Angels Everywhere

When I started this Substack at the end of 2024, my father was dying and the shape of 2025 was a dark and empty land. I knew I had to commit to writing and posting small pieces here regularly, as a tether to something life-affirming, like a tank of creative oxygen.

The first task was to give it a name. I almost got stuck there. I always choke when I have to come up with passwords, ‘short bio’s’ and thank god I’m spared having to dabble in the world of online dating profiles. It would be a sad and ugly affair.

I called it ‘A Gathered Brokenness,’ borrowed from a Leonard Cohen song, which I see now, was my grief speaking.

Seven months into this hardcore year, my sorrow is lifting. Hallelujah for the healing heart.

It was time to change the name.

I made lists of dozens of possibilities but none swept me into its arms.

Yesterday Paul Simon’s,’You Can Call Me Al,’ was playing:

‘He looks around, around

He sees angels in the architecture

spinning in infinity

He says ‘Amen’ and ‘Hallelujah.’

That phrase ‘Angels in the Architecture’ popped out at me, like a spook and said, ‘Here, have me,’ and it didn’t have to explain itself.

Nineteen years ago, Zed and I walked into an apartment in Coogee, hoping we might have found a home if only we could afford it. As we walked into the loungeroom, I looked up at the ceiling to find four angels looking down at us.

‘This is it,’ I whispered.

I’m not one of those people who believes in angels as a kind of hovering ghostbustery presence, but I love them conceptually and metaphorically because they represent what is divine in human form. Also, they have wings.

As a writing mentor, I guide others towards their ‘angels’ (the stories that live inside them as vague presences) through the rigorous mechanics of the writing craft.

Art, Jorge Luis Borges wrote, is ‘fire plus algebra.’ Writing is the handiwork of channelling passion into structure and coherence.

Without foundation, skeleton, joists, and engineering, good ideas are enfeebled, jiggly, too interior to the writer’s own mind without a bridge between the personal and the universal. Poor writing suffers from narrative osteoporosis. I am strict about the architectonics of storytelling and the structural integrity that underpins great writing - for myself and those I mentor. Without architecture, angels are just ‘things in your head.’ They need to be built to stand in the world.

I liked the name, because it also speaks to the way I feel about all the wondrous books I have read in my life, surely, thousands and thousands by now, as other angelic forces which sustain and bolster my own writing practice.

In his novel, History of The Rain, Niall Williams writes:

‘Because here is what I know: the rain becomes the river that goes to the sea and becomes the rain that becomes the river. Each book is the sum of all the others the writer has read… Each book a writer writes has all the others in it, so there’s a library that’s like a river and it keeps going.’

I love the structural image of a shrunken library inside each of us, a treasury of unlost stories we draw on when we put pen to paper.

Finally, I think of the fact that I couldn’t keep at my writing without angels, especially Zed, who has fastidiously supported this madness I call my ‘vocation.’

Virginia Woolf in her 1957 essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ wrote: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’

Substack has made a huge difference to many authors because it gives us the chance to stay afloat.

I set myself a goal of getting 100 paid subscribers in my first year of this Substack experiment. I am 18 shy of that number and THANK YOU to the 82 of you who have pledged your support to me already. As a paid subscriber you offer so more than $5 a month - you remind me to keep at it even when it seems like a self-defeating pursuit.

Make no mistake - you’re also cherubs in the architecture of my life.

If I ever make it to 1000 subscribers, this platform will become a sustainable lifeline. And how cool would that be?

Til now, the subscription has been $5 a month or $50 a year, the lowest subsciption I’ve seen here on Substack. I’m going to nudge it up to $8 a month or $80 a year on 15 August. If you’d like to gift your support before I do, you can jump in anytime before then.

I am grateful for free subscribers too. You can restack, share or recommend my Substack. Those all help me enormously too.

This morning on my way to a meeting, I walked past this pair flanking a Montessori school entrance.

Probably on the creepy side, but hey, you can’t deny I’m living a theme right now.