As an artist in oils, author and transformative learning practitioner, this is resonating through every room of the house. You have a gift of constructing concepts we can pick up and use from what we might only vaguely sense or not even notice.
Thank you. Serendipitously, I've been musing recently on how slow learning is often deep learning. I find your account gratifying as it anchors this notion. I love the symbolism of the sleeve, the rich texture and the way the eye is drawn to pause in beauty. In life we need moments where we are mesmerised and enchanted and in these spaces learning develops.
My debut novel The Seasonwife was both confrontational in its account of colonisation - the frontier between whalers and Māori in early New Zealand, seen through the eyes of two young women, but the language in the novel is also poetical.
The cant language used by whalers was creative and clever and the language used by Māori was poetical and I drew on this for the novel. Beyond this the voice of nature insisting on itself is also prosaic. This was the voice of the forest, the ocean, the call of the earth to the sky.
I love language and your piece 'The Desirable Difficulty' has anchored for me the need to continue with my own style as I weave my next novel. I love works that cause me to pause and when I pause I listen deeply, as I do when I am in a forest and hear that bird singing or the creek wending its own language.
Thank you for your insight and for easing me forward with encouragement.
What a fascinating comment - thank you! I'm so glad you liked this piece. Informal language is SO creative, isn't it, in so many different registers and styles, and I agree: languages which are unfamiliar, so need a bit of slow reading, are one way of creating that slower, deeper reading. (And it doesn't even have to be lit fic: Georgette Heyer created a whole commercial genre by mining the language of different parts of Regency society.)
As an artist in oils, author and transformative learning practitioner, this is resonating through every room of the house. You have a gift of constructing concepts we can pick up and use from what we might only vaguely sense or not even notice.
Thank you. Serendipitously, I've been musing recently on how slow learning is often deep learning. I find your account gratifying as it anchors this notion. I love the symbolism of the sleeve, the rich texture and the way the eye is drawn to pause in beauty. In life we need moments where we are mesmerised and enchanted and in these spaces learning develops.
My debut novel The Seasonwife was both confrontational in its account of colonisation - the frontier between whalers and Māori in early New Zealand, seen through the eyes of two young women, but the language in the novel is also poetical.
The cant language used by whalers was creative and clever and the language used by Māori was poetical and I drew on this for the novel. Beyond this the voice of nature insisting on itself is also prosaic. This was the voice of the forest, the ocean, the call of the earth to the sky.
I love language and your piece 'The Desirable Difficulty' has anchored for me the need to continue with my own style as I weave my next novel. I love works that cause me to pause and when I pause I listen deeply, as I do when I am in a forest and hear that bird singing or the creek wending its own language.
Thank you for your insight and for easing me forward with encouragement.
What a fascinating comment - thank you! I'm so glad you liked this piece. Informal language is SO creative, isn't it, in so many different registers and styles, and I agree: languages which are unfamiliar, so need a bit of slow reading, are one way of creating that slower, deeper reading. (And it doesn't even have to be lit fic: Georgette Heyer created a whole commercial genre by mining the language of different parts of Regency society.)