Autumn Illuminations
of painted books & island women
Autumn is in the lanes today dear readers, and while you will have to wait until next weekend for the second Year’s Wife epistle (I want to sync her up roughly with the moon), I have a few autumnal words to share today, some rather exciting book news, and then a reading at the end. It’s lovely to see so many new names of late; thank you all for being here, for your presence and your thoughtful comments. Especially as the cold gathers at the edges of the day now, I’m glad of your company round this fire.
Well, the rosehips have deepened to their reddest on my hedgerow walk; in the rain they are declarations of love, I swear it. I woke up a few mornings ago and the light was different, like it had passed over an unseen line, the tilt, and I knew we were in. All the fallen nuts feel different once the line is crossed over. They shine differently. I want to gather them. I think about rare dormice hiding in hazel trees. I want to fill up little baskets with glossy chestnuts from the drive and acorns from the one big oak on my walk and every hazelnut too. For the sake of the dormouse, I won’t.
It’s interesting how, though the light is different in each place according to the latitude, the autumn I am learning here in south Devon is plaited in me to autumn in Point Reyes, and autumn in Crete. Here I think the tilt in is faster, harder, a sudden swing— the way the light is draining from the sky at sunset now, leaps each day it seems. But the movement of it is familiar, different dialects of one tongue.
Buckeyes on late-summer bare branches in California instead of chestnuts, and a crisp dry grass scent rising up from the first real morning cold and damp. The hazelnuts are long gone— they ripen in June and the chipmunks get to them so fast there’s hardly any to gather. Still, by now they are starting to yellow, and I love their yellowing.
In Crete, the pomegranates. Oh my god, the pomegranates. Last of the grapes that farmers have left after the wine harvest. The sea a color so outrageously living lapis it hurts (see above). And chestnuts from Rethymno and Chania over open grills while the men stoke the huge copper stills called kazani to make raki.
I like to think of the sun each day touching there, and there, and here, one autumn together that speaks different languages across my heart. So I don’t have to think of before as lost to me, only folded in, making strata like earth’s of the one everlong now of my life.
In all places, it’s the time I start thinking of winter woodfires (well into rainy season in California) and writing by candle, of spinning wool at my wheel and thick socks and the pot always hot with tea. Of reading, and reading, and reading, as I did so voraciously as a little girl that I tucked myself practically inside the fireplace in my reading chair.
So —in autumnal celebration, I have a special book offering to share with you today. A limited collection of hand-illuminated Venus Years which I've been working on when my mind needs a rest from research, study and novel writing.
There's something thrilling about taking a brush right to the pages of a pristine book. I feel I'm breaking the rules by turning it into my palette— and yet the experience is bringing the book to life in a new way for me, as I remember and feel those 19 months, and then let my watercolor brush show me my memories and words, differently, viscerally, in color.
Animals, plants, birds, stars, Minoan pottery and symbolism, all are pouring through, and more.
I originally wanted the book to be hand-illustrated, but the line drawings I was working on at the time didn't quite fit with the book design, and in the end my designer and I let go of the idea. But this literal, right-on-the-page illustration process, well after the fact, is even better to me, and far more satisfying.
It feels like planting living seeds into resting earth. Like pressing flowers from my journeys into the pages, to stay fresh there forever, brightly hued. It feels like a kind of enlivening spell-work, and it helps me remember the living nature of pages and stories, and the preciousness of physical books as their vehicles.
I'm offering just 3 of them for sale in my shop— these precious-to-me gardens hidden away inside the heavy binding, illuminations from my heart cast back across the pages.
Each book will have at minimum 25 illuminations, all done intuitively and spontaneously with watercolors in my studio. No two books will be alike—I'll illustrate different poems and stories (for the most part) in each text.
So, if you'd like to gather up a Venus Year- turned palette for yourself for the autumn season, or perhaps for a loved one for the holidays, you can find them here!
Note - while I won't be doing any custom paintings within the text— these are spontaneous illustrative conversations for me between my hand and my memory— I will be happy to hand-write an inscription for you in the front pages, at your request. xx
Finally, I'll leave you with words read aloud from the book. This is the piece called “Ogygia Speaks” (excerpt below), from October of 2019, when I was just back in California from Crete. I will read the seasonal note at the beginning about October, as well as this piece, a monologue spoken by Calypso's island Ogygia, who insisted that she too wanted a voice alongside her famous sea- nymph....
Ogygia Speaks - an excerpt
“I am a six-sided charm stone at the center of the world. Cast me in the sea. Each side reveals a different eon. I am the labyrinth’s turning and its still center. I am the oldest stone in the world. I float, and so rise and fall like a leaf with the floods and droughts of Earth. I am every island, the seed at their center, and none of them.
I am quartz and limestone. Some of the pebbles on my shores are seamed green with serpentine. Others are reddish from iron. Most are white, and quickly become smooth as bird’s eggs. I dream in falcon migrations and in their clifftop nests. My edges bristle with falcon colonies. My Calypso has eyes like theirs. Nearly golden, they see into utter darkness. She saw me, in the dark of galaxies, as she fell inside the earth and stars. They were two stars, her eyes.
I cannot explain in human terms how a human woman might fall inside and outside time, through the well at the center of her House, through Earth’s purple heart, and land on an island in the sea, at the center of all things, where the falcons migrating from Egypt north to Crete fly through an open seam in the night sky, near Cassiopeia’s throne, and rest on my limestone cliffs. Where every wild orchid from those southern countries grows in the meadow round the spring that arises from my center.
The spring flows in the six directions into the sea, through the pine and oakwood in my central gorge, underground and aboveground to my six corners, feeding all the rivers, springs and oceans of the earth. There are just as many centers of the world. Every country has its Ogygia by some other name, and yet all Ogygias are Ogygia, resting at the still center, a cup surround by rings in a lapis sea. Every seeker calls forth a different Ogygia. I am hers. In her falling through the three worlds, she made me in the image of her own sanctuary, though she did not know it.
The Calypso dreamed her Ogygia.”
- from The Venus Year © 2023 by Sylvia V. Linsteadt
We are fortunate to have you, Sylvia. The worl is fortunate to have people like you. That's how I feel. Thank you for being real.
Pure Magic