An ever-growing series of letters, from me to you.
October 23rd, 2024
My love-letter to reading and writing
I created this journal with the aspiration of articulating my daydreams, making sense of of my nonsensical thoughts, and to share as many words with as many people as I possibly can. I’ve always loved words, and I’ve always found myself falling down dream-like literary rabbit holes; and for as long as I can possibly remember, my main ambition in my life has been to take other people down such rabbit holes with me.
I think reading and writing are two beautifully evocative, hand-in-hand practices. It is rather impossible -and while Lewis Carroll tells us that that we can do six impossible things before breakfast, writing without reading is most definitely not one of them- for the two to not coexist. They are inextricably interlinked, and are magnificently tied together at their innermost cores. They rely on the existence of each other to function, and are at a standstill without the other.
I have found that there is poetry residing in every corner of my life. In every chapter I have closed, everything I’ve left unfinished, there is something living, breathing and hopelessly beautiful in it’s ashes. Joan Didion articulates this feeling perfectly in The White Album. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
While I most certainly do tell myself stories in order to live, these stories cannot live without readers. It’s a quid pro quo economy; and readers and writers are ultimately cut from the same cloth as each other.
In short: My writing, odds-and-ends of words and fragments of tales and stories are now not only mine, but for others, and such are yours. And what a beautiful thing it is, to be able to do so.
Lots of love, bookmarks and dictionaries for hard-to-decipher words,
Emmanuelle Kate.
July 22nd, 2025
To my most beloved writers,
My name is Emmanuelle Kate, and I created The Secret Garden Journal in October of 2024. I study English and French at university, have been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading for even longer. I started learning a second language to push my reading even further, and I am utterly delighted by the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of literary translation, that I believe I will spend my entire life learning as many languages as I possibly can just for the benefit of reading books.
I’ve always wanted to be a children’s author. I love classic children’s fiction more than anything. I cherish the work of Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (fun fact, the first book I read in French was Le Petit Prince) and Lousia May Alcott dearly. So much so that The Secret Garden Journal really only ever had one name. There weren’t, for example, ‘a hundred indecisions,’ nor ‘a hundred visions and revisions’ when it came to naming my project. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘The Secret Garden’ has always been an indelible fixture in the intersection between my heart and my mind. I wanted to curate a garden for overgrown minds, under lock and key (I keep my own journal under lock and key in a desk far older than myself, so it made perfect sense to me to name my first literary project after something so synonymously vulnerable). A ‘sweetest, most mysterious-looking place,’ akin to the imaginative garden I grew up with–the same one that led me to where I am, and who I am now.
I think it’s incredibly valuable to incentivise writers to keep writing, and ergo incentivise readers to keep reading; and I believe that any opportunity that might grant readers the inclination to try their hand at writing themselves is worth every spare minute of my time. The birth of a writer is a beautiful thing, and it has been an immense honour to have seen readers turn into debutante writers with the preliminary push of The Secret Garden Journal. Writing, of course, is the food of reading, and both sides of this library insist upon each other.
In summation; I am beyond thrilled to be your editor, if you’ll have me.
As always, lots of love, and literary well-wishes,
Emmanuelle Kate.