Canada always feels like home and I feel adamant that I’ll spend the rest of my life bouncing between the Cornish coast and the Canadian lakes. Thanks to my best friend, Canada actually is my home for at least one month a year, and that’s been going on for five years now. Next week I’m swapping BC lakes for the wilder west of Vancouver Island, Tofino specifically, to spend time with friends and play at surfing, hiking and drinking at breweries.
Romance is flooding my mind thanks to the books of Carly Fortune. I’ve crushed three of her novels in less than a week – all set in different parts of Canada and so wonderfully readable that I feel like I’m thirteen again, holing up in a hotel room in Cornwall during the summer, desperate to escape back into the world of holiday crushes. I love these kinds of books – frothy and light in the best way, and portals that truly get you to step away from real life. I’ve been sneaking up to the roof at sunrise and sunset to finish chapters, and I have come to the conclusion that I’d like very much to fall in love with someone in that rom-com, head-over-heels kind of way. And not the tortured, painful way I’m used to.
To accompany such stories, we’ve been making what I describe as classic holiday food for me and the Ruddells. Potatoes for every meal. Homemade breakfast burritos with Mrs Renfro peach salsa. Green sauce on everything. Hot honey and tamari marinated pork tenderloin. Buttery barbecue potatoes. Charred corn studded salads with grilled peaches. Having just returned to Calgary via a brewery where we wolfed down Adobo chicken burgers and tater tots, I needed nourishment. Dustin made his famous miso-tomato brothy beans, which I slurped down before Ky and I settled into one and a half episodes of Sterling Point – a new Prime show set in the Muskoka lakes, which seems like it was written for our teenage selves.
I am, however, craving Korean food, so when I get a chance, I’ll be making this spicy chicken stew and also these one-pot beef and carrot noodles.
But also maybe this herbed sourdough crumbed chicken schnitzel situation with a fennel and orange salad.
Just a reminder that my caramelised courgette yoghurt dip is the ultimate bbq accompaniment.
Other than reading the canon of Carly Fortune, I’ve got Madeleine Cash’s Lost Lambs on my list.
I just saw a trailer for Love Me Tender, starring Vicky Krieps as a woman fighting for custody of her son, after revealing to her ex-husband that she’s interested in dating women.
When my friend Molly Virostek writes, I settle in for an epiphany. I love her Substack, where her essays typically centre on a different card in a specific tarot deck – but her latest post discusses her theory around Dionysian Offseason – a way to think about not writing as a way of writing, and a way to rally against the AI-ification of, well, everything. The way she weaves Greek mythology and personal observation is so magical to me.
As the ancient question-asker started their journey home, and returned to their lives, they turned this befuddling divination over in their mind, again and again and again. They turned their attention inwards, activating their own creative springs, and draping the initially cryptic reply with the deeply personal truths that were always inside of them. The resulting answer? Truer than true for this person.
We could get very lost in our story here by debating if the original riddle was a divine missile, or if the person just arrived there on their own. Either way, I hope it’s as clear to you as it is to me: that Apollo knows exactly how to catalyze the creative process.
This is what happens when we make things. Like, actually make things.
Not when we consult Claude, or sculpt and shape the input soup in a clever way. But when we make things from our soul, heart, gut. From the compost of a brilliant day, or a terrible year, or a mundane moment.
Of course Ismene Ormonde’s latest post went viral! stop living in your head, start living in your body!!! is exactly what we all want to be hearing this summer. As someone who has decided to embrace sexiness over ‘beauty’ this season, I needed this (especially after seeing a terrible photo of myself when the real life version felt so good).
And then there’s the paralysis which sometimes descends on me, my foot hovering at the edge of the impossible gulf between my desire and my ability to fulfil it. Sucking my stomach in, losing my appetite, resisting the urge to fake it. The times I looked at my ex and wished we would just grab each other and kiss madly in the park, all the while knowing we never would.
Obviously have been waiting with baited breath to listen to the latest Call Her Daddy podcast episode with Nara Smith. If you know me at all, you know my fascination with the tradwife discourse, so I’m ready to here her defense against the label…
Found this archive fiction piece from The New Yorker called The Swimmer from 1964 via a friend on Instagram and I absolutely loved the lilt of the prose.
Discovered the architecture and objects from Studio Freddy Tuppen – specifically in love with this pewter candle holder.
Also found Matilda Rose’s paintings via a house tour she did – have a particular soft spot for the way it feels like she paints how the inside of my heart might look.
Forever looking for interesting shapes in tops – especially as someone who doesn’t have a flat chest. Brooke Callahan delivers.
So deeply obsessed with Sam Klemick’s Heirloom Bell Chair. I dream of it sitting in my house one day!
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