Writing Wild Issue 11

Words from the Wild Women Writers' Salons - Anniversary Special

Hello, wonderful wild ones. I hope this finds you well and feeling nourished.

How the time is flying by! October marks our 1st anniversary and a year of Wild Women Writers’ Salons. Whoo-Hoo! Thank you all so much for your support and your continued creative community.

What a wild adventure it has been, and one in which we’ve had the chance to meet amazing writers and share beautiful and inspiring stories. A huge thank you to all the participating authors for bringing their words and wisdom to our monthly salons. Over the last 12 months, we have welcomed:

Rebecca Smith, Catrina Davies, Nicola Chester, Katie Holten, Marchelle Farrell, Kerri Ni Dochertaigh, Rebecca Fogdd, Liz O Riordan, Lily Dunn, Jade Angeles Fitton, Gail Simmons, Phoebe Smith, Hannah Stowe, Easkey Britton, Lisa Woollett, Samantha Clark, Amanda Thomson, Joanna Wolfarth, Sarah Thomas, Sophie Pierce, Freya Bromley, Liz Jensen, Rebecca Beattie, Alice Tarbuck, Lia Leendertz, Polly Atkin, Alyssa Graybeal, Louise Kenward, Annie Worsley, Wendy Pratt, Cal Flyn, Doreen Cunningham, Erica Berry and Catherine Munro.

And more guest authors are joining us before we wrap up 2024!

Did you know that you can find all the author books and recommended reads on our Bookshop page, or you can buy author books directly (deliverable worldwide) from Sam Read Booksellers?

We thought it would be nice to celebrate this milestone together by returning to our first salon with Rebecca Smith, Nicola Chester, and Catrina Davies. Just click on the link below. (This is a private link, so please don’t share anything beyond your use.)

Remember, upgrading to a paid subscription allows you to access all recordings.

Salon 1: An Unexpected Joy

At the end of the month, we have Salon 12: The Country of My Body on 31st October (online, 7 p.m. UK time). Join me and fabulous guest authors Catherine Simpson (One Body: A Retrospective), Sumayya Usmani (Andaza), and Gulara Vincent (Fragile Freedom) for a deep dive into how personal, cultural, and societal expectations shape our relationship with our bodies, instincts, and autonomy.

We’ve got a really exciting programme shaping up for 2025, but please let me know what you’ve loved so far and what you’d love to see next year in the comments below.

And remember, if you missed the previous salons, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to access all previous newsletters and private links to the salons for this programme, plus extra interviews with authors, writing prompts and reading suggestions.

Wild Wishes, Vik xx

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A Look Back… to Salon 11

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.” — Mary Oliver

Thank you to our September salon guest authors, Catherine Munro, Doreen Cunningham and Erica Berry. Together, we took a deep dive into our relationship with the wild within and around us, exploring the connections between humans and animals and the homes we make in wild places.

It was a wild and wide conversation that took us on journeys around the globe, following the trails of wolves, whales, and Shetland ponies. We explored what it means to be wild, the impact and issues around domestication and wildness, and the implications of both. We discussed how we can learn and understand from the non-human world and listen better to the non-human within us and how our relationship can be fraught with complexity in both.

It was a fantastic conversation with three fascinating writers. Plus, it gave me my favourite mantra and image so far — from Catherine Munro — when life gets us down, or when it feels like the world is in our faces, remember the Shetland pony on the far cliff, bum to the wind and hair blowing wild, happy as can be.

Thank you to all who shared the evening with us.

Want more from our authors? Catch them here…

Erica Berry: Erica offers freelance 1:1 or written editing/brainstorming/structural input. For more information, visit her website. You can also subscribe to her Substack newsletter

Doreen Cunningham: Doreen has a handy Book Club guide for anyone wanting to read Soundings in their Book Club — you can download it from her website here

Catherine Munro: Thinking of visiting Shetland? Catherine is a qualified tour guide and offers year-round tours of the islands. Book Catherine here.

(Remember, you can access all salon recordings on the 2023-24 programme by upgrading to our paid subscription.)

Wild Women Writers' Salons is a reader-supported publication. To access all recordings of the 2023-24 salons, author interviews, writing prompts and more — and support our work — please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Coming Soon…

Wild Women Writers’ Salon 12

The Country of My Body:

Navigating Womanhood, Identity, and Freedom

Thursday 31st October, 7 pm (UK time)

Online

Hosted by Victoria Bennett and featuring guest authors Catherine Simpson, Sumayya Usmani, and Gulara Vincent, this event will explore how personal, cultural, and societal expectations shape our relationship with our bodies, instincts, and autonomy.

The event is recorded with English subtitles and has captions enabled.

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Introducing our Salon Guests

Catherine Simpson

Catherine Simpson is an award-winning novelist, journalist, poet and short story writer based in Edinburgh. In 2013, she received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Her work has been published in various anthologies and magazines, as well as online and broadcast on BBC Radio. Born on a Lancashire dairy farm, she is now based in Edinburgh. Her memoir When I Had a Little Sister was published by 4th Estate in February 2019 to great acclaim, and her debut novel Truestory was published in 2015 and re-released earlier this year. Her work has been published in various anthologies and magazines, as well as online and broadcast on BBC Radio. Born on a Lancashire dairy farm, she is now based in Edinburgh. One Body: A Retrospective is Simpson’s latest memoir, published in 2022.

One Body: A Retrospective

By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine Simpson and her body had gone through a lot together – from period pain, an abortion and early menopause to shaming and harassment. But there had been success, joy, love and laughter, too: far more freedoms than her mother had, a fulfilling family life and career, and the promise of more gains for her daughters. So when a cancer diagnosis upends her life, Catherine is forced to reflect on her body, then and now. From having been brought up on a farm where vets were more common than doctors and where illness was ‘a nuisance’, she finds herself faced with the nuisance of a lifetime.

Simpson's second memoir is the candid, searing and often darkly funny story of how she navigates her treatment and takes stock of the emotions and reflections it provokes until her cancer is in remission. And how she comes to appreciate the skin she is in – to be grateful for her body and all that it does and is.

'A deep and soulful meditation on what it means to be a woman … powerful.' -- Sunday Times

Sumayya Usmani

Sumayya Usmani is an award-winning writer, creative mentor, flavour maker, mother and proud Pakistani woman, now living in Scotland - sharing creatively and trusting intuitively, creating a kitchen of flavour and words to connect and call home. The author of two previous award-winning and award-nominated cookbooks, Summers Under The Tamarind Tree (Frances Lincoln 2016) and Mountain Berries and Dessert Spice (Frances Lincoln 2017), she left a high-flying legal career in her forties to follow her passion for sharing and writing about the flavours of her homeland.

She has worked with some of the biggest names in the food world, including Madhur Jaffrey, Sophie Grigson, Claudia Roden, Rachel AllenDelicious, Olive, BBC Good Food, Saveur, Guardian, Sunday Herald, New York Times, and Food 52. An experienced food educator, she has taught Pakistani cuisine across the UK. She is a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet with Jay Rayner, and has featured on the Good Food Channel (with Madhur Jaffrey), BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Saturday Live, BBC Radio 2, BBC Asian Network and BBC Worldwide.

Andaza is her third book, published by Murdoch Books in 2023.

Andaza: A Memoir of food, flavour and freedom in the Pakistani kitchen

A stunning memoir conjures a story of what it was like growing up in Pakistan and how the women in her life inspired her to trust her instincts in the kitchen.

At a young age, food was Sumayya's portal to nurturing, love, and self-expression. She spent the first eight years of her life at sea, with a father who captained merchant ships and a mother who preferred to cook for the family on a tiny electric stove in their cabin rather than eat in the officer's mess.

When the family moved to Karachi, Sumayya grew up torn between the social expectations of life as a young girl in Pakistan and the inspiration she felt in the kitchen, watching her mother, and her Nani Mummy (maternal grandmother) and Dadi's (paternal grandmother) confidence, intuition and effortless ability to build complex, layered flavours in their cooking.

This evocative and moving food memoir – which includes the most meaningful recipes of Sumayya's childhood – tells the story of how Sumayya's self-belief grew throughout her young life, allowing her to trust her instincts and find her path between the expectations of following in her father's footsteps as a lawyer and the pressures of a Pakistani woman's presumed place in the household.

Gradually, through the warmth of her family life, the meaning of 'andaza' comes to her: the flavour and meaning of a recipe is not a list of measured ingredients but a feeling in your hands as you let the elements of a meal come together through instinct and experience.

‘Andaza reads like a page-turning novel, with passages describing the sights and sounds of home cooking in Pakistan and beyond. A delightful read.’ – BBC Good Food magazine

Gulara Vincent

Gulara Vincent is a writer, healer, and mother. She lives with her two young children in rural Devon within the Dartmoor National Park. From this tranquil setting, she devotes herself to her family, her writing and her work in helping women and men free themselves from the shackles of abuse and trauma.

Born in the seventies during the Soviet rule of Azerbaijan, Gulara was raised in the semi-poverty of rural Ganja by her very strict and traditional grandparents in a large multigenerational household. Being extremely bright and competitive, she excelled at school, becoming an accomplished violinist and gaining a place to study Law at Baku State University. After achieving her Master’s degree in International law, Gulara became a university lecturer while working on educational reforms for the American Bar Association in Baku. With the support of the British Council and then the University of Birmingham, she was awarded a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in European Law. She went on to lecture at the University of Birmingham for fourteen years. During this time, she travelled extensively in Europe and the United States, promoting the rights of minority communities.

She’s a certified Compassion Key, Non-Personal Awareness, Family Constellations, and Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy practitioner, Soul Motion Dance Teacher, Spiritual Acceleration facilitator, and Reiki Master. She uses this unique blend of healing methods to support her clients in transforming their lives. Fragile Freedom is her second memoir, published in October this year (sequel to Hammer, Sickle and Broom)

Fragile Freedom

Seventeen-year-old Gulara (Gulush) takes on a daunting job at the Prosecutor’s Office to support herself and her Nana through harsh times while striving to complete her law degree at Baku State University in the newly independent Azerbaijan. She dreams of escaping the suffocating traditions of her rural roots to find freedom as a professional woman. In a country at war with its neighbour and beset with cultural and economic upheaval, she navigates betrayal, sexual exploitation, and captivity in the dangerously patriarchal and predatory post-Soviet environment.

Written with frankness and vulnerability, Fragile Freedom offers an intimate lens into a largely unknown country's cultural, economic and historical intricacies during rapid change.

Introducing our Salon Host — Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, carer, and mother. A firm believer in everyone’s right to write their own story, she has dedicated much of her working life to nurturing spaces where people can do just that, founding Wild Women Press in 1999. When not juggling writing, care, and chronic illness, she can be found close to where the wild things grow, tending her new apothecary garden in Orkney.

Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers: motherhood, loss, and an apothecary garden, was published by Two Roads in 2023. An intimate memoir of motherhood, grief, and care, it offers a testimony to the love and radical hope that can grow in even the most broken places and, in doing so, holds a quiet manifesto for a changing world.

Nautilus Book Award Winner 2024.

'...A fascinating, tangled read on gardening as resistance and using ancient ways to heal in the modern world'... -- AMY LIPTROT, author of THE OUTRUN

‘A treasure map back to 'living' for those who have been away too long…’ — DONNA ASHWORTH, author of WILD HOPE

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What are the Wild Women Writers’ Salons?

The Wild Women Writers’ Salons are on the last Thursday of every month (except December) and include day and evening events. This programme focuses on memoir and creative nonfiction and runs until December 2024 (please note, the date for the December 2024 salon will be different due to holidays).

With a treasure chest of excellent writers from across the globe, these are different from your regular Zoom sessions or author events. Together, we're creating a welcoming and inspiring space to gather and engage in meaningful conversation and reflection, where writers can share and explore their inspirations and writing journeys.

Each salon will feature three (and sometimes four!) fantastic guest writers. Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect:

• Dive deep into the world of words.

• Hear authors share their works.

• Get a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process.

• Real talk about publishing highs and lows.

• Engage in some heart-to-heart during the Q&A session.

Remember, ticket sales and paid subscriptions help value and pay all the fantastic people making these salons possible—from behind the scenes to the fabulous authors!

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Be part of the growing Wild Women Writers’ community

Why Upgrade to Paid?

The salons are entirely unfunded. All paid subscriptions support the work behind the scenes to make the Wild Women Writers’ Salons and the newsletter happen. In exchange for your support, you receive access to:

• access to all previous newsletters with recordings of all the salons;

• additional interviews with our guest authors on their writing and inspirations;

• further reading/resources and book suggestions from our guest authors;

• writing prompts from our guest authors;

• submit your writing questions to our guest Author Agony Aunt. One will be picked to be answered in each issue;

• listed opportunities and courses;

• the chance to be part of a nurturing community of creative practice!

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

Writing Wild (Wild Women Writers' Salons) is a reader-supported publication. By taking out a paid subscription, you support the work behind the scenes to make this project possible. Thank you.