WELCOME TO STORIES FROM CLAY
About this newsletter
I’m Julia Kendal, a writer and social justice advocate. This newsletter is where I explore how we can live well in this broken and beautiful world. There’ll be themes of sustainable living, creativity, connection, justice and beauty. If that sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll join me.
What can you expect?
You can expect a couple of newsletters a month exploring how, together, we can might be able to live an intentional, sustainable life amongst the messiness and wonder around us. They’ll probably (but not prohibitively) alternate between a longer, deeper dive into an issue, story or idea and a shorter round up of stories that have encouraged me to keep going. I’m by no means the only person asking ‘how do we live well?’ in this unpredictable, warming and fractured world, but I have come to recognise that this is a dominant question across my spheres of life. It sits behind my research as a climate policy advisor and my explorations as a poet. In this newsletter, I hope there’ll be space to explore this question with nuance and complexity, hope and possibility.
Why ‘stories from clay’?
For a while, I had a blog called ‘Papier-mâché Thoughts’; papier-mâché means ‘chewed paper’, and so the name reflected the desire to mull things over, building up the layers to see what they became. That blog was where I learned to commit to writing, to share publicly and regularly, to express an opinion and be willing to change it as well. Clay feels like an emergence from that season.
Clay is both more solid and more malleable. Warmed in the potter’s hand it can be softened, moulded into something new even as its core nature perseveres. Clay can be imperfect; the edges may not be neat and the joins may not always hold. The ideas we explore here might be built up just to be undone and remade again. But I believe they can still connect and serve along the way.
Because clay can be beautiful. And it can be humble; a word which finds its origins in ‘of the earth’. These are stories of and for the earth. They are stories for the world we live in now, which is messy but still beautiful, and could be even more so.
Stories from clay is free today. But if you enjoy it, you can show this writing is valuable to you by pledging a future subscription. You won’t be charged until I enable payments.
I realise this newsletter won’t be for everyone. But if you think it might be for you, I’m looking forward to thoughtful, honest and hopeful stories and conversations about how — together — we might be able to live well in this broken and beautiful world.