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WILD: An Elemental Journey

WILD is published in the USA under the title
SAVAGE GRACE



Winner of the inaugural Orion Book Prize and a World Book Day award

A journey to wildernesses of earth and ice, water, fire and air. This book is the result of a seven-year odyssey among Indigenous people, listening to their philosophies; meeting cannibals; anchoring a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; joining Inuit hunters on a whale hunt; drinking shamanic medicine with Amazonian healers; visiting sea gypsies and journeying to the freedom fighters of West Papua.

 

It is an evocation of the songlines of the earth, the paths in the Papuan highlands remembered in song, and the ethereal music of shamans, as well as the songlines of Indigenous Australia. The book explores the words and meanings which shape ideas of wildness and it illustrates the anarchic nature of wildness, arguing that what is most wild is most kind, and that wild land is intrinsic to the health of the human mind.

 

Funny, harrowing, passionate and tender by turns, the book is crafted from love and anger: a love of wildness and an anger at those who would demean it or destroy it. While looking at the murderous effect of missionary and corporate invasions of indigenous land, and examining the ignorance and brutality of European explorers in so-called “wastelands”, the book also demonstrates the political resonances of wilderness in terms of gender.

 

Answering the call of the wild, this is a book about freedom, about the persistent allure of nomadism even in societies which ignore their own nomadic shadow. Above all it is a manifesto for the essential wildness of the human spirit.

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS

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“Incandescent, kaleidoscopic, brave, exhilarating, Wild is sensuous, cocky, magnificent, liberating … Joycean word-play, meticulous scholarship, ironic wit, crafted cadences. Wild is a profoundly important contribution, a raging oratorio.”

– Richard Mabey, The Times

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“It’s as though, arm in arm, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas went out to find the deep meaning of wilderness.”

– Sydney Morning Herald

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“Like Henry David Thoreau, Jay Griffiths wants to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….an immersionist… [her] research is impressive… [her] writing dexterous and lush… a passionate plea for the preservation of wilderness.”

– New York Times

 

“Wild is a song of delight, and a cry of warning, poetic, erudite and insistent… a restless, unstintingly generous performance… it carries the mark of true intellectual and spiritual passion”

– Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent on Sunday

 

“Jay Griffiths's Wild is part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original…Griffiths's aim is not to explore the world, nor its people, though she inevitably and fabulously does so. Her project is wildness itself, in all the philosophical glory that the 'sublime' held for the Romantics… Griffiths is fascinated by, and fascinating on, wild language, and her writing builds in extraordinary poetic sequences. Indeed, of the many literary elements that make up the book - travelogue, memoir, journal, reportage, extended essay on feminism, sociology, anthropology, religion, ecology and geopolitics - it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work. Perhaps its most remarkable achievement is its own quality of wildness. Wild is alive with its subject. Language is thrown around in the most earthy, vital way… A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life wherever it is found, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work.”

– Ian Beetlestone, The Observer

 

“I used to think the wild did not have words, that it lay beyond the edge of logic and expression. With her journey and her struggle, Jay Griffiths proves me wrong.  She wanders, she wonders, she suffers, she survives.  Her words are intense, episodic, gripping, and sensual, somewhere between Edward Abbey and Jeanette Winterson-who knew there was such a place?  Wild is the first great nature writing of the 21st century.”

- David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing and Wild Ideas.

 

“If a tiger could write poetry or a polar bear prose, they might write a book as exciting as Wild.”

– Adrian Mitchell, Shadow Poet Laureate.

 

“Remarkable. Griffiths tears out a stupendous style, volcanic yet soft like the sound of a river, cadenced as birdsong, in a book almost onomatopoeic in the use of language to match its view of the world. Her use of etymology to reach into the core of a cultural vision is unsurpassed. A book constructed, through intuitive, poetic associations. Griffiths takes on the Western conceptual lexicon, exposing the misapprehensions on which it is based…. The true wildness at the heart of the book is the author’s own. There is a reslessness and a pain beneath every sentence which can fill one with a deep melancholy. But there is also a righteous fury, at the destruction of a world whose every fibre is – for this deeply sensitive writer – precious almost beyond understanding. The result is a paean, a threnody, a work of great sadness and great joy.

– Toby Green, The Independent

 

“A hungry, brave, all-consuming book”

– Adam Nicolson, The Spectator

 

“A major book by a woman who is, no question, a major writer…powerful and uncompromising… she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn’t there she simply births it… a majestic anthropology. Wild is precisely the right name for this book – it goes deeper into the experience of actually living on our home planet than almost any book I've ever read. It's full of wonderful, funny, scary insight about what this body and mind of ours was built by, and for.” 

– Bill McKibben

 

“Remarkable, impassioned meditation and world-roving travelogue, exhilarating, high-risk stuff, thrumming with unbridled erotic charge, learned and poetically pagan, a geographical and emotional journey of extraordinary range. Nobody can fail to be enriched by this book’s wealth of observation and description, a memorable appeal to live for the now, and in the fullness of the senses.”

– Jeremy Seal, Sunday Telegraph

 

“Like Rebecca Solnit and John Berger – dwellers in the fecund borders between the social and the personal, the political and the epiphanic – Griffiths is primarily a storyteller. Speaking to the planetary tribe at a moment of extraordinary collective crisis, she operates shamanically, making a series of remarkable journeys through cultures, conflicts and language, and she returns with the wisdom of profoundly lived experience. A bardic hymn to the necessity of the unfettered in envisioning possibility and change, Wild is radical in the original, etymological sense. It goes to the root of the problem and it sings its way there.”

– Gareth Evans, Time Out 

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“One of the greatest and most radical travel books of the past 20 years.”

– The Age

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“Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths’ remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject.”

– Robert Macfarlane

 

“A book of staggering power, honesty and wit”

– BBC Wildlife Magazine.

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EXCERPT from the beginning of 'Wild'

“I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. Every mountain top intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with almost inaudible melodies. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel – take flight.

 

I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise for it will die in captivity. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. It is its own manifesto.

 

I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I got to the point of collapse. I got the giggles. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I went to places which are about the worst in the world to get your period. I wrote notes by the light of a firefly; anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind.

 

To me, the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kernelled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. For us all, every dawn, the lucky skies and the pipes. Anyone can hear them if they listen. We are – every one of us – a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never quite forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.

 

For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not. Feral in pheromone and intuition, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in tongue and language. This is the first command: to live in fealty to the feral angel.”​​

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US edition: Savage Grace

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Kith: The Riddle of Childscape

KITH is published in the USA under the title A COUNTRY CALLED CHILDHOOD 

A passionate defence of the rights of children, and of the universal values of freedom, nature and the imagination: it is a book written by a Huckleberry Finn with an accidental anthropology degree.

 

While travelling the world in order to write her award-winning book "Wild", Jay Griffiths became increasingly aware of the differences in how childhood is experienced in indigenous cultures. From communities in West Papua and the Arctic to the ostracised young people of contemporary Britain, she asks why we have enclosed our children and denied them the freedoms of space, time and deep play.

 

She uses anthropology, history, philosophy, language and literature to illustrate children’s affinity for the natural world, for animals and woodlands, and examines the quest element of childhood. Arguing that the risk-averse society enfeebles children, robbing them of the physical freedom they both want and need, Griffiths illustrates how the stress of overscheduled lives denies children their hours of unclocked reverie.

 

This is not a parenting book. It is a book for people interested in the human spirit at all ages.

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS​

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"Scintillating, passionate, supremely honest. Adults and children need more books like this"

- Literary Review


 

"I didn't just read this book; I revelled in it. There's a rare vitality and robust energy ... reading this book feels like playing in the woods. An unabashedly Romantic rallying cry for childhood. Playful and polemical, emotional and imaginative. As vital as play itself"

- Independent


 

“Kith could have been written by no-one but Jay Griffiths. It is ablaze with her love of the physical world and her passionate moral sense that goodness and a true relation with nature are intimately connected. She has the same visionary understanding of childhood that we find in Blake and Wordsworth, and John Clare would have read her with delight. Her work isn't just good -

it's necessary.”

– Philip Pullman

 

“A subterranean book.  We excavate it to refind the  secrets of childhood, our own, and many other childhoods in times and places far from ours.  We join an underground resistance to the capital of grown-up greed, accountancy and profit.  We rejoin the Bears.”

– John Berger  


 

"Jay Griffiths is one of our most poetic and passionate critics of the ways of civilisation, provocative, illuminating and shamelessly romantic."

- Theodore Zeldin

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“An impassioned, visionary plea to restore to our children the spirit of adventure, freedom and closeness to nature that is their birthright.  We must hear it and act on it before it is too late.”

– Iain McGilchrist

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“Jay Griffiths writes with such richness and mischief about the one thing that could truly save the world: its children.”

– KT Tunstall

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US edition: A Country Called Childhood

Why Rebel

'I wish that everyone who said they believed in angels would actually believe in insects...'

 

Why rebel?
Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important.
Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny - a politics that loathes the living world.
Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten.
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies.
This passionate, poetic manifesto for urgent rebellion is also a paean to the deep and extraordinary beauty of the natural world.

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS

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"Jay Griffiths is such a unique talent and is, in my opinion, one of our greatest and most important writers of this and any other time. She is part of that lineage which includes William Blake and Walt Whitman and I get that same feeling when I read her words and theirs: I feel so alive, so vital, a kind of bursting at the seams with joy and love. Why Rebel is not only important at this time but also magnificent, in the true meaning of that word. It contains not just important truths and beautiful words: the book communicates to the reader, through exquisite and deep prose, a sense of that profound and mysterious relationship with Earth, our home and all life upon it. It is truly extraordinary."

- Ed O'Brien, Radiohead

 

"Wonderful, essential and timely. " - John Burnside

 

She has her feet on the land, and her eyes on the stars."

- George Monbiot

 

"I recommend it highly and mightily, thoroughly and wholeheartedly"

- Stanley Donwood

 

"It is hard to imagine a more necessary book - nor one more beautiful, more rich and passionate"

- Tom Bullough

 

"Always a writer of such dazzle and depth, Jay Griffiths has surpassed herself with Why Rebel.  There is of course the passionate erudition and deep humanity that we have come to expect of her, but there is so much more too.  Her focus is laser-like, unblinking, calling out culprits and charlatans, and fighting fascists with the things they fear the most: clarity, truth, wit.  Jay Griffiths has given us a clarion call for revolution.  Nothing less will do."

- Mike Parker

 

"Poetic in its intensity, filled with the fire of radical politics." - The Guardian

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Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression

A Diary of Manic Depression

"There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell. But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun..."

 

A stark, lyrical and personal account of the psyche in crisis. Tristimania tells the story of a devastating year-long episode of manic depression, culminating in a long solo pilgrimage across Spain. Recording the experience of mania as has rarely been done before, Jay Griffiths shows how the condition is at once terrifying and also profoundly creative, both tricking and treating the psyche.


"If this book can befriend just one person in that terrifying loneliness, it will be worth writing."​

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS

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"Funny, honest, iridescent, ecstatic... Such rare lucidity and honesty make Tristimania a gripping book and an important one" - Daily Telegraph

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"Profoundly poetic. A glimpse of madness from inside the eye of the storm. Griffiths always writes so vividly... Tristimania strikes the reader like a punch to the throat; here is all the rawness of psychic pain, torn out and laid bare... both the terror and the seductive glitter of a manic dpisode" - Observer

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"An education in the history, mythology and poetics of madness, in all its wildness and glaring neon. Griffiths is a high-wire writer... An exciting and original thinker, her writing shimmers" - New Statesman

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"Unflinchingly honest... Griffiths offers readers a deep submergence in rich, creative language and fascinating insights into this profound and mysterious disease" - Booklist

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"Beautiful, brave and moving" - John Burnside

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"A book of terrible beauty; a dazzling testament to the moral and literary power of brokenness. I cried, shivered, and then laughed in gratitude for Griffiths' sheer bloody nerve" - Charles Foster

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"A searing account of what it can feel like to be swallowed up by a major mental illness" - Iain McGilchrist

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"Griffiths invites us to follow her down the rabbit hole of the human mind... Her unique gifts of language and wit are utterly captivating" - Nikolai Fraiture, The Strokes

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Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at TIME

PIP PIP is published in the USA under the title A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT TIME 

Winner of the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, (2003)

 

This book is an argument for subtle, graceful and lively time: the diverse cycles of nature or carnival, the rich, wise times of indigenous peoples. The book explores the way time is highly political and used as a tool to power, the imposition of Western time and time-values being an act of invisible imperialism, the coca-colarization of the calendar. Time has been enclosed as surely as land, enclosed by clocks and calendars and privatized for profit.

 

The book explores indigenous peoples’ attitudes to the past and present, women’s experience of time and how time has been disembedded from nature. The book ends with a chapter on ‘Wild Time’ – how time could be conceived – using the example of wilderness as the setting: wild place to illustrate wild time.

 

 

- If you suspect there’s more to time than clocks...
- If you do not think that time is money...
- If you dislike hearing the word ‘Time’ closely followed by the words ‘at the bar now, please’...
- If you would have laughed overhearing a child say ‘I’ll do it in five minutes....Is that today?’...
- If you have a sneaky feeling that other cultures might have wise, rich and elegant ideas of time...
- If you have ever wondered whether linear time and cyclical time could conceivably be to do with gender...
- If you have ever felt that Western modernity’s time is coercive, crushing and overwound...
- If you think an analysis of time could, or indeed should, include art, adverts, philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, sociology, music and myth...

Then please read on.

 

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS

 

“Jay Griffiths has produced nothing short of an original opening of the human mind, a study of what makes us tick. Her book touches nature and language and us with an enlightening spirit, and it demonstrates that we have been in the thrall of a concept of our own invention, one that we have barely acknowledged, much less understood. Her book is cleverness in the service of genius.”

- Citation on winning the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, 2003

 

“An exercise indeed in Dharma, poetry and philosophy.”

– Gary Snyder

 

“This is smart, edgy work, from an original and exciting mind. Jay Griffiths’ voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first century debate.”

-Barry Lopez

 

“Thoughtful, original and intuitive... amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited. Bravo!” - Peter Reading,

-The Times Literary Supplement

 

“A wonderful, delightfully humourous polemic against everything that’s wrong with the way we deal with time today”

- The Independent, Books of the Year

 

“An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time... Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution.”

- Iain Finlayson, The Times, Books of the Year

 

“Like the seminal socialist, feminist and ecological works, Pip Pip articulates what thousands have felt but no-one has been able to put into words. Suddenly, shapeless concerns are brought into focus. Outrage takes the place of confusion, fascination displaces complacency. Cheeky, intelligent, always gripping, Pip Pip re-introduces us to a dimension we’ve utterly neglected. It will be the opening salvo in a new battle over the human spirit.”

- George Monbiot

 

“Jay Griffiths, like the Elephant’s Child, has the gift of insatiable curiosity. She is intensely aware of the world around her, its wonders, its horrors and its absurdities. She questions and protests and celebrates – all in a language which is constantly alive, often sparkling and deep, like a good river. She is a revealer and a healer - to travel through time in the company of such a magical writer is a delight.”

-Adrian Mitchell, Shadow Poet Laureate.

 

“A fascinating, highly original meditation on time…This is a book which needs to be read slowly.”

- Fritjof Capra

 

“A mine of ideas, of anecdotes, connections, angles”

– Ivan Illich

 

“There are lots of books on time, but none like this lyrical account that proceeds via argument instead of examination... Flowing with ideas, an audacious and exhilarating book.”

– Sydney Morning Herald

 

“A wildly exuberant and exhilarating polemic. Enormously intelligent, fresh and innovative, this is a book unlike any other I have read.”

– The Age

 

“Jay Griffiths is a dazzlingly original writer, a wordsmith of the first order. She writes like an angel: a funny, brave, passionate and sometimes naughty angel. Her book is dynamite. It will change your life and you will never think of Time the same way again. It is highly serious and yet playful; it is wise, wide ranging and radical. If this book were a political party, I'd join it.”

- Anita Roddick

 

“Splendid, extraordinarily wide-ranging… impressive, absorbing and radical, provocative, impassioned, often outrageously witty.”

– The New Internationalist.

 

“A compulsively readable book; Griffiths does for time what Robert M Pirsig did for truth-obsessed philosophy in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. It's also a sexual, playful, intensely female book, passionately written and cogently argued” - Pete May, Time Out​

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US edition: A Sideways Look at Time

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Nemesis, My Friend

Journeys through the Turning Times

This book tof essays tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in dawn and spring, it moves to noon and summer, then evening and autumn and finally night and winter. Set partly at the author's home in Wales, the book journeys more widely, searching for a dead father in Prague, listening to the Sky-Grandmothers of Mexican myth and staying with the people of West Papua who, when they know they will fall over laughing, lie down first.

 

It asks: what is the real gift of Nemesis and why is she so misjudged? Why should flowers be prescribed as medicine? What do male zebra finches dream of? Where do the sands of time run fastest, and how is that connected to the age of anxiety?

 

It explores the dawn chorus; the tradition of sacred hospitality; dust from the time before the sun even existed; the twilight time of the trickster and the daily rituals of morning. In all of these it asks: why does light, through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, affect us? Because light is how we think.

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS​

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"The effect is intoxicating but this is no random rag-bag — taken as a whole, the book is an attempt to reinvest the idea of Nemesis with a new and liberating meaning...Jay Griffiths' works defy categorisation and fizz with original ideas and excitement. ...Griffiths' work is beautiful and tender, but it is also built on profound truths and hard-won experience" - John Mitchinson in Byline Times Zeitgeisters 'The Big Thinkers' 

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"Griffiths’ storytelling draws together wide-ranging cultural references to create an abundant folklore of our times. A rich tumbling of feeling, lyric and metaphor, Griffiths conjures a riot of words and ideas in response to the concurrent threats. Through a hybrid blend of travel, literature, culture and political analysis, Nemesis charts the author’s insights into our present situation and shares the same restless energy of her natural-political manifesto Why Rebel, but this time it is also deeply personal. This brave, angry, kind and wise book holds an extraordinary flourishing of language to help us navigate the abyss.

- 'Caught by the River'

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A Love Letter from a Stray Moon
with a foreword by John Berger

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a fictionalised portrait of Frida Kahlo. It explores the artist’s devastating accident and her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera, a story of passion, grief and transcendence. Partly a poetic depiction of a woman in flight from the hollowness of childlessness, the burning of betrayal and the constraints of physical pain, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is also a love letter to the earth and a celebration of the rebellion which protects it – from Frida’s own politics to the present-day Zapatistas. It is a hymn to the revolutionary fire at the heart of art.

 

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon uses Kahlo as a cipher for the experiences of the women - including the author - who identify with her. Much more than the portrait of an artist, this is a vision that resonates with grief, rebellion and transcendence. It is the story of many different women chanelled through the journey of one.

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REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS​

 

'A wonderful book.  It's like a dress that Kahlo invented for herself and wore.' 

- John Berger

 

‘Rich, honed and intense, a fierce, compelling homage’

- The Age, Australia


 

‘An interesting, enchanting author… the most beautiful, beautiful book’

– Phillip Adams Late Night Live, ABC


 

‘A rapturous, crazy and gorgeous poem to art and to the human spirit. It is a text that trembles and shudders with life and melds form with emotion in the most organic way… breathtaking in its tremulous beauty… a profound reflection on universal concerns… Griffiths’ novel itself reminds us what it is to be a human being, born native to the earth, on fire with the joy of the universe and full of grief for our broken world. It is a love song to life, to art and to the human spirit.’

– Alice Nelson, The West Australian


 

'Jay Griffiths' A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a stunning allegory about love, art, and revolution. She makes every word, every scene, in this passionate narrative count. It's brilliant work.'

- Barry Lopez


 

‘Frida Kahlo’s life and work were indivisible, and with a power worthy of her subject Jay Griffiths has found a way of writing Kahlo's broken, prolific life. Through Griffiths we hear the voice of Frida Kahlo herself, as if she were speaking directly to us. It’s like reading poetry inside a great biographical novel. I absolutely devoured this wonderfully perceptive and sensitive book. I already knew a lot about Frida Kahlo’s life but rediscovered it in these pages from the inside out.’

- Marie Darrieussecq


 

‘Vivid as a bloom in the jungle, visionary as a flight over a desert, a love song to life on earth.’

- Joan London


 

‘The book is both narrative and prose poem to revolution, uncensored minds and life lived as art. Griffiths’s fearless, untamed writing style is equal in measure to Kahlo’s brushstrokes. Griffiths’s writing is utterly original.’

– Northern Rivers Echo


 

‘A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a rich and extraordinary vision. It’s unrestrained; it’s as if Jay Griffiths had decided to put everything she knew and felt into this passionate poem of admiration and love for the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. There’s something entirely tropical about the uncompromising richness and intensity of the story, and yet it is a story, there is a strong narrative pulse. There are few people who can write stories like this, though. Jay Griffiths is a fearless adventurer with words and images. I salute her courage and the splendour of this vision.’

-Philip Pullman

 

‘I found in Griffiths writing a crafted freedom that feels made from the mist of dreams and a very real emerging dawn. Imagine being held in the open hand of moonlight and carried through a dream into day.  This is what it is like to read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. It is a book for men to read on women and for women to read on men.  I am transported and transformed; I feel lucky to have read it and it leaves me in awe.’

-Lemn Sissay

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‘An unbridled, infectious feistiness… an ode to living fiercely and bravely… hypnotic and intoxicating. A Love Letter from a Stray Moon exercises a playfulness with language, a determination to broaden its capacities and to increase it malleability… Griffiths’ brave pushing of linguistic boundaries… Griffiths’ vision is indisputably grand… a significant achievement’

– Elizabeth Bryer, Kill Your Darlings

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Anarchipelago

A very short novel, or a long short story, about the road protests of the nineties.

If you drive along the A34 past Newbury this afternoon or tomorrow night, summer or winter, you will, whether you know it or not, be driving over a spirited land. Under the tarmac of the fast lane is a pixie spirit of glee. Under the middle lane, a robust spirit of courage. Under the slow lane, as deep and certain as earth, an older spirit of honour. And along every inch where the hard shoulder meets the grass and thistles, the two most irrepressible spirits of all: love and life. For love of life, for green, green life, a piece of theatre was played here in the mid-nineties, when hundreds of people camped in treehouses and benders to try to stop the road being built through a landscape of surpassing beauty.

 

Some of the players were tangly pissheads and some were darlings of innocence. Some invented an idiosyncratic architecture out of trash and some flew their words like kites from the treetops. Some fought funny, some fought angry, some fought stoned. They fought and failed to stop this particular road being built, but they succeeded in ambushing the imagination of a nation, and did so with flair and fury and fire.

 

Some came and blew a thoughtful breath to the flame. A few burned out and their part in this play left them charred. More, though, came and found their souls lit from this strange fire. A difficult fire, a fantasmagoric fire, a fire fit for a phoenix. This is written for them all. Crucially, it was also written by them all – it is fiction but it is also a truth, a record of my respect for all the players who put their liveliness on the line and who stepped then across the walkways between trees by starlight, and who step again now across these pages. “I found the poems in the fields and only wrote them down,” said John Clare, England’s peasant poet. Anarchipelago is a kind of “found fiction”, a story I heard in the mud and treehouses in that extraordinary time.

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Jay Griffiths, 2007

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“Boiling hot day, McTypical McSuburb, McTypical McSunday. I’m watching the neighbours, going into their gardens to mow the litter... YA BASTARDOS! VIVA LA-FUCK-THIS-FOR-A-LIFADISTAS...” So begins a young man’s search for freedom, leaving the confines of Wimbly and finding himself living in a treehouse, a partner in grime with the road protesters of Newbury.​​​

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