Welcome, and Mulberry Tree/Pyramus and Thisbe

Hello! So you've tumbled down the rabbit hole and found yourself here. I can't promise a tea party, but hopefully you'll find something which will tickle your interest. Yikes, how to start a blog? Perhaps I'll begin by describing where I'm writing from, my study (or burrow as my husband likes to call it), surrounded by a treasure of magical books (favorites include The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr, How To Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake). On the wall in front of me are sketches of forests in Wales by my grandmother (a painter and cartoonist), all kinds of Post-Its which are supposed to remind me of a variety of things - like joining the Boston mycological society, that I want an owl and mist in the next section of my new novel, Into The Lake, that I should read the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which has repeatedly been recommended to me.
Yesterday, in honor of Halloween, my husband and I ate ghost-shaped biscuits and watched the movie, A Dark Place, a very loose adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw, directed by Donato Rotunno. It was an interesting script, with some evocative shots and moments, and the children actors were fantastic - the way they kept smiling was distinctly creepy. Tara Fitzgerald also gave a stellar performance as the house-keeper. However, the plot conclusion was unsatisfying.
I'll leave it there for the moment - I haven't eaten breakfast yet and I'm off to make myself some oatmeal with chopped banana. Then I'll work on Into The Lake for an hour of so before heading to BC. My students are exceptionally bright this year, an absolute treat to teach. On Tuesday we discussed the essays "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" by Sherman Alexie and "On Keeping A Notebook" by Joan Didion, and today we're workshopping some of their own pieces.
Sophie
p.s. I titled this post so because I fell asleep last night thinking of the mulberry tree which grew in a shadowy corner of our garden, growing up. My mother baked the most delicious cakes from its fat, succulent fruit but always dreaded the time when the mulberries ripened. We would inevitably stain our clothes whenever we climbed the old, gnarled tree to pick the deep-purple berries. But how exquisitely delicious they were... on a different level of scrumptiousness even to the best blackberries. You can check out Ovid's Metamorphoses (Bk 4) to learn the Classical myth about how the tree came to grow these blood-red berries.