Today I want to tell you about the light itself, the light Gertie taught Theta to see. Have you ever stood in a garden and felt, without quite knowing why, that it was alive in a way that went past leaf and stem? That something there met you? Most of us learn to set that feeling down as fancy. I want to tell you where it is true. Our eyes catch only a sliver of the light around us, but instruments can measure what we cannot. And what they have found is this: every living cell, plant or...
about 13 hours ago • 1 min read
There is a moment in The Lending when Theta needs her grandmother most, and a warmth gathers in the room, a presence she doesn’t turn to name. I left it unnamed on purpose. You may have your own sense of who it was. I did not invent that. I gave it to Theta because people have been telling stories like that for as long as there have been people. Perhaps you have had a moment like it yourself, a dream so real it did not feel like a dream at all, and you woke not sad but oddly comforted,...
about 13 hours ago • 1 min read
Almost all of The Lending happens in a single room. Theta can’t bring herself to open its door for three weeks; when she finally does, everything turns. Gertie called it the conjuring room. On an ordinary working day, with herbs to grind and a fire to tend, it was simply the workshop. But beneath both names sits an older one, humbler yet, that you may never have heard. It’s a still room. In old English houses, the still room was where the quiet work of the household was done: not distilling...
1 day ago • 1 min read
There is a moment in The Lending when Theta is grieving, unsure she has any gift at all. But her old dog Wriggles is failing, his breath gone ragged, and she opens her grandmother’s book to a remedy written in a slanted hand: Thyme, for the lungs. Three leaves of mullein, for the cough. A pinch of chamomile flowers, for ease. A small measure of marshmallow root, for what is raw. The recipe is mine, but the knowledge in it is old. Every herb in it was used, for exactly these things, by people...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Early in The Lending, Theta remembers the day her mother left her: a red suitcase shoved into a stranger’s car, the door slammed, the gravel crunching under the tyres. Tyres, not tires. One letter swapped, and you’re in England. That’s where Hemlock Lane is in the story. Yet I wanted it to feel like an old-world anywhere, far enough off the modern map that it belongs to whoever reads it. Holding it there comes down to many small choices about words. Some I plant like a flag: grey, never gray;...
1 day ago • 1 min read