Now I Climb Rocks

‘I found something rather unexpected as I peeled back the layers and peered at what pulsed beneath. I thought my foreignness was the ink in the water, but that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t the linguistic quagmire, the different passport, the foreignness – or, better, it wasn’t only these things that had the greatest impact. Motherhood was as much a foreign land and language as the literal foreign land and language I inhabited. For me, migration and motherhood produced very similar symptoms, provoked very similar reactions, awoke very similar beasts.’

How much of who we are is where we come from? How do we give our children their cultural inheritance when we are so far removed from it? And is it possible to learn an entire language in a birth prep class? In this collection of essays, Liv Hambrett dives into her own experiences of pregnancy and the early years of motherhood as they played out in a country and language not her own. Poignant, funny and personal, Now I Climb Rocks explores how raising children in another country can make us question our very ideas of belonging and becoming.

***

Well, here it is. My second collection of writing, almost ready to go. It’s a slimmer book – I took to it with a scythe during the editing process, paring it right back. The whole process of writing this was quite different to Heimat, which was a collation of blog posts, an exercise in bundling together quite raw and unpolished writing, so that all of the memories and ideas were in one place. Most of the twenty-three essays in Now I Climb Rocks* are new and haven’t been published anywhere else. They were also written with this book’s themes in mind, written to belong to a throughline. A handful of them you’ll recognise if you’ve been a blog reader over the past few years, or at least you’ll recognise their core. 

The book isn’t available yet, but I did want to give you all the chance to sign up to a mailing list. If you sign up, you’ll get an alert as soon as it has gone to print, as well as instructions on how and where you can buy it. Just pop your email address below and click subscribe.

And lastly – thank you all so very much for your patience and for sticking around these last few (busy) months in which I barely wrote a thing. Putting this book to bed means I can now move on and turn my attention and words to other things, whatever they may be.

*The title is a line taken from an essay of the same name that looks at the different ways we put our roots down and still grow.

NOW I CLIMB ROCKS MAILING LIST

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