Podcast appearances and mentions of catherine hughes

Clare Carlisle's biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question, is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot's narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch, and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare's answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare! Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot's narrative ideas.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question. I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome.Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here.Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist?Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy.Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on.Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch. No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot.Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling?Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her.Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light.The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them?Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money.He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship.I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things.Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples.Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were.Clare: Yes, absolutely.Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way.Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity…Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression.Clare: Yes.Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah.Clare: Oh, that's good.Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza?Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics, which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics, but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision.Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being.Henry: Sure.Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected.We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web.Henry: The web. Right.Clare: In Middlemarch, where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with.In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that.Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes.Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men. These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men. Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months.Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb.She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon?Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks.He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself.I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is.Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.Henry: There's a good book by Debra Gettelman about the way that novelists like Eliot knew what readers expected because they were all reading so many cheap romance novels and circulating library novels. There are a lot of negations and arguments with the reader to say, "I know what you want this story to do and I know how you want this character to turn out, but I'm not going to do that. You must go with me with what I'm doing.Clare: Yes. You mean this new book that's come out called Imagining Otherwise?Henry: That's right, yes.Clare: I've actually not read it yet, I've ordered it, but funnily enough, as you said at the beginning, I'm a philosopher so I'm not trained at all as a reader of literary texts or as a literary scholar by any means, and so I perhaps foolishly embarked on this book on George Eliot thinking, "Oh, next I'm going to write a book about George Eliot." Anyway, I ended up going to a couple of conferences on George Eliot, which was interestingly like stepping into a different world. The academic world of literary studies is really different from the world of academic philosophy, interestingly.It's run by women for a start. You go to a conference and it's very female-dominated. There's all these very eminent senior women or at least at this conference I went to there was these distinguished women who were running the show. Then there were a few men in that mix, which is the inverse of often what it can be like in a philosophy conference, which is still quite a male-dominated discipline. The etiquette is different. Philosophers like to criticize each other's arguments. That's the way we show love is to criticize and take down another philosopher's argument.Whereas the academics at this George Eliot conference were much more into acknowledging what they'd learned from other people's work and referencing. Anyway, it's really interestingly different. Debra Gettelman was at this conference.Henry: Oh, great.Clare: She had a book on Middlemarch. I think it was 2019 because it was the bicentenary of Eliot's birth, that's why there was this big conference. Debra, who I'd never met before or heard of, as I just didn't really know this world, gave this amazing talk on Middlemarch and on these negations in Middlemarch. It really influenced me, it really inspired me. The way she did these close readings of the sentences, this is what literary scholars are trained to do, but I haven't had that training and the close reading of the sentences, which didn't just yield interesting insights into the way George Eliot uses language but yielded this really interesting philosophical work where Eliot is using forms of the sentence to explore ontological questions about negation and possibility and modality.This was just so fascinating and really, it was a small paper in one of those parallel sessions. It wasn't one of the big presentations at the conference, but it was that talk that most inspired me at the conference. It's a lot of the insights that I got from Debra Gettelman I ended up drawing on in my own chapter on Middlemarch. I situated it a bit more in the history of philosophy and thinking about negation as a theme.Henry: This is where you link it to Hegel.Clare: Yes, to Hegel, exactly. I was so pleased to see that the book is out because I think I must have gone up to her after the talk and said, "Oh, it's really amazing." Was like, "Oh, thank you." I was like, "Is it published? Can I cite it?" She said, "No. I'm working on this project." It seemed like she felt like it was going to be a long time in the making. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a review of the book in the TLS. I thought, "Oh, amazing, the book is out. It just sounds brilliant." I can't wait to read that book. Yes, she talks about Eliot alongside, I think, Dickens and another.Henry: And Jane Austen.Clare: Jane Austen, amazing. Yes. I think it's to do with, as you say, writing in response to readerly expectation and forming readerly expectations. Partly thanks to Debra Gettelman, I can see how Eliot does that. It'd be really interesting to learn how she sees Jane Austen and Dickens also doing that.Henry: It's a brilliant book. You're in for a treat.Clare: Yes, I'm sure it is. That doesn't surprise me at all.Henry: Now, you say more than once in your book, that Eliot anticipates some of the insights of psychotherapy.Clare: Psychoanalysis.Henry: Yes. What do you think she would have made of Freud or of our general therapy culture? I think you're right, but she has very different aims and understandings of these things. What would she make of it now?Clare: It seems that Freud was probably influenced by Eliot. That's a historical question. He certainly read and admired Eliot. I suspect, yes, was influenced by some of her insights, which in turn, she's drawing on other stuff. What do you have in mind? Your question suggests that you think she might have disapproved of therapy culture.Henry: I think novelists in general are quite ambivalent about psychoanalysis and therapy. Yes.Clare: For what reason?Henry: If you read someone like Iris Murdoch, who's quite Eliotic in many ways, she would say, "Do these therapists ever actually help anyone?"Clare: Ah.Henry: A lot of her characters are sent on these slightly dizzying journeys. They're often given advice from therapists or priests or philosophers, and obviously, Murdoch Is a philosopher. The advice from the therapists and the philosophers always ends these characters up in appalling situations. It's art and literature. As you were saying before, a more diffusive understanding and a way of integrating yourself with other things rather than looking back into your head and dwelling on it.Clare: Of course. Yes.Henry: I see more continuity between Eliot and that kind of thinking. I wonder if you felt that the talking cure that you identified at the end of Middlemarch is quite sound common sense and no-nonsense. It's not lie on the couch and tell me how you feel, is it?Clare: I don't know. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it would be to see Eliot and Freud is located in this broadly Socratic tradition of one, the idea that if you understand yourself better, then that is a route to a certain qualified kind of happiness or fulfillment or liberation. The best kind of human life there could be is one where we gain insight into our own natures. We bring to light what is hidden from us, whether those are desires that are hidden away in the shadows and they're actually motivating our behavior, but we don't realize it, and so we are therefore enslaved to them.That's a very old idea that you find in ancient philosophy. Then the question is, by what methods do we bring these things to light? Is it through Socratic questioning? Is it through art? Eliot's art is an art that I think encourages us to see ourselves in the characters. As we come to understand the characters, and in particular to go back to what I said before about Spinozism, to see their embeddedness and their interconnectedness in these wider webs, but also in a sense of that embeddedness in psychic forces that they're not fully aware of. Part of what you could argue is being exposed there, and this would be a Spinozist insight, is the delusion of free will.The idea that we act freely with these autonomous agents who have access to and control over our desires, and we pick the thing that's in our interest and we act on that. That's a view that I think Spinoza is very critical. He famously denies free will. He says we're determined, we just don't understand how we're determined. When we understand better how we're determined, then perhaps paradoxically we actually do become relatively empowered through our understanding. I think there's something of that in Eliot too, and arguably there's something of that in Freud as well. I know you weren't actually so much asking about Freud's theory and practice, and more about a therapy culture.Henry: All of it.Clare: You're also asking about that. As I say, the difference would be the method for accomplishing this process of a kind of enlightenment. Of course, Freud's techniques medicalizes that project basically. It's the patient and the doctor in dialogue, and depends a lot on the skills of the doctor, doesn't it? How successful, and who is also a human being, who is also another human being, who isn't of course outside of the web, but is themselves in it, and ideally has themselves already undergone this process of making themselves more transparent to their own understanding, but of course, is going to be liable to their own blind spots, and so on.Henry: Which of her novels do you love the most? Just on a personal level, it doesn't have to be which one you think is the most impressive or whatever.Clare: I'm trying to think how to answer that question. I was thinking if I had to reread one of them next week, which one would I choose? If I was going on holiday and I wanted a beach read for pure enjoyment, which of the novels would I pick up? Probably Middlemarch. I think it's probably the most enjoyable, the most fun to read of her novels, basically.Henry: Sure.Clare: There'd be other reasons for picking other books. I really think Daniel Deronda is amazing because of what she's trying to do in that book. Its ambition, it doesn't always succeed in giving us the reading experience that is the most enjoyable. In terms of just the staggering philosophical and artistic achievement, what she's attempting to do, and what she does to a large extent achieve in that book, I think is just incredible. As a friend of Eliot, I have a real love for Daniel Deronda because I just think that what an amazing thing she did in writing that book. Then I've got a soft spot for Silas Marner, which is short and sweet.Henry: I think I'd take The Mill on the Floss. That's my favorite.Clare: Oh, would you?Henry: I love that book.Clare: That also did pop into my mind as another contender. Yes, because it's so personal in a way, The Mill on the Floss. It's personal to her, it's also personal to me in that, it's the first book by Eliot I read because I studied it for A-Level. I remember thinking when we were at the beginning of that two-year period when I'd chosen my English literature A-Level and we got the list of texts we were going to read, I remember seeing The Mill on the Floss and thinking, "Oh God, that sounds so boring." The title, something about the title, it just sounded awful. I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Jane Austen or something more fun.I thought, "Oh, The Mill on the Floss." Then I don't have a very strong memory of the book, but I remember thinking, actually, it was better than I expected. I did think, actually, it wasn't as awful and boring as I thought it would be. It's a personal book to Eliot. I think that exploring the life of a mind of a young woman who has no access to proper education, very limited access to art and culture, she's stuck in this little village near a provincial town full of narrow-minded conservative people. That's Eliot's experience herself. It was a bit my experience, too, as, again, not that I even would have seen it this way at the time, but a girl with intellectual appetites and not finding those appetites very easily satisfied in, again, a provincial, ordinary family and the world and so on.Henry: What sort of reader were you at school?Clare: What sort of reader?Henry: Were you reading lots of Plato, lots of novels?Clare: No. I'm always really surprised when I meet people who say things like they were reading Kierkegaard and Plato when they were 15 or 16. No, not at all. No, I loved reading, so I just read lots and lots of novels. I loved Jane Eyre. That was probably one of the first proper novels, as with many people, that I remember reading that when I was about 12 and partly feeling quite proud of myself for having read this grown-up book, but also really loving the book. I reread that probably several times before I was 25. Jane Austen and just reading.Then also I used to go to the library, just completely gripped by some boredom and restlessness and finding something to read. I read a lot and scanning the shelves and picking things out. That way I read more contemporary fiction. Just things like, I don't know, Julian Barnes or, Armistead Maupin, or just finding stuff on the shelves of the library that looked interesting, or Anita Brookner or Somerset Maugham. I really love Somerset Maugham.Henry: Which ones do you like?Clare: I remember reading, I think I read The Razor's Edge first.Henry: That's a great book.Clare: Yes, and just knowing nothing about it, just picking it off the shelf and thinking, "Oh, this looks interesting." I've always liked a nice short, small paperback. That would always appeal. Then once I found a book I liked, I'd then obviously read other stuff by that writer. I then read, so The Razor's Edge and-- Oh, I can't remember.Henry: The Moon and Sixpence, maybe?Clare: Yes, The Moon and Sixpence, and-Henry: Painted Veils?Clare: -Human Bondage.Henry: Of Human Bondage, right.Clare: Human Bondage, which is, actually, he took the title from Spinoza's Ethics. That's the title. Cluelessly, as a teenager, I was like, "Ooh, this book is interesting." Actually, when I look back, I can see that those writers, like Maugham, for example, he was really interested in philosophy. He was really interested in art and philosophy, and travel, and culture, and religion, all the things I am actually interested in. I wouldn't have known that that was why I loved the book. I just liked the book and found it gripping. It spoke to me, and I wanted to just read more other stuff like that.I was the first person in my family to go to university, so we didn't have a lot of books in the house. We had one bookcase. There were a few decent things in there along with the Jeffrey Archers in there. I read everything on that bookshelf. I read the Jeffrey Archers, I read the True Crime, I read the In Cold Blood, just this somewhat random-- I think there was probably a couple of George Eliots on there. A few classics, I would, again, grip by boredom on a Sunday afternoon, just stare at this shelf and think, "Oh, is there anything?" Maybe I'll end up with a Thomas Hardy or something. It was quite limited. I didn't really know anything about philosophy. I didn't think of doing philosophy at university, for example. I actually decided to do history.I went to Cambridge to do history. Then, after a couple of weeks, just happened to meet someone who was doing philosophy. I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to do." I only recognized it when I saw it. I hadn't really seen it because I went to the local state school, it wasn't full of teachers who knew about philosophy and stuff like that.Henry: You graduated in theology and philosophy, is that right?Clare: Yes. Cambridge, the degrees are in two parts. I did Part 1, theology, and then I did Part 2, philosophy. I graduated in philosophy, but I studied theology in my first year at Cambridge.Henry: What are your favorite Victorian biographies?Clare: You mean biographies of Victorians?Henry: Of Victorians, by Victorians, whatever.Clare: I don't really read many biographies.Henry: Oh, really?Clare: [laughs] The first biography I wrote was a biography of Kierkegaard. I remember thinking, when I started to write the book, "I'd better read some biographies." I always tend to read fiction. I'm not a big reader of history, which is so ironic. I don't know what possessed me to go and study history at university. These are not books I read for pleasure. I suppose I am quite hedonistic in my choice of reading, I like to read for pleasure.Henry: Sure. Of course.Clare: I don't tend to read nonfiction. Obviously, I do sometimes read nonfiction for pleasure, but it's not the thing I'm most drawn to. Anyway. I remember asking my editor, I probably didn't mention that I didn't know very much about biography, but I did ask him to recommend some. I'd already got the book contract. I said, "What do you think is a really good biography that I should read?" He recommended, I think, who is it who wrote The Life of Gibbon? Really famous biography of Gibbon.Henry: I don't know.Clare: That one. I read it. It is really good. My mind is going blank. I read many biographies of George Eliot before I wrote mine.Henry: They're not all wonderful, are they?Clare: I really liked Catherine Hughes's book because it brought her down from her pedestal.Henry: Exactly. Yes.Clare: Talking about hedonism, I would read anything that Catherine Hughes writes just for enjoyment because she's such a good writer. She's a very intellectual woman, but she's also very entertaining. She writes to entertain, which I like and appreciate as a reader. There's a couple of big archival biographies of George Eliot by Gordon Haight and by Rosemary Ashton, for example, which are both just invaluable. One of the great things about that kind of book is that it frees you to write a different kind of biography that can be more interpretive and more selective. Once those kinds of books have been published, there's no point doing another one. You can do something more creative, potentially, or more partial.I really like Catherine Hughes's. She was good at seeing through Eliot sometimes, and making fun of her, even though it's still a very respectful book. There's also this brilliant book about Eliot by Rosemary Bodenheimer called The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. It's a biographical book, but it's written through the letters. She sees Eliot's life through her letters. Again, it's really good at seeing through Eliot. What Eliot says is not always what she means. She can be quite defensive and boastful. These are things that really come out in her letters. Anyway, that's a brilliant book, which again, really helped me to read Eliot critically. Not unsympathetically, but critically, because I tend to fall in love with thinkers that I'm reading. I'm not instinctively critical. I want to just show how amazing they are, but of course, you also need to be critical. Those books were--Henry: Or realistic.Clare: Yes, realistic and just like, "This is a human being," and having a sense of humor about it as well. That's what's great about Catherine Hughes's book, is that she's got a really good sense of humor. That makes for a fun reading experience.Henry: Why do you think more philosophers don't write biographies? It's an unphilosophical activity, isn't it?Clare: That's a very interesting question. Just a week or so ago, I was talking to Clare Mac Cumhaill I'm not quite sure how you pronounce her name, but anyway, so there's--Henry: Oh, who did the four women in Oxford?Clare: Yes. Exactly.Henry: That was a great book.Clare: Yes. Clare MacCumhaill co-wrote this book with Rachael Wiseman. They're both philosophers. They wrote this group biography of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. I happened to be having dinner with a group of philosophers and sitting opposite her. Had never met her before. It was just a delight to talk to another philosopher who'd written biography. We both felt that there was a real philosophical potential in biography, that thinking about a shape of a human life, what it is to know another person, the connection between a person's life and their philosophy. Even to put it that way implies that philosophy is something that isn't part of life, that you've got philosophy over here and you've got life over there. Then you think about the connection between them.That, when you think about it, is quite a questionable way of looking at philosophy as if it's somehow separate from life or detachment life. We had a really interesting conversation about this. There's Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. He's another philosopher who's written biography, and then went on to reflect, interestingly, on the relationship between philosophy and biography.I think on the one hand, I'd want to question the idea that biography and philosophy are two different things or that a person's life and their thought are two separate questions. On the other hand, we've got these two different literary forms. One of them is a narrative form of writing, and one of them- I don't know what the technical term for it would be- but a more systematic writing where with systematic writing, it's not pinned to a location or a time, and the structure of the text is conceptual rather than narrative. It's not ordered according to events and chronology, and things happening, you've just got a more analytic style of writing.Those two styles of writing are very, very different ways of writing. They're two different literary forms. Contemporary academic philosophers tend to write, almost always-- probably are pretty much forced to write in the systematic analytic style because as soon as you would write a narrative, the critique will be, "Well, that's not philosophy. That's history," or "That's biography," or, "That's anecdote." You might get little bits of narrative in some thought experiment, but by definition, the thought experiment is never pinned to a particular time, place, or context. "Let's imagine a man standing on a bridge. There's a fat man tied to the railway line [crosstalk]." Those are like little narratives, but they're not pinned. There is a sequencing, so I suppose they are narratives. Anyway, as you can tell, they're quite abstracted little narratives.That interests me. Why is it that narrative is seen as unphilosophical? Particularly when you think about the history of philosophy, and we think about Plato's dialogues, which tend to have a narrative form, and the philosophical conversation is often situated within a narrative. The Phaedo, for example, at the beginning of the book, Socrates is sitting in prison, and he's about to drink his poisoned hemlock. He's awaiting execution. His friends, students, and disciples are gathered around him. They're talking about death and how Socrates feels about dying. Then, at the end of the book, he dies, and his friends are upset about it.Think about, I know, Descartes' Meditations, where we begin in the philosopher's study, and he's describing--Henry: With the fire.Clare: He's by the fire, but he's also saying, "I've reached a point in my life where I thought, actually, it's time to question some assumptions." He's sitting by the fire, but he's also locating the scene in his own life trajectory. He's reached a certain point in life. Of course, that may be a rhetorical device. Some readers might want to say, "Well, that's mere ornamentation. We extract the arguments from that. That's where the philosophy is." I think it's interesting to think about why philosophers might choose narrative as a form.Spinoza, certainly not in the Ethics, which is about as un-narrative as you can get, but in some of his other, he experimented with an earlier version of the Ethics, which is actually like Descartes' meditation. He begins by saying, "After experience had taught me to question all the values I'd been taught to pursue, I started to wonder whether there was some other genuine good that was eternal," and so on. He then goes on to narrate his experiments with a different kind of life, giving up certain things and pursuing other things.Then you come to George Eliot. I think these are philosophical books.Henry: Yes.Clare: The challenge lies in saying, "Well, how are they philosophical?" Are they philosophical because there are certain ideas in the books that you could pick out and say, "Oh, here, she's critiquing utilitarianism. These are her claims." You can do that with Eliot's books. There are arguments embedded in the books. I wouldn't want to say that that's where their philosophical interest is exhausted by the fact that you can extract non-narrative arguments from them, but rather there's also something philosophical in her exploration of what a human life is like and how choices get made and how those choices, whether they're free or unfree, shape a life, shape other lives. What human happiness can we realistically hope for? What does a good life look like? What does a bad life look like? Why is the virtue of humility important?These are also, I think, philosophical themes that can perhaps only be treated in a long-form, i.e., in a narrative that doesn't just set a particular scene from a person's life, but that follows the trajectory of a life. That was a very long answer to your question.Henry: No, it was a good answer. I like it.Clare: Just to come back to what you said about biography. When I wrote my first biography on Kierkegaard, I really enjoyed working in this medium of narrative for the first time. I like writing. I'd enjoyed writing my earlier books which were in that more analytic conceptual style where the structure was determined by themes and by concepts rather than by any chronology. I happily worked in that way. I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how to write. How do you write a narrative?To come back to the Metaphysical Animals, the group biography, writing a narrative about one person's life is complicated enough, but writing a narrative of four lives, it's a real-- from a technical point of view-- Even if you only have one life, lives are not linear. If you think about a particular period in your subject's life, people have lots of different things going on at once that have different timeframes. You're going through a certain period in your relationship, you're working on a book, someone close to you dies, you're reading Hegel. All that stuff is going on. The narrative is not going to be, "Well, on Tuesday this happened, and then on Wednesday--" You can't use pure chronology to structure a narrative. It's not just one thing following another.It's not like, "Well, first I'll talk about the relationship," which is an issue that was maybe stretching over a three-month period. Then in this one week, she was reading Hegel and making these notes that were really important. Then, in the background to this is Carlisle's view of history. You've got these different temporal periods that are all bearing on a single narrative. The challenge to create a narrative from all that, that's difficult, as any biographer knows. To do that with four subjects at once is-- Anyway, they did an amazing job in that book.Henry: It never gets boring, that book.Clare: No. I guess the problem with a biography is often you're stuck with this one person through the whole--Henry: I think the problem with a biography of philosophers is that it can get very boring. They kept the interest for four thinkers. I thought that was very impressive, really.Clare: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There's a really nice balance between the philosophy and the-- I like to hear about Philippa Foot's taste in cushions. Maybe some readers would say, "Oh, no, that's frivolous." It's not the view I would take. For me, it's those apparently frivolous details that really help you to connect with a person. They will deliver a sense of the person that nothing else will. There's no substitute for that.In my book about Kierkegaard, it was reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. It was generally quite a positive review. He was a bit sneering about the fact that it had what he calls "domestic flourishes" in the book. I'd mentioned that Kierkegaard's favorite flower was the lily of the valley. He's like, "Huh." He saw these as frivolities, whereas for me, the fact that Kierkegaard had a favorite flower tells us something about the kind of man he was.Henry: Absolutely.Clare: Actually, his favorite flower had all sorts of symbolism attached to it, Kierkegaard, it had 10 different layers of meaning. It's never straightforward. There's interesting value judgments that get made. There's partly the view that anything biographical is not philosophical. It is in some way frivolous or incidental. That would be perhaps a very austere, purest philosophical on a certain conception of philosophy view.Then you might also have views about what is and isn't interesting, what is and isn't significant. Actually, that's a really interesting question. What is significant about a person's life, and what isn't? Actually, to come back to Eliot, that's a question she is, I think, absolutely preoccupied with, most of all in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda. This question about what is trivial and what is significant. Dorothea is frustrated because she feels that her life is trivial. She thinks that Casaubon is preoccupied with really significant questions, the key to all mythologies, and so on.Henry: [chuckles]Clare: There's really a deep irony there because that view of what's significant is really challenged in the novel. Casaubon's project comes to seem really futile, petty, and insignificant. In Daniel Deronda, you've got this amazing question where she shows her heroine, Gwendolyn, who's this selfish 20-year-old girl who's pursuing her own self-interest in a pretty narrow way, about flirting and thinking about her own romantic prospects.Henry: Her income.Clare: She's got this inner world, which is the average preoccupation of a silly 20-year-old girl.Henry: Yes. [laughs]Clare: Then Eliot's narrator asks, "Is there a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl who's preoccupied with how to make her own life pleasant?" The question she's asking is-- Well, I think she wants to tell us that slender thread of the girl's consciousness is part of the universe, basically. It's integral. It belongs to a great drama of the struggle between good and evil, which is this mythical, cosmic, religious, archetypal drama that gets played out on the scale of the universe, but also, in this silly girl's consciousness.I think she's got to a point where she was very explicitly thematizing that distinction between the significant and the insignificant and playing with that distinction. It comes back to Dorothea's unhistoric life. It's unhistoric, it's insignificant. Yet, by the end of Middlemarch, by the time we get to that description of Dorothea's unhistoric life, this life has become important to us. We care about Dorothea and how her life turned out. It has this grandeur to it that I think Eliot exposes. It's not the grandeur of historic importance, it's some other human grandeur that I think she wants to find in the silly girls as much as in the great men.Henry: I always find remarks like that quite extraordinary. One of the things I want a biography to tell me is, "How did they come to believe these things?" and, "How did they get the work done?" The flowers that he likes, that's part of that, right? It's like Bertrand Russell going off on his bicycle all the time. That's part of how it all happened. I remember Elizabeth Anscombe in the book about the four philosophers, this question of, "How does she do it all when she's got these six children?" There's this wonderful image of her standing in the doorway to her house smoking. The six children are tumbling around everywhere. The whole place is filthy. I think they don't own a Hoover or she doesn't use it. You just get this wonderful sense of, "This is how she gets it done."Clare: That's how you do it.Henry: Yes. The idea that this is some minor domestic trivial; no, this is very important to understanding Elizabeth Anscombe, right?Clare: Yes, of course.Henry: I want all of this.Clare: Yes. One of the things I really like about her is that she unashamedly brings that domesticity into her philosophical work. She'll use examples like, "I go to buy some potatoes from the grocer's." She'll use that example, whereas that's not the thing that-- Oxford dons don't need to buy any potatoes because they have these quasi-monastic lives where they get cooked for and cleaned for. I like the way she chooses those. Of course, she's not a housewife, but she chooses these housewifely examples to illustrate her philosophy.I don't know enough about Anscombe, but I can imagine that that's a deliberate choice. That's a choice she's making. There's so many different examples she could have thought of. She's choosing that example, which is an example, it shows a woman doing philosophy, basically. Of course, men can buy potatoes too, but in that culture, the buying of the potatoes would be the woman's work.Henry: Yes. She wasn't going to run into AJ Ayre at the grocer's.Clare: Probably not, no.Henry: No. Are you religious in any sense?Clare: I think I am in some sense. Yes, "religious," I think it's a really problematic concept. I've written a bit about this concept of religion and what it might mean. I wrote a book on Spinoza called Spinoza's Religion. Part of what I learned through writing the book was that in order to decide whether or not Spinoza was religious, we have to rethink the very concept of religion, or we have to see that that's what Spinoza was doing.I don't know. Some people are straightforwardly religious and I guess could answer that question, say, "Oh yes, I've always been a Christian," or whatever. My answer is a yes and no answer, where I didn't have a religious upbringing, and I don't have a strong religious affiliation. Sorry, I'm being very evasive.Henry: What do you think of the idea that we're about to live through or we are living through a religious revival? More people going to church, more young people interested in it. Do you see that, or do you think that's a blip?Clare: That's probably a question for the social scientists, isn't it? It just totally depends where you are and what community you're--Henry: Your students, you are not seeing students who are suddenly more religious?Clare: Well, no, but my students are students who've chosen to do philosophy. Some of them are religious and some of them are not. It will be too small a sample to be able to diagnose. I can say that my students are much more likely to be questioning. Many of them are questioning their gender, thinking about how to inhabit gender roles differently.That's something I perceive as a change from 20 years ago, just in the way that my students will dress and present themselves. That's a discernible difference. I can remark on that, but I can't remark on whether they're more religious.Just actually just been teaching a course on philosophy of religion at King's. Some students in the course of having discussions would mention that they were Muslim, Christian, or really into contemplative practices and meditation. Some of the students shared those interests. Others would say, "Oh, well, I'm an atheist, so this is--" There's just a range-Henry: A full range.Clare: -of different religious backgrounds and different interests. There's always been that range. I don't know whether there's an increased interest in religion among those students in particular, but I guess, yes, maybe on a national or global level, statistically-- I don't know. You tell me.Henry: What do you think about all these reports that undergraduates today-- "They have no attention span, they can't read a book, everything is TikTok," do you see this or are you just seeing like, "No, my students are fine actually. This is obviously happening somewhere else"?Clare: Again, it's difficult to say because I see them when they're in their classes, I see them in their seminars, I see them in the lectures. I don't know what their attention spans are like in their--Henry: Some of the other people I've interviewed will say things like, "I'll set reading, and they won't do it, even though it's just not very much reading,"-Clare: Oh, I see. Oh, yes.Henry: -or, "They're on the phone in the--" You know what I mean?Clare: Yes.Henry: The whole experience from 10, 20 years ago, these are just different.Clare: I'm also more distracted by my phone than I was 20 years ago. I didn't have a phone 20 years ago.Henry: Sure.Clare: Having a phone and being on the internet is constantly disrupting my reading and my writing. That's something that I think many of us battle with a bit. I'm sure most of us are addicted to our phones. I wouldn't draw a distinction between myself and my students in that respect. I've been really impressed by my students, pleasantly surprised by the fact they've done their reading because it can be difficult to do reading, I think.Henry: You're not one of these people who says, "Oh students today, it's really very different than it was 20 years ago. You can't get them to do anything. The whole thing is--" Some people are apocalyptic about-- Actually, you're saying no, your students are good?Clare: I like my students. Whether they do the reading or not, I'm not going to sit here and complain about them.Henry: No, sure, sure. I think that's good. What are you working on next?Clare: I've just written a book. It came out of a series of lectures I gave on life writing and philosophy, actually. Connected to what we were talking about earlier. Having written the biographies, I started to reflect a bit more on biography and how it may or may not be a philosophical enterprise, and questions about the shape of a life and what one life can transmit to another life. Something about the devotional labor of the biographer when you're living with this person and you're-- It's devotional, but it's also potentially exploitative because often you're using your subjects, of course, without their consent because they're dead. You're presenting their life to public view and you're selling books, so it's devotional and exploitative. I think that's an interesting pairing.Anyway, so I gave these lectures last year in St Andrews and they're going to be published in September.Henry: Great.Clare: I've finished those really.Henry: That's what's coming.Clare: That's what's coming. Then I've just been writing again about Kierkegaard, actually. I haven't really worked on Kierkegaard for quite a few years. As often happens with these things, I got invited to speak on Kierkegaard and death at a conference in New York in November. My initial thought was like, "Oh, I wish it was Spinoza, I don't want to--" I think I got to the point where I'd worked a lot on Kierkegaard and wanted to do other things. I was a bit like, "Oh, if only I was doing Spinoza, that would be more up my street." I wanted to go to the conference, so I said yes to this invitation. I was really glad I did because I went back and read what Kierkegaard has written about death, which is very interesting because Kierkegaard's this quintessentially death-fixated philosopher, that's his reputation. It's his reputation, he's really about death. His name means churchyard. He's doomy and gloomy. There's the caricature.Then, to actually look at what he says about death and how he approaches the subject, which I'd forgotten or hadn't even read closely in the first place, those particular texts. That turned out to be really interesting, so I'm writing-- It's not a book or anything, it's just an article.Henry: You're not going to do a George Eliot and produce a novel?Clare: No. I'm not a novelist or a writer of fiction. I don't think I have enough imagination to create characters. What I love about biography is that you get given the characters and you get given the plots. Then, of course, it is a creative task to then turn that into a narrative, as I said before. The kinds of biography I like to write are quite creative, they're not just purely about facts. I think facts can be quite boring. Well, they become interesting in the context of questions about meaning interpretations by themselves. Again, probably why I was right to give up on the history degree. For me, facts are not where my heart is.That amount of creativity I think suits me well, but to create a world as you do when you're a novelist and create characters and plots, and so, that doesn't come naturally to me. I guess I like thinking about philosophical questions through real-life stories. It's one way for philosophy to be connected to real life. Philosophy can also be connected to life through fiction, of course, but it's not my own thing. I like to read other people's fiction. I'm not so bothered about reading other biographies.Henry: No. No, no.[laughter]Clare: I'll write the biographies, and I'll read the fiction.Henry: That's probably the best way. Clare Carlisle, author of The Marriage Question, thank you very much.Clare: Oh, thanks, Henry. It's been very fun to talk to you.Henry: Yes. It was a real pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

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In episode 47, I am once again speaking to British Nordic Walking National Trainer, Steve Ellis, from Malmesbury, Wiltshire.  Steve founded Gemini Outdoor Adventure Ltd, and is a qualified ‘Mountain Leader' and ‘International Mountain Leader.  Steve is about to move to New Zealand, where he will continue his work as a National Trainer.  During our chat he mentions two other National Trainers, who have been fantastic guests on this show.  Steve was trained initially by Karen Ingram, who has appeared twice to discuss how Nordic Walking can help reduce Back Pain, as well as explaining everything you need to know about Nordic Walking Poles.  Catherine Hughes, who is CEO of British Nordic Walking has shared her knowledge about the history of Nordic Walking. Steve mentions INWA on several occasions, which is the term used for the International Nordic Walking Association, of which British Nordic Walking is a member.  Steve joins me today to explain what is involved in the role of National Trainer and how he came to qualify.Find An Instructor Near Youhttps://britishnordicwalking.org.uk/apps/store-locatorIf you have enjoyed this podcast, I would be very grateful if you could show your support by buying me a coffee!  This enables me to continue producing these podcasts, as it will go towards covering the server and podcast platform licenses.   Not only is Nordic Walking a whole body workout, but it is also one of the safest and most sociable way to exercise.  Classes always finish up in a cafe enjoying a coffee together. Many thanks, Mary xI'm Mary Tweed, a British Nordic Walking instructor with Nordic Walking East Anglia. If you wish to share your story, do get in touch by emailing hello@walkingonairpodcast.co.uk#NordicWalking #WeAreNordicWalking #BritNW #BritishNordicWalking #INWA #NordicWalkingEastAnglia #onwf #nordicwalkinguk #walx #nordicwalkingaustralia #nordixx #urbanpoling #ANWA #anwaUSA #nordicwalkingnewzealand #nordicpolewalking #nordicpolewalkingnovascotia #nordicacademy #polewalking #lekipoles #exelpoles #fitnesswalking #skiwalking #polewalking  #greengym #mentalhealth #mentalwellbeing   #weightloss #posture #useitorloseit   #activeageing #nutritiousmovement  #exerciseanywhere  #BetterHealth #GreatOutdoors #fitnessforallages #walkwithease #weightmanagement #inspiration #survival #inspiringpeople #positivethinking #positivethoughts Support the showSupport the show

The Big Bark dog podcast is Irelands Number 1 dog related podcast. With new episodes each week, Darragh and his trusty sidekick pups Bruno & Milly bring you the latest news from the canine world with the biggest interviews with pet professionals.This week, we're back with a brand new episode of The Big Bark - We take a break from our Summer series this week and we chat with Catherine Hughes of The Woofdrobe, a new online dog business based in Limerick with a focus on providing high quality products while supporting local businesses. Catherine's story is quite inspiring as she chats this week about the challenges that she overcame when first setting up the Woofdrobe and how she bounced back from these challenges to launch her business. She demonstrates an important lesson to all business owners regarding the understanding of copyright law.Catherine also takes part in our trivia quiz and we chat Wellness with Your woofer too this week. We also have our first agony aunt letter (name pending) and we have a big announcement about a huge competition coming your way next week. Become a member of The Big Bark Podcast + By becoming a member and subscriber, you can gain access to behind the scenes videos and interviews, bloopers and see what our wonderful puppies get up to. https://plus.acast.com/s/the-big-bark-dog-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Catherine Hugheshttp://www.catherinehughes.netSUBSCRIBE!DONATE TO UFO HUB viaDONORBOX: https://donorbox.org/ufo-hubPAYPAL: https://goo.gl/nvYTqiUFO HUB MERCHANDISE: https://goo.gl/bznPj9TELEGRAM: https://t.me/ufohubYOUTUBE: https://goo.gl/O4IPJ5TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/ufohubRUMBLE: https://rumble.com/user/UFOHUBPODCAST LIST:SPREAKER: https://www.spreaker.com/show/ufo-hubSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/44PeAupWmlmkjHM0INvYAiAPPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ufo-hub/id1589998958AMAZON: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f5db9a62-3dff-4d25-b2fe-33dcd54b0c4f/ufo-hubiHEART: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/53-ufo-hub-87793120/GOOGLE: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc3ByZWFrZXIuY29tL3Nob3cvNTEzMjQ4MS9lcGlzb2Rlcy9mZWVk#ufohub

This week on the show we have Catherine Hughes from Growing Family and author of A year of nature, craft and play!Plus Olive joins us for #AskOlive to tell us about what gardening she does at school!With thank to our sponsors..Got a project in the garden? Find the right tool for the job with WORX >>> www.worx-uk.com Look good and Feel good with clothing from Bestdays Vintage >>> www.bestdaysvintage.co.uk TEACHER or PARENT? Want to get your school gardening? The School Gardening Success Plan is for you! Find out more >>> https://skinnyjeangardener.co.uk/schoolsuccessAre you wondering How to get Kids Gardening? Wonder no more! HOW TO GET KIDS GARDENING by The Skinny Jean Gardener is OUT NOW >>> https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1916293301/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1916293301&linkCode=as2&tag=leeconnelly-21&linkId=9d68ff7051c58729dbbab47fa77f4158

Catherine Hughes found her GI grandfather using DNA. Now she helps other people do the same. In this conversation she tells us about her grandfather and other people she has helped as well as sharing tips on how to find your own GI relatives and if you get stuck she can help you (for free). 

Catherine Hughes was living a mom's worst fear. Her child was taken from her after a bystander called authorities to report her parenting actions. Catherine Hughes did not do anything wrong, she simply needed answers. Her son finally received a diagnosis and their journey to self-advocacy is an experience you need to hear. Connect with Catherine Hughes: The Caffeinated Advocate: www.thecaffeinatedadvocate.com Amazon: www.amazon/com/author/hughescatherine Continue the conversation as a VIP Special Education Inner Circle Member: www.specialedinnercircle.com

Today's Patreon-fueled shout-out is for the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Campaign, an initiative that wants you to grow native plants in yards, farms, public spaces and gardens in the northern Piedmont. Native plants provide habitat, food sources for wildlife, ecosystem resiliency in the face of climate change, and clean water.  Start at the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Facebook page and tell them Lonnie Murray sent you!    On today’s installment:Charlottesville City Schools begin official consideration of names for Clark and Venable elementary schoolsThe Green Business Alliance launches on a mission to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals ahead of scheduleLegislation is signed in Christiansburg for an authority to work towards a new passenger rail to the New River Valley To begin today’s installment, U.S. 250 at Afton Mountain is still closed, three days after a rockfall began. There’s no timetable for when the roadway might reopen.“On Wednesday, rocks, soil and debris continue to slide down the steep slope into the roadway,” reads a press release. “Geologists and engineers with the Virginia Department of Transportation are continuing their assessment of the site and the extent of the slide area. Then they can determine how to safely remove debris from the road as well as unstable material still on the slope above the road. The slope must also be stabilized before the road can be reopened to traffic.”Stay tuned. Sixteen companies and nonprofits in the greater Charlottesville area have launched the creation of something called the Green Business Alliance as a way of providing leadership on the way toward meeting the community’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Susan Kruse is the executive director of the Community Climate Collaborative, which goes by C3. “This is the decade where we must act to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change,” Kruse said. “Our nation, our Commonwealth, and our community have all set ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we cannot reach those goals without working together in our homes, in our schools, and in our businesses.” Kruse said C3 selected these businesses based on their past commitments to energy efficiency, and a dedication to being bold. “I am pleased to announce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2025,” Kruse said. “That is five years faster than the goal set by the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County and well ahead of the Commonwealth’s goal to hit net zero by 2045.”Kelli Palmer of the CFA Institute at the May 5, 2021 launch of the Green Business Alliance Kruse estimated that if they meet these goals, that will reduce 13,156 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The groups selected provided three years worth of energy data and have agreed to continue submitting that information to C3 to audit the data going forward.One of the groups is the CFA Institute, and Kelli Palmer was on hand to speak on their behalf. Palmer is the head of Global Inclusion & Diversity and Corporate Citizenship at CFA and she remarked at being at an in-person event.“This is the first time I’ve been in community in real life with other people in over a year so that alone is a cause for celebration,” Palmer said. Palmer said CFA’s mission is to be a worldwide leader, and participation in greenhouse gas reduction at its headquarters is consistent. “It is our mission, CFA Institute that is, to lead the investment profession globally by promoting the highest standards of ethics, education, and professional excellent for the ultimate benefit of society,” Palmer said. Another member of the Green Business Alliance is Sentara Martha Jefferson, which moved from the city of Charlottesville to Albemarle County nearly ten years ago. Catherine Hughes is the executive director.    “We almost doubled our physical plant from approximately 300,000 square feet at our downtown location which Kelli [and CFA Institute] now resides in to 600,000 square feet approximately and we were able to do so without increasing our energy consumption,” Hughes said. “That came with a lot of work. Every decision as far as building the building is part of that.” The Tiger Fuel Company may not be the one of the first that jump to mind when you think of green businesses, but President Gordon Sutton is on board to prepare his firm for the future. “Our business is in large part focused on the distribution of fossil fuels which makes me somewhat of an outsider in this setting,” Sutton said. “I’m proud to tell you however that we have for years now been working on ways to reduce our carbon footprint. One of the compelling ways we have achieved that has been through embracing solar and installing solar arrays on our facilities.”Sutton said Tiger Fuel was so satisfied with the results that decided to get into the business.“We have decided to completely immerse ourselves in the industry by acquiring a small solar company with a national footprint but roots right here in Virginia,” Sutton said. That company is Altenergy, which Sutton said has over 16 years of experience and has installed 21 megawatts of solar generation capacity across ten different states. Sutton said he knows that reduction of greenhouse gases will require dramatic reductions in or cessation of the use of fossil fuels. The final Green Business Alliance member who spoke at the event was Liza Borches, the President and CEO of Carter Myers Automotive. “We all know that transportation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” Borches said. “And as a part of this industry, we have a choice. We can put our head down, keep pushing forward selling a lot of cars, and not be proud of what our industry is doing to contribute to our climate impact, or we can pull up a chair to the table, be a part of the conversation and help find the strategic solutions that we need for our future.”Borches said part of her company’s role is to educate consumers about the benefits of alternative-fuel vehicles, and this year she and her staff helped push for Virginia legislation known as the Clean Cars Act which directs the State Air Pollution Control Board to create a program for low-emissions and no-emissions vehicles. It was at about this point in the recording that the wind began to become an issue. Governor Ralph Northam was also in attendance to watch as members of the Green Business Alliance received certificates indicating their participation in the program. Northam is in his last year and said he has tried to get something done while in office. “We’ve had these climate commissions in Virginia and we’ve listened to the data and we’ve said at the meeting that we need to take action, and we really never have,” Northam said. “The past few years we have been able to work together and really understand what we’re up against in society.” It was around this point in the recording that the wind picked, and I would be curious to know how much energy that would have generated. So, we’re going to wait until later in the program to hear more from Northam on the story from Christiansburg. The Charlottesville Public School system has begun the process of evaluating the names of two elementary schools to see if they should be changed. On Monday, the Schools Naming Committee held a community forum with breakout sessions on the appropriateness of the current names of Clark Elementary School and Venable Elementary School. In all, there are ten schools for the city to review, and the process will go from oldest to newest. Beth Baptist is interim director of student services and achievement. “Clark and Venable are our older schools so those are the schools that we are starting with,” Baptist said. “We are not on a timeline for this project. We want to do it right.” One of the slides from the May 3, 2021 presentation available on the School Names Committee websiteCommittee member Phil Varner prepared information for the break-out groups to consider before they spent time in breakout areas. He said he began research two years ago after watching a presentation from filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson about the work that went into one of his films. “So he had done some work on researching Black schools pre-desegregation in Albemarle for his documentary Albemarle’s Black Classrooms    ,” Varner said. “And sort of almost tangentially to that there was work and a bit in his presentation before the Albemarle School Board about Paul Cale, who previously had an elementary school named after him.” What is now known as Mountain View Elementary had been named after Paul Cale, who served as superintendent of Albemarle Schools from 1947 to 1967 according to a September 2019 article by Katherine Knott in the Daily Progress. Superintendent Matt Haas said at the time he wanted the school renamed because Cale did not act swiftly to fully integrate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.“And that got me thinking who are our elementary schools named for, and surprisingly it was hard to find good information,” Varner said. “Surprisingly it was hard to find good information. For many of the people they were named after, I could literally only find a sentence that described what they taught and where. Clark and Venable were famous in their own right but don’t really have a very strong connection with the actual school system.”Varner said naming schools memorializes a person in the same way that putting up a statue memorializes a person. He said philanthropist Paul McIntire, who donated Confederate statues, also played a role in naming Clark after George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War general who inherited several enslaved people as property. “They were always done by whoever the dominant group was in Charlottesville, whoever held the power and using these names to enforce and entrench their power and I really wanted to see this devolve into letting the people who are actually affected by this, students, teachers, parents in the buildings, make these decisions about what their school represents and who it is named for,” Varner said. To learn more about the names of the ten Charlottesville school facilities, visit the website correctingthenarrative.org to learn more. To keep up with the project, visit the page on the Charlottesville School system. You’re listening to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In this subscriber supported public service announcement, over the course of the pandemic, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society has provided hours and hours of interviews, presentations, and discussions about interpretations and recollections of the past. All of this is available for you to watch, for free, on the Historical Society’s YouTube Channel. There’s even an appearance by me, talking about my work on cvillepedia! Tune in! Three hours after being present in Albemarle at the launch of the Green Business Alliance yesterday, Governor Northam traveled southwest to Christiansburg to sign legislation authorizing the creation of a new authority to help build a new railway station to serve the New River Valley. Mike Barber is the mayor of the Town of Christiansburg. “The Town of Christiansburg is proud to have been selected for the site for the future passenger rail station,” Barber said. “We believe this station will meet many of the town’s current goals and priorities in relationship to transportation, connectivity, economic development and promotion of regional tourism, not just in Christiansburg but in the entire New River Valley.” Barber said rail has played an important role in history in the history of southwest Virginia, but the last passenger rail train traveled through in 1979. In recent years, efforts have been underway to bring one back, and the goal is to eventually extend the Northeast Regional Service that terminates in Roanoke to Christiansburg. The Northeast Regional Services dates back to October 2009 as part of a three-year pilot project that has been wildly successful. Governor Northam signed HB1893 into law at the event in Christiansburg (read the bill)Shannon Valentine is Virginia’s Secretary of Transportation. “And over the next 12 years, so much has changed,” Valentine said. “Virginia sponsored rail has grown from one route to four, one train to six round-trips, [and yearly] ridership from 125,000 to 971,000.” Valentine said the route is one of the most profitable in the United States. The original cost for the three-year pilot cost $17.5 million. The Northam administration has decided to try again to make an investment to give people a way to get around the state without driving. “When we started three and a half years ago we had a lot of discussions and said, you know, we really can’t pave our way out of congestion across this great Commonwealth and we’ve got to look at other means of transportation and so certainly rail and transit have been part of that.” Planning for the new train station includes the 2015 New River Valley Passenger Rail study The creation of the New River Valley Passenger Rail Authority is just one part of the infrastructure improvements that will be required to get the trains there on time. “Today we are making a commitment to invest $257 million to create this vital connection between southwest Virginia and other parts of the Commonwealth and beyond,” Northam said. “And yes while we are bringing rail to Blacksburg and Christiansburg, we’re not finished and we want to take it all the way out to Bristol to open it up to the great southwest .” When regular passenger service eventually begins between Charlottesville and Richmond, it will do so on tracks owned by the state of Virginia. Now the state is working to secure right of way in the western part of Virginia where Norfolk Southern owns the lines to make sure passenger and freight can coexist. “Through the western rail initiative, we will acquire approximately 28.5 miles of the Virginia line from the Salem crossovers west of Roanoke, to Merrimac and Christiansburg,” Northam said. “We’ll make improvements to the Roanoke yard, and invest in infrastructure upgrades along the 29-81 corridor to accommodate the new service… And up at the northern end of this line we’ll build a seven-mile siding from Nokesville to Halverton creating a continuous two-track corridor for 22 miles from Manassas to Remington.” Northam said a second daily train on the Northeast Regional Service between Roanoke and D.C.’s Union Station will begin in 2022. “When improvements are completed in 2025, both trains will be extended to the New River Valley,” Northam said. Sixth District Congressman Morgan Griffith was also present at the signing of the legislation. He said he had initially been skeptical of the idea but came around when he saw ridership numbers continue to grow. “I have to confess and anybody who studies the record would know that I missed the train in Lynchburg and I missed the train in Roanoke, so I wanted to make sure I got on in Christiansburg,” Griffith said.Delegate Chris Hurst of the 12th District was the patron of legislation that created the authority. He credited the group New River Valley Passenger Rail for their work in moving the idea from concept to an official entity that can now work to have the station in place. He’s also a member of an advisory board overseeing improvements on Interstate-81 Advisory Board. That includes some funding for the western rail initiative.“We are really addressing things up and down the entire Interstate-81 corridor with different modes of transportation,” Hurst said. “It was also mentioned in our 81 advisory committee the other week that we are going to be increasing capacity for the Virginia Breeze bus system which has been incredibly popular for us along the 81 corridor. We are doing amazing things in the New River Valley.”Later this month, Amtrak is expected to lift their restrictions on capacity on their trains. Are you planning a journey? I’d love to hear about it if you do have tickets, or want to? Let me know! Want to support the show? Here are some ways! Remember, Ting will match your contribution.Support my research by making a donation through PatreonSign for a subscription to Charlottesville Community Engagement, free or paidPay me through VenmoTell your friends and family! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

Catherine Hughes was living a mom's worst fear. Her child was taken from her after a bystander called authorities to report her parenting actions. Catherine Hughes did not do anything wrong, she simply needed answers. Her son finally received a diagnosis and their journey to self-advocacy is an experience you need to hear.  Connect with Catherine Hughes: The Caffeinated Advocate: www.thecaffeinatedadvocate.com Amazon: www.amazon/com/author/hughescatherine Continue the conversation as a VIP Special Education Inner Circle Member: www.specialedinnercircle.com  

In this Episode we listen to baby Riley's story. Riley was too young to be vaccinated against pertussis. His tragic death occurred 2 days before Australia started recommending all pregnant women be vaccinated with TDaP in their 3rd trimester. Catherine tells us about Riley's life and death, and how it led her to start the Light for Riley campaign to spread the message of vaccinations during pregnancy. Catherine also goes on to share some of the harassment she has received from antivaxxers along the way. This is a must hear story and I hope you take the time to listen. Here is a link to the Immunization Foundation of Australia and the Light for Riley campaign. https://www.ifa.org.au/lightforriley

In episode #7, I learn about Nordic Walking's origins in Cross Country Skiing from Catherine Hughes, CEO of British Nordic Walking CIC, a social enterprise that trains people to be Nordic Walking Instructors and helps communities set up their own groups. She also runs regular groups with Midlands Nordic Walking, catering for a wide range of fitness abilities and she is a board member of the International Nordic Walking Federation. If you have enjoyed this podcast, I would be very grateful if you could show your support by buying me a coffee!  This enables me to continue producing these podcasts, as it will go towards covering the server and podcast platform licenses.   Not only is Nordic Walking a whole body workout, but it is also one of the safest and most sociable way to exercise.  Classes always finish up in a cafe enjoying a coffee together. Many thanks, Mary xI'm Mary Tweed, a British Nordic Walking instructor with Nordic Walking East Anglia. If you wish to share your story, do get in touch by emailing hello@walkingonairpodcast.co.ukNordic Walking Researchhttps://www.inwa-nordicwalking.com/research/https://britishnordicwalking.org.uk/pages/nordic-walking-researchGovernment guidance for health and care professionals who deal with people at risk of falling#NordicWalking #WeAreNordicWalking #BritNW #BritishNordicWalking #INWA #NordicWalkingEastAnglia #wellbeing #fitness #greatoutdoors  #greengym #mentalhealth #mentalwellbeing #polewalking #lekipoles #exelpoles #fitnesswalking #weightmanagement #weightloss #posture #nordicwalkinguk #walx #countrywalking #countrywalks #walkingforhealth #countrywalkingwalks1000miles #countrywalking1000miles #countrywalker #useitorloseit #britishoutdoors #exerciseoutdoors #exerciseoutside #activeageing #nutritiousmovement #nordixx #urbanpoling #ANWA #skiwalking #polewalking #anwaUSA #exerciseanywhere  #BetterHealth #GreatOutdoors #fitnessforallages #outoflockdown3 #exercisetogether #walkwithease #midlandsnordicwalkingSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/walkingonair)Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/walkingonair)

Meet Catherine Hughes. Hailing from a small town southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dubbed "the most boring town in Pennsylvania," Catherine Hughes is the daughter of two English professors. She is a passionate advocate, innovative storyteller, and community strategist. Catherine is an international best-selling author and/or editor of multiple books including It's Going to be AUlright: Testimonies from Ausome Women Raising Ausome People, You Are Not Alone: Stories, Resources and Hope from Autism Moms, several books in the Made to Overcome series, Becoming an Exceptional Leader: Inspiration from 14 Accomplished Disability Changemakers, Mental Health DisABILITY: Perception vs. Reality (by Louis Bianco), From the Inside Out: An Autistic Person's Journey to Creating Inclusive Employment Opportunities (by Mary Nixon Hahn), and We All Belong: Musings on Inclusion, Acceptance, and Kindness. Her long-awaited memoir, Imprisoned No More: A Mother and Son Embrace Autism and Journey to Freedom released in August 2020. She presented her father's poetry (Seeking Utopia: The Art, Poems, and Passages of John J. Tomko) on what would have been his 77th birthday (1/16/21). The release of both of these books (and all of her other projects) fulfill the promise she made to her father in his final days. Catherine has managed a blog and social media platforms as The Caffeinated Advocate since 2018. If you were wondering about her caffeine of choice, she's always loved her Dunkin' but is now a sponsored "barista babe" for Coffee Over Cardio. Birthday Cake is her CoC java of choice. Who doesn't need a little caffeine and cake in their life, right? In August 2020, Catherine not only released her memoir, but also founded The Caffeinated Advocate, LLC. She is the Chief Inspirational Officer (CIO), and offers a wide array of services as an author, editor, coach, consultant, speaker, and trainer. She is a Certified Master Life Coach, with certifications endorsed by Transformation Academy of Clearwater, Florida. For over seventeen years, she has provided comprehensive support and passionate advocacy to individuals and self-advocates, their families, and surrounding natural supports throughout their communities. She considers herself a servant leader, one who cultivates, develops, and maintains relationships with grace and grit in order to create, enhance, and promote services and programs that transform lives. On a personal level, her calling (not a career) allows her to give back some of what has so graciously been given to her family. She proudly serves as the Director of Family Support and Community Engagement at Achieving True Self, supporting families across the Northeastern U.S. Living with her in that "boring" (ok, it's not actually boring) town and very much not boring household are Mama Betty, Christian, and their pets Callie, Cookie, Candie, Hannah, Maddie, and Raven the Cats -- yes six cats -- and the one and only Abby Dog.

On this week’s show: BTS named Entertainer of the Year, NYE tickets on sale, and more. Data Drop News BTS named Time’s Entertainer of the Year New holiday remix of Dynamite and a remastered collab released NYE concert tickets on sale More wins at The Fact Music Awards BTS to appear in DICON magazine Next Week Last Word: Year in Review episode news Intro song: Dynamite Holiday Remix (Spotify) Featured image: Photo by Catherine Hughes on Unsplash Data Drop Run BTS Ep 119 (Weverse) Run BTS Ep 119 Behind the Scenes photos (Weverse) Run BTS Ep 119 Behind the Scenes video (Weverse) [BT21] MUKBANG - HOT UDON EATING SHOW ASMR (YouTube) (EN/JP/ES/HI) EP 01. Hello! I am Bora. [Bon BORAge] | Learn! KOREAN with BTS (YouTube) (EN/JP/ES/HI) EP 02. Do you have BTS public transport cards? [Bon BORAge] | Learn! KOREAN with BTS (YouTube)

There is now an indoor visitors booth at the Courtyard Communities in Kewanee. Catherine Hughes, Director of Courtyard Village came up with the idea just as the weather was turning cold and outdoor visiting was becoming less of an option. The project has been a huge success with residents at Courtyard Communities enjoying reunions with family knowing that they can visit and be safe. Maisey Link, Karissa Nash and Catherine Hughes from Courtyard joined WKEI on People to People on Monday to talk about this remarkable effort, how residents are reacting and the many other things that Courtyard has going on which you can see for yourself via the Courtyard Estates Facebook page.

My guest today is Catherine Hughes.  Catherine, also known as The Caffeinated Advocate, is a best-selling author, blogger, editor, and public speaker.  Her long-awaited memoir, "Imprisoned No More: A Mother and Son Embrace Autism and Journey to Freedom" has just been released.  She is a passionate advocate, innovative storyteller, and community strategist.Connect with Catherine at:http://www.thecaffeinatedadvocate.comhttps://www.achievingtrueself.com/Disclaimer: The podcast is intended for educational purposes only and isn't medical advice. Please talk to your doctor if you have questions. The views and opinions expressed by me are my own personal opinions.Join us on the Autism Mom MD Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/autismmommd/) Visit our website at www.AutismMomMD.com

Hailing from a small town southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  Catherine Hughes is the daughter of two English professors and mother to Christian who is on the autism spectrum. She is a passionate advocate, innovative storyteller, and community strategist.  Catherine is an international best-selling author and/or editor of multiple books including It's Going to be AUlright: Testimonies from Ausome Women Raising Ausome People, You Are Not Alone: Stories, Resources and Hope from Autism Moms as well as several books in the Made to Overcome series. Her long-awaited memoir, Imprisoned No More: A Mother and Son Embrace Autism and Journey to Freedom released in August 2020. She is scheduled to release more books and is participating in additional collaborations over the next twelve months. Catherine has managed a blog and social media platforms as The Caffeinated Advocate since 2018. In August 2020, Catherine also founded The Caffeinated Advocate, LLC. She is the Chief Inspirational Officer (CIO), and offers a wide array of services as an author, editor, coach, consultant, speaker, and trainer. She has achieved Certified Goal Success Coach and Certified Life Purpose Coach certifications from Transformation Academy, and expects to achieve all four certifications and ultimately recognition as a Certified Master Life Coach before the end of the year. For over seventeen years, she has provided comprehensive support and passionate advocacy to individuals and self-advocates, their families, and surrounding natural supports throughout their communities. Connect with Catherine:  The Caffeinated Advocate: www.thecaffeinatedadvocate.com FB/IG/Pinterest: @caffeinatedadvocate LinkedIn: @catherineahughes ***************************************** To purchase my book “Welcome to My Life – A Personal Parenting Journey Through Autism” click HERE!! You can easily stay connected to the Living the Sky Life podcast and me in various ways.  Please visit my website www.lauriehellmann.com for all the links. I'd love to hear what you think, so if listening on the Apple platform, please leave a written review and rating of the podcast!  If you are interested in being a guest on an episode of Living the Sky Life, please contact me!

Meet Catherine Hughes.Hailing from southeast of Pittsburgh, PA in a small town recently dubbed as "the most boring town in Pennsylvania," Catherine Hughes is the daughter of two English professors. She is a passionate advocate, innovative storyteller, and community strategist.For over 16 years, she has provided comprehensive support and passionate advocacy to individuals and self-advocates, their families, and surrounding natural supports throughout their communities. She considers herself a servant leader, one who cultivates, develops and maintains relationships with grace and grit in order to create, enhance, and promote services and programs that transform lives. On a personal level, her calling (not a career) allows her to give back some of what has so graciously been given to her family. She proudly serves as the Director of Family Support and Community Engagement at Achieving True Self servicing families across the Northeastern U.S.Catherine is a best-selling author and editor for multiple books including It's Going to be AUlright: Testimonies from Ausome Women Raising Ausome People, Made for More - Mental Health Edition and You Are Not Alone: Stories, Resources and Hope from Autism Moms. She is set to release several more works in 2020. Catherine manages a blog and social media platforms as The Caffeinated Advocate.If you were wondering about her caffeine of choice, she's a Dunkin' girl.Living with her in that "boring" (ok, it's not actually boring) town but not so boring household are Mama Betty, Christian, and their pets Callie, Cookie, Candie, Hannah, Maddie and Raven the Cats and the one and only Abby Dog.www.thecaffeinatedadvocate.comBooks by Catherine Hughes: amazon.com/author/hughescatherineFacebook: @caffeinatedadvocateInstagram: @caffeinatedadvocateLinkedIn: @catherineahughesAdvocate, Best-Selling Author, Editor, Speaker, and TrainerFounder of The Caffeinated AdvocateDirector of Family Support and Community Engagement, Achieving True SelfAutism Moms Are Beautiful Advisory BoardThe ABA in PA Initiative Board Member

[TRIGGER WARNING: see below]  Whooping cough, that terrible childhood scourge, has been making an alarming comeback due to lapses in vaccination coverage across the globe. And in this episode, we’ll tell you why exactly its return is a cause for concern. From the devastation it wreaks on the body to the untold tragedy of past epidemics, pertussis is a dreaded disease that was nearly relegated to the past thanks to the amazing efforts of three incredible researchers, Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and Loney Gordon. But as the provider of our firsthand account illustrates, pertussis is still very much present today. We are joined by the incredible Catherine Hughes, who does us the honor of sharing her story about her son Riley and her efforts to raise awareness about the importance of childhood vaccinations.   Read more about the Light for Riley campaign and the Immunisation Foundation of Australia to see the hugely important work being done.   Trigger Warning: The firsthand account of this episode features the death of an infant. If you do not wish to hear this, skip to 5:10.

Guest Pastor Rev. Catherine Hughes

Catherine Hughes, aka The Caffeinated Advocate, is our guest today. She has been advocating on behalf of those with special needs for many years and she brings a wealth of knowledge on the advocacy space to this conversation. Catherine talks about the nitty-gritty of advocacy work, strategies for reaching out to politicians for advocating, and some of the things that drive her in her work.

The Light for Riley was born out of terrible tragedy, the death of a newborn child due to Whooping Cough.  Out of this devastation has come exactly that, a shining light of hope for future generations of children and parents with the advent of the government-funded whooping cough vaccination for pregnant women. Not only this, but greater awareness of whooping cough across Australia and the knowledge that protection of family members spending time with that child is also important. It won't stop there for ‘Light for Riley', there are many more important developments worth talking about and advocating for to support people in the protection of their children against serious disease. Riley's Mum, Catherine Hughes is my guest in this podcast, speaking from the heart on a preventative health strategy, to inform people of the key evidence when it comes to immunisation. In this podcast we discuss Riley's story, the impact it has had on her family and the reasons it has influenced her to speak to the Australian Government, the challenges faced when dealing with pressure against immunisation and where to turn to if you are not sure. Please visit her website at https://www.immunisationfoundation.org.au/light- for-riley/ for more. We also mentioned another great resource www.talkingaboutimmunisation.org.au during our chat. 

Life never happens the way we wish it too. But being dealt with the tragedy that is the loss of your child, just isn't part of the natural order of the universe. "There is no tragedy in life like the death of a child." But for my guest today Catherine Hughes, it was a reality she has lived in for the last 5 years. The day after Riley died from whooping cough, she and her husband where thrust into the spotlight, and so began a new chapter in their lives with the start of the Light for Riley campaign. This followed shortly after by the creation of The Immunisation Foundation of Australia. Today Catherine shares with us all: how her life has in no way worked out like she had planned Riley's story the beginnings of Light for Riley the work they do, the impacts they've had, which includes women being immunised at 20 weeks pregnant with the whooping cough vaccine how we all can help how her family became a target for the anti vax lobby - the ugly side of what human beings are capable of how she rose above all of that and didn't let them stop them getting their message out..."We had just lost a child. So being abused online... it just doesn't compare to the pain of losing a child." the arguments around vaccinations advice on coping after a loss, and includes some practical things she did and resources she used that helped her and her family.   Thank you Catherine for being so brave and sharing Riley's story. He will live on in the hearts of so many. ***** To connect with Catherine, or to donate to their foundation: Website: www.immunisationfoundation.org.au Facebook: Immunisation Foundation of Australia & Light for Riley Instagram: light_for_riley   ***** To connect with me (Tracey), Women's Health Coach Website: www.traceymcbeath.com.au Instagram: @tracey_mcbeath_healthcoach and @lowcarb_lifestyle_coach Facebook: Tracey McBeath Health Coach Email: tracey@traceymcbeath.com.au I offer one on one coaching, group coaching, online programs, personalised programs & speaking services.

Guest pastor Rev. Catherine Hughes delivers a special message.

For over fifteen years, Catherine Hughes have provided comprehensive support and passionate advocacy to individuals and self-advocates, their families, and surrounding natural supports such as schools, churches, daycare facilities, as well as healthcare organizations, transition providers, and other applicable sources throughout communities. Navigating "the system" is often a daunting task - but she believes that receiving services and supports to be independent, successful, and well, should never be. Follow her at https://www.facebook.com/caffeinatedadvocate/ Christina Abernethy is a dedicated wife and mother of 3 from a small town called Ohio Township. She is a passionate activist for individuals and families impacted by disabilities. With her own family being touched by multiple diagnoses including autism, she has coordinated events for local and national charitable organizations to fund research, support services and even service dogs for families like ours. She has served on a local walk committee, participated in a local gala, coached a special needs cheerleading team, and have won awards for successful fundraising endeavors including those for “Team Bubba” created in honor of our son with autism. Follow her at https://www.facebook.com/LoveHopeandAutism/ Both of Cathy and Christina were co-authors for the #ausome book "It's Going to Be Aulright! available at https://bit.ly/AuSomeMoms --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/chouhallegra/support

PART ONE Hosts Clarence Boone and Liz Mitchell speak with La Vella Hyter, Roberts Settlement Descendant, Board Member and Media Chair; and Dr. Catherine Hughes, Director of Museum Theatre and Research for Conner Prairie, about Indiana’s Roberts Settlement. PART TWO In part two we hear from Indiana University’s First Nations Educational and Cultural Center Director Nicky …

An introduction to my brand new podcast " I can and I will " with me Catherine Hughes

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders   0:04:35 The Raw Skeptic Report.... with Heidi Robertson Heidi heads to the city of Brisbane, Queesland to aid the stand of Light for Riley at the Pregnancy Babies & Children’s Expo. After a wander around to snoop out any woo, Heidi chats to Catherine Hughes about her ongoing campaign to protect babies in the name of Riley Hughes. Light for Riley https://www.facebook.com/lightforriley   0:25:45 Fair Trading takes beef with unsubstantiated cancer cure A Queensland business has been ordered to pay more than $11,000 by the Brisbane Magistrates Court today (13 June 2018) for failing to substantiate claims, following an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) investigation. https://tinyurl.com/y9cuklg7   0:30:05 The Data Skeptic - An interview with Kyle Polich Are you skeptical of data, computers, numbers and data in general. We chat to Kyle Polich who might just have the podcast for you! https://dataskeptic.com/   Also... Australian Skeptics National Convention 2018 https://convention.skeptics.com.au    

On tap this week is an interview with Indianapolis guests Catherine Hughes, Director of Interpretation & Evaluation at Conner Prairie, and Keesha Dixon, Executive Director of Asante Children’s Theatre.  The two have collaborated on a unique project called “Giving Voice: African-Americans’ Presence in Indiana’s History,” which has generated new community engagement opportunities and greater exposure, and presented the stories and history of the African-American community.

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders 0:03:15 Big Trees are...... BIG! Join Dr Eugenie Scott and Richard Saunders as they wander through Big Trees State Park in California. Calaveras Big Trees State Park is a state park of California, United States, preserving two groves of giant sequoia trees. It is located 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Arnold, California in the middle elevations of the Sierra Nevada. https://www.stateparks.com/calaveras_big_trees_state_park_in_california.html http://w3w.co/myths.blitz.tighter 0:22:58 Maynard's Spooky Action! During the recent Australian Skeptics convention, Maynard interviewed Catherine Hughes from the Light for Riley group. Also Mandy-Lee Noble with more insights into the pros and cons of weight loss. https://www.facebook.com/lightforriley/

Clare Balding takes a lesson in Nordic Walking as she joins national coach, Catherine Hughes, in one of her classes in Bramcote Park in Nottingham. Some of those who regularly attend, are a group of mothers with their daughters, all of whom have learning difficulties. Nordic walking has proved to be an ideal activity for them all to enjoy. The poles give confidence to those who find walking difficult, the fresh air is beneficial to all and the chance for mothers and daughters to be able to exercise together has made the group very popular. Producer Lucy Lunt.

In the investment world, Ellin Purdom is known to her clients as a Director of Client Services. But Ellin is also Catherine Hughes’ cousin and best friend. The two women grew up together in Piedmont and share memories of enjoying Catherine’s godmother’s hand-made toffee on holidays and special occasions. Ellin now lives in Marin County, California, and she and Catherine talk often, preferably over toffee. Not surprisingly, Ellin found the notion of publicizing Toffee Talk as irresistible as the candy itself. Thirty years experience in the investment advisory business have turned Ellin into a networker extraordinaire. She has deep roots in the Bay Area and loves meeting new people and helping them connect with others. Not surprisingly, Ellin has developed a passion for, and a great expertise in, marketing through social media. As Toffee Talk’s Director of Social Networking, Ellin uses Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and Google Plus to get the word out about Toffee Talk. Her efforts have gotten Toffee Talk featured in influential foodie blogs and on the Daily Grommet, One Kings Lane and Daily Gourmet online marketplaces. And whether she’s wearing her financial hat or her marketing one, Ellin chooses Toffee Talk for all her business gifts.     On Today's show Ellin will share: - What her top  business tips are for aspiring entrepreneurs - How social media has helped them expand their business - How they landed a sweet gig - GOOGLE! - How they started the business - Plus much more...

It's been said that museums are stages and visitors are the performers. Museum theater provides opportunities for visitors to become part of the story, exploring history, science and art in new and relevant ways. Museum theater techniques can transport visitors back in time and help them grapple with sensitive and sometimes painful subjects. Museum theater can also cross traditional content areas, bringing history to life in science museums and creating context for science in history museums. Listen as Catherine Hughes, a pioneer in this field, shares her experiences using museum theater to engage visitors, especially how various theatrical techniques have been used at Conner Prairie History Museum.

After 30 years in real estate, Catherine Hughes was ready for a career change. “Let’s talk toffee!” Catherine said to her friends. Right then, she realized she had just named her delicious confection: Toffee Talk. It was the beginning of Catherine’s evolution from dealmaker to candy maker. In a matter of months, her new company, CJ’s Toffee and Toppings, had launched Toffee Talk. The toffee was exceptional, with a rich taste and melting texture people raved about. Catherine refined the recipe for weeks, trying out different brands of butter and chocolate before settling on the right combination for her “little pieces of conversation.” Recognition came quickly, with Toffee Talk winning “best of show” at the 2010 Marin County Fair. Catherine soon branched out from the traditional almond toffee, adding peanut, pecan and red walnut varieties. CJ’s Toffee and Toppings also introduced Crumble Mumble, a crunchy combo of chocolate, toffee and nuts to sprinkle over everything from ice cream to oatmeal.