Spring Newsletter

Cobbled together, blooming

Mar 31, 2025

Hello friends,

I have a flowery workshop in London on Tuesday, and I realise most people on this mailing list don’t live in London. So, I’ve tried to put together a spring round-up, though some of my ‘news’ is just things I’ve thought about.

In general, though, I’ve got through the really intense part of writing my book, and I think it’s time to be in contact more. My clever friend Jenny Lau (you’ll read about her in bullet point three) said that building community on Substack was a way of divesting from Meta, and I’ll go one further and say that this mailing list is my little fortress against the changing tides of the internet. I’m not sure that Substack is the best place for basic bits of life updates and work promo, and I might move platforms again if I find something more basic, but for now, I really value having this ability to write to you!

Here is a list of news and housekeeping in no particular order:

Formalising Nostalgia

For the last two years since my dramatic final performance, I’ve been quietly writing little songs while pondering a next musical step. I’ve also been collecting unreleased material from ETG, and there’s a lot. It’s been on my mind for a while to share these in some form, and my big idea is to start a year-long Patreon, to release the past (ie old material), share new ideas, and start building towards a new collection of songs. It would be fun to have somewhere to put old photos too, something like an archive.

Then I could finally fulfil the prophecy I saw on a Reductress meme, featuring a woman covered in cobwebs and the caption “Why I quit my job to focus on being nostalgic full time”.

I’d share photos like this one, which I found when I was searching through old albums. Taken during a warm UK spring like the one we’re having now! Did you know nostalgia was originally classified as a disease among soldiers? Cures for nostalgia once included leeches, purging of the stomach and threats of pain and terror. This is the kind of fun thing we could be sharing if I created a dedicated space for it. I think I’m going to do so soon, so please look out for it.

2. Song in Your Pocket: Hope Springs Workshop

Speaking of spring, I’m at London’s Soho Poly on Tuesday (tomorrow!) from 1230-230pm for a new workshop with the brilliant poet and academic Deborah Finding.

It’s called Hope Springs…Flowers, Poetry and Song for a New Season. We’ll be setting creative intentions, crafting and writing a poem song, grafted together like two fruit trees. I’ll also be playing one of the old, unreleased songs, which has been floating around my head. Deborah has kindly allowed me to refer to Tuesday’s workshop as “Emma’s big gig”.

Soho Poly was a pioneering venue of the 70’s and 80’s, part of the London “fringe” which helped launch the careers of actors, writers and directors like Bob Hoskins and Caryl Churchill. It was abandoned in 1990, and recently rediscovered and lovingly brought back to life by Matthew and Guy, lecturers at the University of Westminster, where the venue is located. It’s a space dedicated to sharing creativity and “disrupting the everyday”. I’m pleased to be a part of this curriculum, especially since I studied at this university and had the most transformative time there!

Jenny Lau has a book out!

My dear bandmate and collaborator Jenny Lau has a book out, and it’s funny and irreverent, and powerful. For years, she’s been writing about food and identity through her project Celestial Peach, and organising community events that bring people together in profound ways over food. Now, she’s written An A-Z of Chinese Food *Recipes Not Included, and let me tell you, it’s the book you want - one of those amazing books you can open on any page, and find some amazing fact, and an insight that changes your perspective.

I ordered it online and it arrived on Lunar New Year, which meant that my inevitable attempt at a photoshoot looked a little odd. I was wearing a Lunar New Year outfit to work from home (we have to get kicks where we can). So, after all that, here it is on my special shelf where I keep my special books.

Podcasts and Mushrooms

I really enjoyed this conversation on Siren’s Equalised Sound podcast, with Anna Phoebe and Jenny Plant. We were there to discuss our “multi-hyphenate” work lives, which soon became connecting and open conversation about creativity, long careers, parenthood, and just trying to keep your ears/ heart open and head above water!

This somehow relates to spring too, because the day of the recording was one of the first sunny days and suddenly I felt chatty. About a week later, a magnolia outside my window burst into flower. By then, I’d read a paper by a professor called Jessica Pitt, who was inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s book about fungi, Entangled Life, to write about children’s musical play. She imagined music as the mycelium hyphae, reaching into the space of the playing to affect and transform. I went on the internet to remind myself of what hyphae do, and saw that the Guardian called Entangled Life an account of “how life-forms interpenetrate and change each other continuously”. And I thought - that applies to flowers, which are collaborators with mood. And it applies to conversation - sound waves entering each others’ atmospheres, creating reactions, and change.

Which is a bit of a tangent for a forty-minute podcast, but that’s something that I thought about when I left. How we’re always encouraged - expected - to focus ourselves, our energies, our creativity, so it can be explained neatly. To be moving forward in an obvious way. But isn’t the reality more like mushrooms somehow? Aren’t our creative endeavours more like constellations than a portfolio? Aren’t we just messy organisms with sparks going off in all directions? That’s how I feel most of the time.

Reading

We have way overshot the idea of newsletter items, but I’d also like to share with you something I realised about my book. I thought it had taken me two-and-a-half years, which is a long time. But then I realised there had been a year of work on the pitch before that, then ten years of thinking about this subject as a book before figuring out how. Then there were the thirty-five years of thinking, I want to write a book, and the many attempts I made to do this. Shout out to my unfinished 1993 novella about Atlantis.

So, it’s been a journey, and I do feel different for it. There’s still some editing and refining to do before there’s a publication date or cover, but this feels like a good moment to stop and reflect. When I met my lovely agent Niki, I told her I was trying to go from “musician/ writer” to “writer/ musician”, and right now I feel like I’m on my way.

Since last month, when I handed it in, I’ve been treating myself with fiction, falling in love with novels again after a long period of reading heavy non-fiction about Hong Kong. I read Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, an impulse buy as I was getting a train. I read Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton, which brought Hong Kong to life in ways a lot of history books didn’t. I’ve started Mongrel by Hanako Footman and Creation Lake by Rachel Kusner. And I LOVED a memoir called Cry When the Baby Cries, by Becky Barnicoat. It’s a parenting book that contains no advice, a graphic novel so filled with truth that you finish it feeling like you’ve made a new friend. I think it is flawless.

If you have anything good to recommend, please send it my way.