Category: Personal

Co-conspirators

The thing about finding a partner to share the intricate and often messy process of life and or creation with is that there has to be a level of mutuality that bends and blends with something that could be conflicting but ultimately becomes complimentary to the other’s process. We come together to share and intertwine ideas to make new colours in life and in art. Colours that would never be without the other. The coalition becomes a new entity separate from the singular. And it thrums to its own drum, which exists inside each of us. Sending electrical impulses of ideas that invade our dreams as we (attempt to) rest and seize our minds at the most unexpected moments. We have much work to do, and the muse grows each day.

I’ve always been fiercely private when I’m ‘creating’. Yes, I was that child in nursery who would hunch quietly behind the easel with one arm hiding my recycled, crunchy foolscap paper. I didn’t want or be copied, ridiculed or questioned. What if they saw something through paint strokes that I don’t want to share? What if someone took a piece I wasn’t ready or willing to give up?

I’m not original. We’re all just unconscious copies, in a way. I know many of us have that feeling I had back then and carry it somewhat into adulthood, especially if we continue on or rediscover a creative path—a fear of being unpicked and someone else discovering something or disappointment of there being nothing. Exposure or emptiness?

With my BFH sister, Ruthann Jagge, I have found that I’m no longer anxious and scared of either of these things. I share my creative process with her as if we cohabit the same space. (I’m not embarrassed by the mess I make as we build.) Because of this, we are creatively bound for as long as that mutual muse whispers and screams—and oh, the muse certainly does that! Sometimes I can’t get the words down fast enough. Honestly, I never thought I could do that with anyone. It’s an intimacy that supersedes the distance—the sharing of minds, passions, drives, triggers, ideas, and art!

It’s still new, and it’s all so exciting! For updates on our first release and those that follow, tune in to Brazen Folk Horror.

Peace & Love—Natasha )O(

Delevan House, Ruthann Jagge & Natasha Sinclair

Clan Witch: Found Shadows

I’m sweeping the circle. The bones and remnants of word fusions are being expelled to make way for new spells. This collection is set for release in Hogmanay 2022. The preorder is live now.

Digital ARCs will be available well in advance of release, if you are a reviewer who’d love a first look at Clan Witch: Found Shadows, my mailbox is open for enquiries to be added to my priority early reader list.

Clan Witch: Found Shadows, releasing December 31st 2022

Synopsis (subject to tweaking)

Do readers buy poetry from undead poets?

There’s nothing quite like picking the prose and verses of the dead like vultures. There’s freedom in that unpicking, with no one alive to contest, at least not the mind which birthed them.

Sinclair consumes written and spoken as she does in its lyrical form, dressed in music and paint. Dancing to the beat or screaming into the voids of despair. Here, Sinclair presents Clan Witch: Found Shadows, no music, no paint, just words. A mix-tape of drabbles and anarchic free verse poetry..

The writer still lives. Perhaps you’ll read her unruly verse before the witch is dead.

Cover image from Christy Aldridge of Grim Poppy Designs

Expectant Miscarriage: Waiting for Averey

Personal blog post

My first was in 2004, a spontaneous natural miscarriage.

My second was in 2013, a missed miscarriage that required medical management.

My subsequent pregnancy ended with extreme preterm natural birth in 2014.

Number four was in 2016, another preterm birth, delivered by emergency caesarean.

2022, another missed miscarriage. I’m currently in the limbo phase of knowing my baby is dead inside my womb. I am waiting for contractions and birth, referred to medically as ‘expectant miscarriage’.

Does that make you uncomfortable? Me using the term ‘birth’ instead of ‘miscarriage’? Does it jar to read ‘contractions’ instead of ‘cramp’?

Some pregnancy and loss terminology has raised personal discomfort since my first. Since I was able to directly relate through lived experience what these words mean, and while much has changed in the professional medical approach to supporting parents through these situations, there are still these underplayed words that almost mute and downplay the experience that a body and mind go through with pregnancy loss (the death of a baby). From my personal experience (and every one is different), ‘mild to severe cramping’ (when the physical process takes hold) is not cramp; these are contractions. Miscarriage is labour. Miscarriage is birth. Miscarriage is still birth. Except, the pain is extended beyond the physical.

Even now, in 2022, it feels like we’re not supposed to talk about these things. Not in any depth anyway. It’s all hushed and quietly ushered into another room. Door closed. Keep it for a support group (at most). I use the term ‘talk’ loosely, as I’m not particularly a talker. I process better quietly, introspectively, creatively and practically than with my mouth or too much external involvement.

A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed my baby actively bouncing around inside my uterus. The flutter of his tiny heartbeat, a symphony of life in black and white. This week, he lay still. There was no flutter, no activity, no life. Cradled inside my uterus, my baby is dead. Baby? Does that make you uncomfortable? Would foetus be better? After all, that’s just a bundle of cells. What about ‘pregnancy tissue’ or ‘products of conception’? Then we can forget about the fully formed central nervous system, circulatory systems, the (recently) rapidly growing brain, organs, heart… it’s just a foetus…

No. He’s my baby. And I can’t stand the disrespect of him being regarded as anything else. My daughters have given him his name, Averey. 🖤

https://clanwitch.com/2022/08/03/one-for-sorrow/