Quarterly Report
I’m sorry to be the one to bring it to your attention, but as of tonight, a quarter of the year has gone by – which leads me to the theme of today’s video.
Last time around, I spoke about being given a question and one of you wrote back with a list of questions that my work had brought your way. Among them: “What is the work that is yours to do?”
So, at the end of its first quarter, I stop to ask: “What is the work that is mine to do … in 2025?” And the answer comes back loud and clear…
To Write a New Book
I know this well enough, but to pause and underline it helps. Get a clear sight of this work, silhouetted against the horizon, and ask what else needs done in service of it.
The
magazine led me to ’s and her call to ‘Make Something Heavy’. Notice the difference, she says, between when you’re creating in ‘light mode’ and ‘heavy mode’. Notice how the internet favours ‘light mode’. And then she names something which hits home: ‘You feel like an imposter when you only make light things.’That was me, before I wrote At Work in the Ruins. I no longer feel that way. The shift which writing that book brought was not a passing hit of satisfaction, but a permanent change of state.
Three differences, then, this time around:
I know what it means to write a full-length book. They do say that your second marathon is tougher than your first.
You. I’m writing a book with a Substack audience, a good part of whom are paying subscribers – and this is a great gift, for the economic security it offers, but also the sense of company in the sometimes lonely work of wrestling something heavy into being.
This Substack. I’m still learning what it means to hold this space alongside the heavy lifting of the book work.
One change, then, after three months: rather than releasing new public essays every few weeks, I’m going to intersperse these with substantial pieces from my pre-Substack writing which will probably be new to you.
Alongside the essays, I’ll be making these videos, which fit well into the weave of book-work, and there will be further occasional live Zoom events for those of you I’ve come to think of as the Home Team. (More on that below.)
Events
I did think the invitations would drop off, two years after the previous book came out, but they just keep coming – and even if I turn down nine out of ten, that still leaves a good scattering of events, online and off, to let you know about:
1 April, tomorrow – 7pm CEST (online) – join Vanessa Andreotti (aka Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) and me for an event hosted by Resilience.org. Details here.
5 April – if you’re in Gothenburg, I’ll be giving a talk (in Swedish) at 9am as part of the Swedish churches’ ecumenical Spring Meeting.
25 April – 6pm CEST (online) – ‘Who Believes in Climate Change?’ – my contribution to the Fairchild Lectures hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi’s Philosophy and Religion Forum. (Details here.)
6 May – 11pm CEST – ‘Regrowing a Living Culture’ – keynote for Creating Resilience in (and through) Community symposium of Hiram College. (Details to come.)
7-9 November – Rotterdam Change Days – a three-day event for “practitioners working in the field of organisational change” themed around At Work in the Ruins. I’ll be giving the keynote. Full details here.
I’d be open to taking on one or two additional events in the Netherlands while I’m there, so if you want to talk about setting something up, please get in touch.
The Home Team
There’s a wall – and I picture it as the wall of a tent. There’s a doorway and a table beside it. On the table, there’s a bowl. Many of the people who cross the threshold put a few coins in the bowl, others exchange a word or two with the host. No one has ever been turned away.
For a while last year, I thought of taking down the wall and simply releasing everything I publish here as a gift, while inviting donations. What held me back was not the desire to create scarcity, but the realisation that I cherish the existence of this closer circle of readers, the space it offers for a different kind of reflection, including sharing work-in-progress.
It came to me this morning that those of you who belong to that circle form “the Home Team”, a name which gestures to my sense of being upheld by your support.
So, let me underline – you can join the Home Team and step inside the tent with me by taking out a paid subscription to Writing Home or, if that would be an obstacle, you can do it by dropping me an email and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions asked.
Inside the Tent, Today
If you join me for the second half of today’s video, you’ll learn more about:
Why this stage of writing a book feels like playing with a Rubik’s Cube
What a metaphysical pop-up book might look like
What I told John Berger when I met him at the British Library in 2011
What At Work in the Ruins was originally going to be called
What happens when I’ve written something and I can’t tell if it’s any good
I’ll share the breakthrough I had last week with the book, including reading a couple of pages of what might just be its opening.
And Finally…
Those with sharp eyes may notice the yellow pin badge with a black elephant’s head which I’m wearing. For the full story, here’s an article I co-wrote for Resilience.org, with the badge’s creator, Ivan Idso: ‘Finding Each Other in the Ruins’.
DH
