The Clearing with Katherine May

Katherine is delighted to let you know she’s back with a new podcast series called The Clearing.  In each episode she asks writers and creatives, where would you go to rest and retreat, in good times and bad? Drawing on memory, inspiration and imagination, she explores the things we seek out when we need to restore our joy, hope and energy.  It begins with a forest clearing. What will we...

Recently, Katherine interviewed Sarah Moss about her incredible new memoir, My Good Bright Wolf , an account of growing up as a difficult girl in a difficult family, and how this ultimately led to her eating disorder. Throughout the book, she repeatedly argues against herself. A voice rises up in the text and says, What are you trying to claim here? That’s not how it happened! Why can’t you tell t...

What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?’ So writes Hilary Mantel in her extraordinary memoir,  Giving Up the Ghost . First published in 2003, it offers a snapshot of the great writer before the  Wolf Hall  era: a literary, if not commercial, success, and a fragile soul with a dark, scuttling imagination.  Katherine was joined by Jillian Hess of the...

It was National Poetry Day in the UK earlier this month and Katherine talked to Kate Fox about her new book,  On Sycamore Gap , in an extra Book Club event. Kate’s book is about a very special tree in the north of England that was chopped down by vandals, but that has brought people together in the aftermath of its felling. Katherine's book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK Links...

September - when we’re almost as likely to be trying to reform ourselves as in January - is the perfect moment for Oliver Burkeman’s new book,  Meditations for Mortals . Katherine sat down to talk to Oliver for her Book Club, and there was one question she was burning to ask:  do you confuse lots of readers too? Oliver, you see, has mastered the art of subverting the self-help genre. It’...

This month, Katherine spoke to Lucy Jones about  Matrescence , her book about the profound changes wrought by pregnancy and birth. Combining the biological, the social and the political with exquisite writing, this is a radical revision of a subject veiled in forced cosiness and obfuscation.  Lucy's frankness and curiosity - her utter realness - are an absolute balm for anyone who’s navi...

Katherine was excited to speak to Daniel Tammet about his latest book,  Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum . Katherine has been reading Daniel’s writing for a long time - his first book,  Born on a Blue Day , came out in 2006. At the time, he was writing about his experience as a savant (his synaesthesia means that he conceptualises numbers and dates in a completely different way to...

Join Katherine as she talks with Tom Newlands about his debut novel,  Only Here, Only Now . Katherine talks with Tom about his female main protagonist, the unforgettable Cora, setting the book in 1990s Scotland and how it offers a new way of writing about neurodivergence. She also explains the thinking behind choosing  Only Here, Only Now  for a non-fic...

Join me for a recent conversation with comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer Samantha Irby. Recorded as part of my True Stories Book Club hosted on Substack, we talked about realising you have a body again after lockdown, dogs that don’t love us enough/love us too much, writing about the darkest parts of our life, and terrorising  Sex and the City  fans by writing on  A...

At a superficial level, Soil is a gardening memoir, full of gorgeous descriptions of plants and getting your hands in the soil. But the garden in question is a political gesture, an act of resistance and an assertion of belonging. Camille T. Dungy uproots the staid monoculture of the suburban garden, and takes a fierce, critical look at its assumptions. In this conversation, we talk about the way...

In the past few years, resistance has been a live issue for many of us, whether we’re wondering for the first time how to bring about social change, or realising that we need to find new ways to be activists.  For Kaitlin Curtice, this resistance is an ongoing practice, informed by her perspective as an Indigenous American, and imbued with gentleness, integrity and personal sustainability. In...

The wolf carries an almost unbearable amount of symbolism in western culture, encapsulating the predatory, the carnal, the supernatural and the ravenous. But in her book Wolfish , Erica Berry suggests that it’s time to understand wolves differently: as tender, as hunted, as guardians of the landscape.  What’s more, those evil qualities may be better attributed to ourselves than to wolves. Ber...

I stumbled across Dacher Keltner’s work when I was first researching Enchantment , and now - for the final episode in this season - I’m honoured to speak to him about Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life .   Dacher’s research attempts to understand this very fleeting, ineffable emotion. He and his colleagues have shown that  awe induces a feelin...

Marjolijn van Heemstra believes that we can change the world by gazing into the night sky. Her book, In Light Years There’s No Hurry , explores the ‘overview effect’, a personal transformation reported by astronauts who have seen the earth from space. People who’ve experienced this rare view often report an ethical shift taking place, a new sense of mission in their lives. They come to see themsel...

How can we return to a richer, more complex understanding of national identity and personal ethics - one that can only come from folklore? Amy Jeffs is the perfect person to ask. An art historian and printmaker, she creates immersive retellings of ancient stories, beautifully illustrated with her own woodcuts and etchings. In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, we discuss the function and appe...

In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, Katherine speaks to author and public intellectual Báyò Akómoláfé. We consider how we can step out of the belief that humanity is in control of a passive planet, and instead wonder how we can learn to read the intelligence of the systems and landscapes that we inhabit. We meander our way to autism, and begin to think about how we can create a new language...

Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s writing rings with a sense of connection between this world and the otherworld, and nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in her latest book, Cacophony of Bone. Here are pages full of subtle signs that are legible only to those who are in the practice of seeking them. It’s a work of plain mysticism, a very personal representation of direct contact with the sacred. At its...

When I spoke to Morgan Harper Nichols, she was taking a break from assignment-writing for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts she’s studying. That’s a telling detail for this exuberant soul: she has ideas and energy to spare, and she’s always learning, always reaching towards new forms. A visual artist, writer, musician, speaker and podcaster, I always see her as a communicator first and forem...

Pico Iyer’s latest book, The Half Known Life, looks at the ways in which we seek paradise on earth, sometimes in places that are fraught with risk. In this episode, he and Katherine talk about the similarities in their work, particularly the ways in which they explore secular understandings of big spiritual questions, and they touch on the differences, too. Where Katherine is drawn to the local an...

We're in between seasons of How We Live Now and Katherine is in the midst of talking about her new book Enchantment in radio and podcast interviews. We wanted to share one of these conversations with you in the How We Live Now podcast feed. In this episode of The Shift with Sam Baker, Sam and Katherine talk about Katherine’s midlife autism diagnosis, why she believes we’re living through the burno...

Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran understands the problems of rightwing populism better than most: she lives as an exile, after her criticism of the Erdogan regime threatened her liberty. But despite the very personal toll that our current politics has taken, Ece remains optimistic. The seeds of a new society, she says, lie in communities, and the ways they find to come together. In this episode,...

Emma Gannon is a true digital native, a storyteller who finds creative inspiration in online communities, and who has sought a more thoughtful way to be in the digital spaces that so dominate our lives.  In this episode, Katherine and Emma discuss what it means to be a digital citizen - the pleasures and the agonies of coming together in the ether, and the ways it can both warp and welcome co...

Jay Griffiths’ writing has long explored the link between land, culture and our potential for connection, but her father’s death during lockdown made this more vital than ever. Denied the comfort or closure of a funeral, Jay had to find other ways to connect, mourn and memorialise, and in this gentle, wide-ranging conversation she and Katherine talk about imaginary journeys, ritual and delving int...

Many of us are enduring a painful new awareness of the conflicts that underpin our social relationships. For Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens, this is the beginning of a revolutionary path to our liberation - a necessary upheaval that will rebalance us forever. In this profound, perspective-shifting conversation, we are urged to stop looking for short-cuts and panaceas for our suffering, and instea...

Being a Sikh in America gives Simran Jeet Singh a very particular insight into the divisions that run between us: on one hand, his visible differences have made him a target for racism; on the other, his religion emphasises the connectedness of all humans, and urges him towards compassion, forgiveness and love. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, Katherine and Simran explore building...