Year of the Whale

Searching for sky whales and the road back from self-abandonment

This whole essay may not fit into your email but can be read at lightonthesea.substack.com

Dear friends,

This is my first letter of 2024, so a Happy New Year and a Happy Lunar New Year too. I’ve been quiet since Christmas, pondering ideas of renewal and rebuilding, and feeling the tensions that arise as these themes seem borderline privileged to explore in a world that is increasing the pace of destruction. But without the daily renewal and rebuilding of hope at least, what do we have?

Before my own slightly long-read whale tale, and in an effort not to ‘bury the lead’ as they say, I’ll open with a wee announcement, which is that I’m very delighted to be able to share the cover of a new book! ‘The Night Whale’ was written by stunning debut author Bryher Mackenzie and illustrated by me, and it will be published on 6th June in the UK by Walker Books and 4th December in the USA by Candlewick Press.

Here’s the blurb:

There will be an event at Waterstones in Birmingham in June, and hopefully a few more along the way, and we’d love to see you in person. This project has been A DREAM COME TRUE, and the longer version of why is below…

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Tay Whale

For a long time now, a memoir with a theme of whales and stars has been writing itself in my mind. I grew up in the city of Dundee, where in the dock sits the RRS Discovery which took Shackleton to Antarctica in 1901, and not far along the River Tay are the stumps from one of the greatest rail disasters, when the bridge collapsed in 1879 and sent a passenger train into the river at Christmas. Just four years later, a humpback would swim up the same river into what was then a famous whaling port. He was harpooned, dissected and eventually his skeleton put on display in the local museums, but his legend entered the cultural consciousness of the city, and I remember many times sitting under his aerial bones and wondering about him. There is now a modern metal whale sculpture beside the river itself which folk can sit under, in the shade of the shiny new V&A Museum, a cathedral to progress.

Picture by Silenteyemedia

If you were to float up the way from the river to the highest point in the city, you’d reach a monument at the top of the hill known as The Law (which you can see in my first illustration). From there, you’d be able to see the remnants of what was once a thriving jute weaving city and, on another nearby hill, you’d see Mills Observatory, the first purpose-built public observatory in the country. So much ingenuity and adventure is visible from a single vantage point.

Were you to float downhill the other direction from the observatory though, you’d find the place in which I grew up. You’d see council houses in various states of repair and, were you to remove the front walls of a street like mine as you would with a doll’s house, you’d find a lot of people in compounding states of difficulty. Due to some genius town-planning and open access though, I was able to grow up in this city and walk my little self up the hill to gaze into space through powerful telescopes completely for free, or go and sit under the humpback’s skeleton with my sketchbook for an afternoon.

I was always a bit of a dreamy, distracted child, often called ‘whimsical’ either as a compliment or a complaint. Whales and stars and stories of explorers captured my imagination, but they were often at odds with the everyday violence of my realities.

I recognise a strength within myself now that I did continue to try and dream, to push and to grow, to travel and to build a life, and I thank the cosmos that I met people along the way who encouraged this… but if we’re being real, the slow seeds of self-limitation had also begun to germinate. Unconsciously, I found myself in situations, jobs, friendships and relationships that perpetuated self-abandonment, not in some dramatic way but rather like parts of the city itself, a place that had forgotten it produced wonders of engineering and exploration in favour of staying in and watching telly, or having another drink. I had allowed people to use what I now know are my strengths as insults against me, a feeling that makes me wince as I type.

The moment you realise you’re not really ‘you’ anymore is like the wail of a humpback itself, a moan of grief from the deep that reverberates across the empty space. When you finally realise that the situation you’re in isn’t serving you, there’s an elemental and visceral cry about the time you’ve lost to the wrong job or the bad marriage or just to paralysis. For me, it had manifested in simply making my world smaller and smaller; staying in, feeling ashamed, self-sabotaging or feeling like the good things I was receiving were somehow delivered to the wrong address. A pandemic and a divorce temporarily took away the last shreds of momentum and brought into relief the truth; that I had given far too much of myself away and now was a bit adrift.

Weirdly, I hit this low point at the very same time I encountered this new art piece ‘The Whale’, created by Captain Boomer collective. It’s a sculpture but presented as a real beached whale, complete with rotting fishy smells, as a hymn of grief about the climate. For me, that particular day, she was also an elegy for the life I thought I was going to have and the little stargazer I had long lost touch with.

Follow the Whale

With very much nothing to really lose, I decided to just let go a bit and see where the tide would take me. I’ve been incredibly lucky to live in the shelter of a co-living community, and this ‘found family’ has been the pod that I’ve traveled the stormy seas with. In 2021, I was also really lucky to come across three women in Berwick who helped transform my thinking about my work. Enter

Helen Stephens

,

Katie Chappell

and Tania Willis, otherwise known as ‘The Good Ship Illustration’.

Part of my restlessness just prior had been that I’d stopped enjoying my work, but I couldn’t figure out why. On the first day of the ‘Find Your Creative Voice’ course with Good Ship, I heard Helen share her tale of being in a similar position and deciding to take a year off from formal art work to do some exploring. Using the Good Ship’s tools around play and exploration, I finally found a way to more fully embrace the voice that was just under the surface; for me this looked like painting hundreds of skyscapes, space-scapes and seascapes, indulging my love of lyricism and magical realism, letting go of the idea of being ‘good at drawing’, allowing myself and my stories to have twinges of sadness and allowing my colour palettes to become more earthy and reflective of my bittersweet tendencies (Thank you to another luminary

Susan Cain

, for that absolutely perfect self-descriptor). I also learned to look backwards and excavate those childhood fascinations. Before I knew it, my portfolio was filled with flying whales, light shining on the sea and impossible dreamscapes, with a real urge to explore what it means to be a tiny creature next to a large creature or in a whole cosmos, or to be a time-limited being on an ancient planet.

Before I knew it, my now agent Jenn was making an offer in my inbox and the publishing offers started arriving. The very first offer was from the publisher I’ve always felt most drawn to, Walker Books, who had a manuscript for a flying whale book and wondered if I might like to draw the pictures! When I read Bryher’s lyrical words, I was utterly covered in goosebumps. That’s how you know, isn’t it? You body just tells you.

And here we are, for now anyway. I’ve begun the process of casting off old stories in search of the new. I’m trying to loosen my anxious grip on life and even the paintbrush in favour of a style that is softer. I've had a strange feeling for a while now that there is a whale somewhere I need to go and meet and an even stranger feeling that I shouldn’t try to ‘make’ this happen, but should let the next chapter of my story be about things like surrender, community, adventure and self-commitment… there is a sense that a final chapter of a future memoir might be titled ‘The Meeting’ and that there might be much to say by then about the very everyday steps of getting back to your childlike and wondrous bit of yourself but, honestly, I’m still learning.

What is clear to me now is that I can be more than one thing- a responsible schedule-keeping mother, a tax-paying business owner and a being full of childlike wonder who longs for expansiveness and poetry and adventure, or who longs deeply for home, and who can go to those places simply in her mind, guilt-free. Not only is it ‘ok’, it’s becoming the making of me. As my good friend and author Bryher writes…

And I know then what the Night Whale is saying. I understand. "Anything is possible."

ps. I recently wrote down that I’d love to finally meet a real living whale and, not 3 days after I’d written it on a piece of paper, a chance to travel to Portland Maine in 2025 popped its head up, a place of quite a lot of whale sightings. As I said, I’m not pushing this thing at all, because I feel a need to be surprised by joy and to believe in things bigger than myself just now, but I’m putting this here for posterity. Who knows when ‘The Meeting’ shall take place or what form my illustrated whale memoir idea will take, but half the fun is not yet knowing.