Despite Redfern being my surname, it took me a couple of weeks to come up with it as the name for this Substack. I was tempted to call it The Confident Creative, and indeed this is what I thought it would be called for a while. But it’s too close to The Confident Creative Club - my membership for unconfident creatives - and I wanted my Substack to reflect me more.
I want my Substack to differentiate between my writing and what I do as a creative confidence mentor. I want my Substack to be a place where I can write, not just sticking to the niche of creativity and confidence, but share raw writing; to explore different interests as I become more confident with the subjects I write about.
Recently I took the plunge and started to write on Medium and this encouraged me to write about different subjects. HRT and Julia Child were two subjects I tackled and made me incredibly nervous because I hadn’t touched upon them before; it was way out of my comfort zone.
So I’d like this space to muse, to write thoughtful pieces that you may connect with.
What is The Red Fern about?
What is at its heart? What is its soul?
I don’t know specifics as yet, I’m trusting that’ll come to me as I write and as time moves on, for now, I have more of a feeling.
It’s for people like me who have landed at a certain age - maybe in their mid-forties like me, or late thirties, fifties or sixties, even seventies, and are currently wondering how did you get here? Where you’ve spent the best part of a decade or a couple of decades looking after children, a career, or parents and have that urge to do something for yourself.
As one of my club members described it: it’s time to re-find our feistiness. To do something just for ourselves.
In the last few weeks and months I’ve read about there being a shortage of HRT (would this have happened if it were hormones for men?) I’ve watched a programme based around Julia Child and wished there were more inspirational women of a certain age on the telly-box.
I’ve read about the fact that ebooks are mainly read by women over the age of 45 yet are the most ignored group by the media and the publishing industry. I’ve read about actors looking for more diversity in the ages of women on screen. And my dad handed me a Sunday paper magazine yesterday with the headline ‘how to get a book deal at 64’.
All of these signs keep coming to me.
I see women writers younger than me, such as Emma Gannon who I respect, enjoy her work and am hugely inspired by, but wish there was someone out there more my age with my experiences who I could read. And I can’t find anyone. Are there people out there like me? Do the algorithms just not share those women? Do women like that not exist online? Or are we less inclined to push our heads above the parapet, unlike our younger colleagues who have grown up with technology?
It seems like you either have youngsters or pensioners. Two extremes. I’m neither. I am no longer a naive twenty-something but equally, I’m not shuffling about and watching Countdown in my slippers in the afternoon.
I feel like the peak of my life and my career is still ahead of me. I’m ambitious, hopeful and have big dreams.
I may be a mother to an adult son and a teenage daughter. I may be a wife, sister, daughter and daughter in law, or even a granddaughter, but I am still an individual who has her own interests, writing and work.
And, as such, in addition to sharing my own thoughts and ideas I want to hear from other women who are creatively ambitious, have big dreams and are re-emerging from their child-rearing years, from being known as ‘mum/mom’, from being known as a wife, or being defined by what they do for a living.
I want to talk to these women, interview them, and highlight them.
Why ‘The Red Fern’?
I wanted to convey something with my title. I’ve gone on a big journey thinking of words and actions that conveyed what I felt this newsletter/blog was going to be about.
I had the word ‘blossoming’ high up on my list, alongside ‘blooming’. The sentence ‘it’s never too late to blossom’ came to me but I didn’t like the word ‘late’. It felt negative, like ‘late’ meant ‘old’ and I didn’t want to go down that route.
So a sentence like ‘late bloomer’ was out of the question but despite that, I liked where I was going with it. I described it to my family and my daughter came up with ‘metamorphosis’. This felt perfect, a way to describe the transition we often feel, but was too long a word! It wasn’t solid enough.
I kept coming back to nature, I pictured a leaf unfurling and even asked my mum what a late-blooming flower was. Her suggestion was the Helenium flower which shines from July to September. But its common name was ‘sneezeweed’ which made me laugh.
Then there was ‘quietly blossoming’ and ‘gently blossoming’. Good but not assertive enough.
So I googled which plants or flowers represented confidence. And the fern came up. I couldn’t believe it.
On one website it says: “The fern represents magic, enchantment, confidence, sincerity and shelter.”
And “to the indigenous Maori of New Zealand, the fern represented new life and new beginnings.”
Confidence, sincerity, shelter and new beginnings. Perfect. And so The Red Fern was born.
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