nookish guest #6

every time a katie james video graces the tube, i run to it with my coffee. to sit and hear her musings, such wonderful musings, on books and how they move her, move the world. there’s a sense of harmony to the world whenever we come into her headspace. this is also evident through the books we’ve buddy-read together, Sula by Toni Morrison and The Seas by Samantha Hunt. i feel so whole when enveloped with the way she thinks through themes, thinks through the thick tough of it all. calm, cool, collected, i present to you: katie james xoxo

🥮 describe the view outside your window.

It’s February in Scotland. Grey. I can see grey. There’s also a trio of duets in my eye-line: a pair of magpies flitting between branches, two swans gliding down the canal, and a couple are walking hand in hand.

🥮 what’s your food of the month?

I don’t tend to cycle through phases with food—or with anything else to be honest. My obsessions are wholly committed and long-standing. A hot mug of chai is undeniably my biggest craving during the colder and darker months.

🥮 what’s your elevator pitch?

🥮 what are you reading now?

Currently a few things, which always happens accidentally and feels too chaotic to manage if I’m being honest.

Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde

Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield

The World According to Joan Didion, Evelyn McDonnell

🥮 what are you watching now?

I’ve been watching old interviews with artists and writers I admire. There’s a very short snippet of an interview with Joan Didion from 1971. She’s at home in Los Angeles, sitting on the sofa, books surrounding her, and discussing how landscape has influenced her and her writing. She’s barefoot, wearing a little brown skirt and a black t-shirt, her hair tucked behind her ears—so effortlessly cool.

🥮 current obsessions?

Words and movement, always! But at the moment it’s specifically how intimacy affects language and movement. I love eavesdropping and people watching. Catching snippets of relationships between people through their word choice and the organic choreography of the everyday.

🥮 what have you been dreaming about?

A world where love and understanding are held higher than power and greed.

🥮 what song(s) has best represented your mood for the month?

Somebody to Love, Valerie June

Go Dig My Grave, Lankum

Sometimes He's in My Dreams, Mary Lattimore

🥮 what’s something you’ve learned this month?

These words from Audre Lorde have been loud in my head since I read them, ‘for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.’

you can find katie james and all her thoughts here <3