that's the time the guilt starts to set in. Should I have spent more time slowing down and playing with my child, cuddling with my child, instead of getting all those dishes done? It's a constant battle in my mind of so many tasks to do, not enough time, which a ultimately leads to anxiety and lack of patience, and then at the end of the day, exhaustion and guilt.
I rely on those moments that remind me I need to slow down and take a breath. So when I came across a book this past year, a debut called Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, it was exactly what I needed to remind me that I need to slow down and be present with my toddler—because these years pass so quickly and life is so short, and to not take this relationship I have with her for granted.
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story unlike any other I've read. It is told from the perspective of Lia, a mother, a wife, a lover of words, but also told from the perspective of the cancer that is taking over her body. There are many passages that immediately made me wanna hug my daughter. I'll share two of them now: "Because death also makes the things that never seem to matter begin to matter all in a matter of seconds." and "Motherhood is nothing but a great reminder that life begins and ends with the body."
This book was full of unflinching honesty and raw emotion. And when the days start to feel a bit too messy, I'll reflect back on passages from this book, slow down, set all the tasks aside, and hold my daughter close.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Jess for sharing. Again, the novel she mentioned is Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, and you can follow Jess on social @jessdekkerreads. Now, here's my conversation with Katherine May.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: How do we find and maintain a sense of wonder in a world that's become so unpredictable? Katherine May tackles this pressing question in her latest book, Enchantment, which is "an invitation to each of us to experience life in all its sensual complexity and to find the beauty waiting for us there."
Calling upon the natural elements—earth, water, fire, and air—Katherine launches a personal and collective investigation into how we can restore ourselves and restoke imagination. Far from prescriptive, Katherine's work always invokes readers to follow their curiosities. To slow down and open themselves up to a process of reflection. As she writes in Enchantment:
"When we look for enchantment to give us direct, concrete revelations, we miss the point. It is too big for us to swallow all at once. It teaches us in constellations, and invites us to undertake the slow, lifelong work of assimilating a moment."
And in this interview, Katherine shared more about the winding process of finding Enchantment, the nurturing and nature of motherhood, and what she’s learned from living, working, and creating both online and off.
In full disclosure, this interview with Katherine took place at the height of winter, though I can't think of a better way to honor the themes explored in Enchantment than by sharing this episode during my own period of re-emergence. Seasons aside, there's a lot to take away from our conversation—so without further delay, here's Katherine May, author of Enchantment.
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Katherine May: Goodness. I feel like I'm so entangled with my profession because before it became my job, it was my hobby. And so now I'm always a bit lost about what I do with my time when I'm not writing to be honest, probably just writing something else instead. [Laughs]
I'm a lover of the sea. I live by the sea in Whitstable in Kent with my husband and my son. I have a few pets. I do enjoy spending time with my dog and my cats. I love to swim in the sea. I try to walk every day when I can, and that's pretty much everything I do, really.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you walk with your dog along the sea?
Katherine May: Sometimes, although the dog has a few issues with walking cause we adopted her as a stray puppy with a very badly broken leg. And so, although she kept all four legs—which was a bit of a surprise—she still doesn't like walking very far. You can see that it begins to ache a little after a while. So if I really want to walk, I have to leave the dog at home. That wasn't my vision of having a dog. I thought we'd be hanging out all day, but no, she gets very fed up with me if I try and take her too far. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I guess that's the definition of a slow story. She forces you to keep your pace in check, maybe.
Katherine May: Yeah, she often protests when we get to a certain point on the beach. She keeps trying to leave; she knows all the exit points. [Laughs] So eventually, I have to take her home.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. I don't have dogs. I actually have a Lionhead rabbit. Are you familiar with that breed?
Katherine May: Oh yes. How gorgeous!
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, she is the embodiment of enchantment and also very gorgeous. But just as you were saying the word protest, that's very much in line with her personality as well. She wants what she wants when she wants it. [Laughs]
Katherine May: Yeah. They have ways of letting you know. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: [And] you garden too?
Katherine May: Actually, I'm the world's most hopeless gardener. I have a garden, but I regularly let it overgrow and then panic and raise it to the ground. I have whatever the reverse or the talent is of gardening. I just kill everything. I don't even know how I do it. [Laughs] Yeah, so I think about gardening a lot. Does that count? I think one day it'll turn into gardening, but it hasn't yet. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I've listened to some other interviews that you've done, and gardening seems to pop up. So I just wanted to see how that process was going. If it was going?
Katherine May: I'm in the annual phase of thinking if I could really plant this garden out this year, it would look amazing. And then I’ll probably think that until about August, and then get overcome by how many weeds are there and give up. [Laughs]
What I know is that I hate lawns. I just think they're a big waste of dead green space. And so I abolished my lawn about ten years ago, and then I've regretted it ever since because a lawn is there because it's easy to look after. You just have to mow every week and maybe even let it grow sometimes. And so do I now understand why other people have lawns, and I've come down off my high horse. But I still don't have one. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: I wouldn't know. I live in New York, so—
Katherine May: Lawns are a very long way away.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. I do live down the street from Prospect Park, which is nice. So that's my backyard. That's the trade-off, I guess.
Katherine May: Yeah. You see, I mean the beach is my garden. That's where I spend time sitting if I'm going to sit anywhere. I think that's probably why my garden gets so abandoned, really. Because there's this great big, amazing wild space five minutes walk from my house and it's got [the] sea. So really, why would I sit in my garden? That's the problem.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I feel like the sea and water have been so central to a lot of turning points in your life and a way to sort of remove you from spaces—and also place you in the present moment. So it's interesting that [the] duality of the sea is this place that's grounding but also moving [for you].
Katherine May: Yeah, I think I've just always been pointed toward the sea. Like even when I was a little kid, my family would take me to the seaside, and they'd kind of complain because I'd just drift towards the sea without them being able to control it. Like there was nothing they could do to stop me from keep wandering into it. And I always used to tell them that I wanted to live by the sea—which I write about this in Enchantment. My family thought that was hilarious because, to them, that was the most impractical dream. Why would you live in this place that's going to blow sand into your house all the time? [Laughs] And actually, I'm not a lover of sand in any way. So I live by Pebble Beach, which is just right for me.
But it's always called [to] me in this way that I don't feel is in my control. I feel like it provides almost every function in my life: it sort of wakes me up, it soothes me, it helps me to think, it brings me new ideas. I socialize by it. I exercise in it. I listen to it. It's really multifunctional for me. And the only thing I wish is that I lived a tiny bit closer so that I could actually see it out my window.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think it's nice that you have a little bit of distance because it creates a sort of ritual and maybe a level of accountability to go and be near this place that gives you so much—and gives itself so much.
Katherine May: For sure. I mean, I know lots of people who live in town who quite happily say that they don't see the sea from one month to the next, even though they're right beside it. I make it a practice to see the sea every day. That's a really simple goal to have. And sometimes that means on a very busy day that I drive past it. As I go home, I kind of change my roots slightly just so that I can glimpse it. But most days, that means I walk down to it and say hello. The thing with the sea is it presents something completely different to you every day.
Today it's been really foggy, and so the light on the beach is quite strange cause it's sunny and foggy at the same time. There's this extraordinary glow there, and it's like walking into a very, very different universe altogether. Whereas yesterday it was kind of gray and the sea looked kind of muddy and cross. Today it's celestial, and maybe tomorrow, it will have that flat thing going on where it turns into a mill pond. It's just lovely to keep going back and seeing this familiar place that is totally unfamiliar every day.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And then seeing yourself change alongside it.
Katherine May: Yeah. You can't help but have your mood altered by the sea, I don't think. Certainly, for me. I just do a big exhale whenever I see it. There's no mediation of my thoughts, really. It talks to my body directly.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. And I think in terms of coming back to your body and really being in the present moment, I mean, you write so beautifully about reclaiming that in Enchantment and Wintering. You know, at the end of Wintering, you wrote this passage that really resonated with me. You said:
"Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along the pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we're finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can't always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind. To find our own grit in our time."
And I think as we get into talking about your writing process and everything that goes into what you do, I'd like to kind of start on an honest note. Globally a lot of things remain pretty precarious, so I have a two-part question for you. What is difficult for you right now, and how have you given yourself a break through this time?
Katherine May: Well, I mean, this beginning of 2023 has been really tough for me cause I've not been very well. I've had a flareup of the same thing I wrote about at the beginning of Wintering. And with all the publicity for my book building up, it becomes a very busy time. I've actually had to cancel out whole sways of my diary and just rest. I've had no choice but to rest. I mean, that's the thing I've had to say about Wintering over and over again because quite often people will read it—and I'm sure you get this talking about slow living, I bet it's exactly the same—a certain type of person will read it and say, "oh, but I don't have the luxury of slowing down. I don't have the luxury of letting everything stop." And I've had to say over and over again like that completely misses the point because the problem is you are stopped. It's not of your bidding. There are things that come to you in life that will stop you. And you know, serious illness is one of them.
And so I've had to be taking my own medicine in the last few weeks and spending a lot of time on the sofa or in bed watching movies and letting everyone else pick up the slack for a while. And it's hard. But I think it's actually been really important for me, to be honest, because I do have the tendency to think that the world doesn't carry on functioning if I'm not watching it. [Laughs] Like I've got to be personally supervising everything, and that's a modern disease that a lot of us have succumbed to. I've had to let go for a few weeks and let other people be brilliant and take over. And it's actually been very comforting ultimately to know that despite how visible you feel as an author, you're the peak of a very, very big iceberg of very talented, wonderful people.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I hope you're feeling better.
Katherine May: It's normal to be sick. Just because it's invisible in a lot of our culture, it's actually very, very normal to have periods of illness in your life. And it'll come to every one of us at some point, even if it hasn't already.
My grandfather, who is like a model slow liver, used to say that "A little spell in [the] hospital does everyone good." [Laughs] And I don't think he meant because of the medicine. I think what he meant was that actually to hand yourself over to people and put yourself in someone else's care for a while is actually surprisingly good for the soul. I'm in the middle of learning one of those lessons right now.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's a lifelong lesson we'll have to keep learning at different points in our lives, different proximities.
Katherine May: Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Has this period impacted or taught you something about how you write and what you want to write about? And I wonder, too, Wintering and Enchantment are very much in conversation with one another, but was there something that you had to leave behind in how you wrote Wintering in order to write Enchantment?
Katherine May: Yeah. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to say in Enchantment because my instinct was to write something completely different. And that's how I often work. I just kind of jump around. But I knew that the two books had to feel coherent together, and that felt like an enormous responsibility because, by the time I started writing Enchantment, I was already receiving so much feedback from people saying that it had been a hugely meaningful book for them. And that it, in a way, had kind of defined this era, this pandemic era in which it landed and had given people a language to talk about what they were going through. And while that's a wonderful thing to hear, it does rather put some pressure on you for what you write next. Because that meaning—that kind of resonance—that Wintering found at that time was just entirely coincidental as far as I was concerned. There was no way I could have planned it even if I'd wanted to.
So I began to think: What do I need to say about the world next? What's useful? I'm very motivated by service. And so it kind of stuck [with] me for a while because I didn't know what I could say that would help in this age that we're finding ourselves in that is so profoundly odd—where we feel so homeless after maybe growing up thinking we understood how it all worked and that there was this progress going on. I think a lot of us felt quite hopeful about the direction of change, and now everything has been shaken up again. And I wanted to say something about that, but I wanted to do it in a way that was pointed toward healing rather than throwing another grenade into the arena, which has become so much of our discourse.
So yeah, that's a long way of answering your question, really, which is to say that I had to vastly change my approach to writing in the face of that because I needed to do it by trial and error this time. Wintering came to me whole, and my previous book, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, did the same. I saw the whole concept in one go, and I went out and wrote that. Whereas Enchantment was much more of a process of feeling my way through it slowly and deliberately wasting my time on it. Not being efficient, not saying, "Okay, well, I'm going to write 50,000 words, and that means I'm going to write 10,000 words a week, and it'll be done in so many weeks." That was not how this book worked in any way, shape, or form.
In fact, it was the opposite. It was kind of going in and saying, "Right, I'm feeling the need to write this chapter, but I don't think it's got a place in the book, but I'm going to learn something through that process of writing." And you know, my editor found it quite funny how willing I was to dump things that look fully, carefully written. She'd say, "I'm not sure if this fits." And I'd be like, "Great, no worries, let's do another one!" [Laughs] It was actually quite a grueling process, but it was also really exciting for me. Like it demanded my complete engagement, and it really challenged me to work in a way that was very process led. There's a lot in the book about humility, and I felt like I needed to approach it with a dose of personal humility to just accept that I just didn't have the answer but that I could maybe go out and find what to say. So that's how it happened, really.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is there a period of mourning that follows putting a book out for you? I mean, this one's particularly interesting, given the themes you're raising, but I wonder how it feels now.
Katherine May: I wouldn't say it's mourning, but it does feel very exposing. It always does. And there's this sense that it's no longer mine. I always feel that way about my books, that I, by this point, I have done my part of the work, and now it gets remade by every person who reads it, and it gets remade in every conversation. And you realize that when they talk about their understanding of your book—because everybody has a totally different notion of what Wintering is about. And I think from the conversations I've had so far that Enchantment will be very similar.
I actually love that. I love that handing over. [Laughs] I'm really collaborative, naturally. And, of course, writing isn't a terribly collaborative process, although there are lots of elements of collaboration when working with the publisher. But I do feel like that collaboration really comes to fruition once it gets out into the world and readers start collaborating and making an understanding of it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I think on the note of readers, maybe we can pause and have you read from Enchantment.
Katherine May: Yeah.
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Katherine May: It's a thought I've been over quite a few years now, really, that I didn't find a place for before. I did want to talk about these repellent surfaces that I noticed so much when my son was younger. [Laughs] I certainly took to all those places as well because they were places where other people were meeting. They were places we could go when I needed to try and squeeze in work. It was a very fraught time when he was little, but I've always been trying to urge him toward the other places as well. And he sometimes resists me, and that's really healthy, but I hope as he gets older, he will start to crave them and that he'll bring his own children back to them. And feel permission to do that. I think that's the important part.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It seems like you've been instilling that [idea] just based on how you've written about your experiences together. Even in your memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and those early sort of awakenings. It's really interesting as a reader to almost watch him grow up through these lenses.
Katherine May: Yeah, he'd hate that. [Laughs] But last year, we were driving along, and I got my first glimpse of the bluebell wood for the year. I love seeing the bluebells because we have amazing chalk ... and that's exactly where bluebell like to live. So I did my usual thing of going, "Ah, Bluebells!" and he said, "I love how excited you can get over that." And I thought, "Oh, that makes me so happy that that's the bit of me that he loves." That you can see that part of me that just cannot contain my glee when I see bluebells every year. That made me think that I'd done something right. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: I wonder if a future book of yours will tackle these themes through the lens of motherhood.
Katherine May: Yeah, a couple of years ago in the UK, I edited a collection of short pieces, a piece of memoir, called The Best Most Awful Job, which was about motherhood and about trying to draw out that very mixed experience and very complex emotional experience of being a mother. But while I was editing that, or while I was promoting it, I realized how much I struggled with the culture around motherhood. I'd realized that very clearly when Bert was tiny—it's probably pretty well documented in The Electricity of Every Living Thing—but it put me back into contact with that kind of agonizing over how it is we should be as mothers. I realized how toxic I found it. And I thought, "That's it; I'm never writing about motherhood again. I'm not getting involved!" [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, you have more perspective on it at this point. I'm not a mother personally, but I think it's a constant internal struggle of how to even talk about it with yourself, with your partner. It's only getting harder as I age.
Katherine May: Yeah, it's a very peculiar cultural moment for being a parent, I think. And it also is for not being a parent incidentally. I mean, wow, we do a lot of agonizing stuff, and I have to say I find it much easier to avoid that culture. You know, also, I write a lot about being neurodivergent, and the way we talk about parenting is so saturated in the assumption that the parent is neurotypical and that the child is neurotypical, and it's a very, very different experience if those things are not true. And so there's a part of me that kind of wants to step out there and say, "Nope, these are all assumptions, and actually, here are the ways that I need to do this, and here are like the appropriate ways for me to behave and here are the things that give me pleasure." [Laughs]
But I actually feel quite avoidant of that. I'm so glad that the intense period of scrutiny of my parenting is over now that my son's a little older. I hated the younger years when everybody had a comment. I think now, as your kids get older, they become a bit more invisible, and therefore you become invisible. And I am so grateful to have entered that phase; I cannot tell you.
Rachel Schwartzmann: The terrain definitely shifts, it seems like.
Katherine May: Yeah, and your relationship with your child changes and becomes interpersonal. It's so much fun to spend time with him now in a way that actually, when he was younger, it was more work, really. Even though I enjoyed it, and I loved him and adored him, I also found it really exhausting and draining. Now it's kind of mutual again, it feels like normal life a bit more, and I'm really happy for that to be relatively unexamined. [Laughs]
I think everything is so scrutinized in our lives, and one of the things we need to learn to do is just exist. It's not a political statement what you feed your child, or what you talk to them about, or what you do together. It's okay to just get on with the business of living. You know, I'm trying to stay in that very gentle space that's so full of ease for me compared to those younger years when everything was a bit bate. I hated it. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, in terms of the business of living, I'd love to talk about how pace factors into your life at this point. How would you describe your relationship with pace, and how do you think about it in terms of our digital lives? Can we find enchantment in our digital homes? How do we slow down to see it all? Both online and off?
Katherine May: Yes. I think the pace of my life is very different from the pace of other people's lives and quite deliberately so. I try and bring a lot more slowness into my life than would be possible if I worked in an office, for example. And I'm very resistant to taking in those kinds of modern routines that often come with parenthood—where you're expected to constantly be somewhere, fill your calendar with events and clubs, society, and stuff—and that becomes the badge of a good parentalmost. That you're keeping your children busy. I'm not so sure that that's teaching them the right stuff. I'm much interested in showing my son a different way to live which is to go deep into the things you're passionate about and to be perfectly fine with missing out on a lot of the things that other people are doing. And that's actually the natural rhythm that he and I fall into. So that's the kind—on the granular level of life—way I try and think about pace.
But there's a big however in that, which is that my pace—the pace at which I have to work—is very variable. There are times like this when I'm promoting the book when everything gets a lot busier. And there are times when there's not much to do at all. In lots of ways, I think that really suits me. I find consistency quite boring, and I love to kind of work really hard at the things I am getting right behind, but what I hate is working hard all of the time. I am hopeless at motivating myself to work hard at anything I don't 100% care about, which is a very autistic approach to life. So yeah, I have to find ways to be flexible in my life.
And the digital side of it. I think I maybe have a different perspective on it other than writers writing in my area because as a person with a disability—autism is a disability as well as being intrinsic to my personality—but what the digital world has done for me is open up my community and provide me with enormous solace and an enormous sense of common feeling mutual support, which I did not have in my life before I found that group. And I don't think it could exist offline cause it's a way of uniting disparate people.
I have all the concerns that the rest of us do about the addictive quality of our phones and the way that social media manipulates us into these quite addictive behaviors and the way that it's skewing our discourse and, actually, the very way that we structure thoughts and it's doing it quite deliberately into these very kinds of conflict-ridden relationships because that's what keeps us addicted. It keeps the adrenaline flowing. I'm very suspicious and wary of that. But at the same time, I think that the people who say, "It's all bad; dump your phones, never look at a social media site again," have never had the experience of feeling like there's no one else in the world at all like you and understood what loneliness feels like.
So I have enormously affectionate feelings towards all my digital places, and I make it my job to try and control my relationship with it and to make sure that are other beautiful things coming in. And I think it can point us towards enchantment. I think there are so many ways in which we're sharing information [that], in a way, we're actually saying, "Look at this. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it fascinating? Isn't it magical?" So much of our social media discourse is actually doing that rather than shouting at each other. And so we have to find a balance in the way we think about it, as well as a balance in the way we use it. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Right! Well, I think it's what we were saying before we started recording, which is relearning nuance. It's just gotten totally wiped off the counter in a lot of ways, understandably. We've been living in a state of extremes for years now.
Katherine May: Yeah. And I don't think we should throw lots of babies out with the bath water here, but I do think we should all be active in imagining better spaces and imagining less manipulative spaces, actually. I think that's where a lot of my concern comes from—that these spaces weren't actually made to look after us and to take care of us. They were made to innovate us and to stop us from being able to look away, and I hope that there will be a new generation of digital makers who are telling us when to exit as well as when to stay. I think we're modifying behavior toward that. I hope we are.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think we are. It's going to take time.
Katherine May: Yeah. The other thing I'd like to say about that is I started writing in, I don't know, 2007 maybe—maybe a little earlier than that—around about that time. And my creative life is so fundamentally tied up with my online life that I wouldn't know how to unpick it. And again, I know loads of people would draw their breath there and say, "Oh, that's terrible; that must stop," I don't feel that way at all about it, actually. I've always thought of my writing as a collaborative process with my audience and as a very conversational, intermeshed practice rather than a handing down of knowledge from myself to them. And meanwhile, I've learned so much from my presence there, and I've vastly increased my empathy toward other people. And deepened my understanding by listening, and I don't know how I practice without it, honestly. I don't know how I'd do it, and I'm not sure if I want to.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, it really just comes down to individual preference and circumstances—and allowing ourselves to change our minds and allowing others to change their minds. I think that’s another lesson that we're all collectively learning: if somebody wants to "pivot" away from certain themes or ideas, give them the space to grow. We paint such particular pictures of people and have a hard time when they change. [Laughs]
Katherine May: Yes, well, you know diversity is a word that we bandy about a lot, but I don't think we're actually very good at recognizing genuine diversity. And diversity means people doing lots of different things in lots of different ways, and that is actually the glory of being a human being that this happens. But we get quite itchy about it when we actually see it. Everybody is doing this differently, and that's amazing to have that choice and that ability to explore. And that variation across the course of our lives. I love that. I love the level of choice I have there. So yeah, it's a very complicated relationship. And I say this as someone who recently left Twitter and felt nothing at all. Just nothing. It was just like, “Bye!” [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's a gift to have that choice. But you know, on the subject of sort of reframing how we engage in these spaces, let's have you read from Enchantment again, particularly from the chapter “Unlearning,” which you know is really striking in the sense of you coming back to a space that was once familiar but, given the circumstances, needed your attention in new ways.
Katherine May: Okay, cool, yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you feel that you understand more of what was lost then, now that you've had distance from writing about that experience? Or how are you thinking about learning?
Katherine May: I think so, but I also think that I needed to acknowledge that I'd been permanently changed by that experience. And I mean, in another section of the book, I wrote about [how] I had COVID really early on, and although the COVID passed, it really affected chronic conditions that I lived with. I don't think my health is still fully really recovered from that. I think energy levels are lower, and I think that my work is really partly to acknowledge that permanent change but also to imagine what life looks like within that. And that's always going to be an ongoing process, and it definitely still is.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And it was interesting to read about your experiences coming back to reading as well and reclaiming another thing that had been so central to your life but was difficult. I wanted to ask—are there any stories that you've come across recently that have helped you unlearn or reimagine what enchantment can look like in your own life?
Katherine May: Gosh. [Laughs] That's a huge question. I mean, I feel like it's constantly shifting, really. And it's interesting, you know, you write a book about a change that is going on in your life, and then once that book's written, you go out, and you live that. And I think it's much more integrated into my everyday experience than it perhaps was at the time of turning that book in. And that's always the risk, I think, of writing books. Because by the time they're published, it could be that you've gone completely back to square one. [Laughs] I often wonder about these people that go on these extraordinary fitness journeys or whatever publish a book about it. I always think, "Did you keep that up? Was that still going even by the time you published?" Because some things are actually very, very hard to really make stick. Although, as readers, we enjoy those heroic stories, and we like to believe that we could do it too, I am aware of plenty of authors behind the scenes who have not stuck with the stuff that they wrote about. [Laughs]
But actually, the interesting thing about working on Enchantment and learning to immerse much more into small moments of wonder—and learning the call and response of that—is that by the time by the time I came back to it, I realized that really sunk into my systems and that writing the book had given me permission to fully engage with that in a way I didn't feel before—like the embarrassment was gone. I think more than that; it had let me ... you know, I agonize a lot in the book about my spiritual relationship with the world, you know, like my desire to believe in God, but not to ever take in anyone else's religious beliefs, which I'm just completely incapable of doing. And so by the time you get to now, I'm so much more comfortable with calling myself a spiritual person and not feeling shy about that. And also talking to other people about their religious experiences and beliefs. It's taken a burden away, and you know my books are always a learning process for me. It's why I write them without a shadow of a doubt, and they work. It's a great way to genuinely change your mind: to go through that really huge process of writing a book and letting it absorb over that amount of time it takes.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I was really taken with some of the points you were raising about spirituality, and I actually just finished All about Love by bell hooks, and I was kind of drawing connections between your two works in the sense that spirituality can help us create these ethics around love and enchantment. And there's a passage that I wanted to share with you from her book and with listeners, if you don't mind, which I think is also in conversation. At the end [of the book], she writes:
"Love redeems. Despite all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love, the intensity of our yearning. The understanding that love redeems appears to be a resilient aspect of the heart's knowledge. The healing power of redemptive love lures us and call us toward the possibility of healing. We cannot account for the presence of the heart's knowledge. Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope. Without hope, we cannot return to love. Breaking our sense of isolation and opening up to the window of opportunity, hope provides us with a reason to go forward. It is a practice of positive thinking, being positive, living in a permanent state of hopefulness, renews the spirit. Renewing our faith in love's promise, hope is our covenant. I began thinking and writing about love when I heard cynicism instead of hope in the voices of young and old. Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let fear go. Fear stands in the way of love."
Katherine May: I love the way that she talks about love as mysterious. Like as an unknowable thing that visits us anyway, despite our complete inability to understand it and to really look at it and examine it objectively. I find that so true. I find that so fundamentally true. [Laughs] And I find that so true about a lot of the fundaments of life, actually. That I don't think we have the capacity to actually see them. They're so much greater than we are that we can't examine them in the way that we can examine the smaller things and the way that we expect to be able to examine things. And so we're forced to live with mystery. And that, for me, is the answer to a lot of questions actually: about God and about love, about illness, about hope. We have to learn to come to terms with this thing that we can never see the whole of and, therefore, never fully understand. And the trick is for that to become wonderful to you rather than frustrating.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Or scary.
Katherine May: Or scary. Yeah. There's a surrender that has to be made.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And as you continue to sort of take questions into deep terrain, I wanted to know if there is a question that you hope people start asking you more often, whether it's about hope, enchantment, love, spirituality.
Katherine May: I think my hope about being asked questions is to get lots of different questions. [Laughs] I mean, that's just partly because of my boredom, but also, it's because I want people to have multiple responses to my books. I never want to be writing something that is linear or that takes us down one track. And I always want to write something that encourages personal, individual responses that then filter into the discussion.
So no, I hope there isn't one question that people start to ask me. I really, really hope that I've created something that echoes around and refracts and opens up hundreds of questions—hundreds of lovely, unique, inquiring, curious questions. They're the only questions I'm interested in, really—the ones that come from genuine curiosity rather than assumption or from trying to assert your fixed knowledge. I just hope for a multitude of lovely, curious, open questions.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I'm trying to reign myself in. There are so many things that we could probably touch on in this conversation. But to close things out, we can have you read a final passage from Enchantment.
Katherine May: Most certainly. Let me find the correct page.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Katherine May, author of Enchantment. You can purchase Katherine's work anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Katherine on social @katherinemay_. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.