Return after rupture + some news

I haven’t updated here in a long while because

*deep breath*

last spring, within weeks of each other, I found out a close family member had cancer and was facing a daunting treatment regime and then my oldest and most beloved friend died very suddenly. If that wasn’t hard enough, he left me all of his possessions so I had to fly to Auckland to organise, sort and pack up his house.

It has been a very difficult time.

I decided I would take a break from updating here for the rest of last year, then that turned into the summer, then I thought maybe I’ll do an update at Easter...and now it’s mid-May.

Thanks to a wee bit of time, various healing modalities, some therapy and a lot of crying…I am just now beginning to feel a little less sad and overwhelmed and ready to be world-facing again.

Life is complicated and hard and raw and intense and beautiful.

So…Hello! It feels nice to be here saying hi again.

If you have any ‘grief’ media to reccomend, please do so in the comments. I’ve been hoovering up Clover Stroud’s ‘grief’ books and have just started ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ by Irvin and Marilyn Yalom. Books really help me process things.

I think that’s all I can say about the last six months for now.

(Me and my dear friend in 1998. We have been friends since we were 14 and no one ‘got me’ like he did. I’ve lost so much shared history and quirky friend-intimacy things with his passing.)

Now to the happier news, an exciting thing happening recently, is that at the end of May my next book is coming out with Firestarter Press.

This time it is a volume of poetry, The Bruise Palette. It is a almost entirely Manawatū production: the writing, the cover art, the design, the publisher, the book trailer film maker, the advance praise artists are all from Palmerston North. We would have gotten it printed here also if we could but we don’t have a local printery so it is going to be printed a little South of here in the Wairarapa.

Me & some friends made a short and sweet book-trailer for it:

Here is the cover; the painting is by my friend Kirsty Porter.

& Today it became available for pre-order, via Bruce McKenzie Books, my local independent bookshop.

We’re doing a couple of weeks of pre-orders to see if we can get the book into the top 20 Nielsen bestseller list for the week of publication (because it doesn’t have much chance after that. Poetry doesn’t much populate bestseller lists.) It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work…it’s just fun to have a go…like betting on a horse.

There’s much to say about this book and life and everything! but given it’s been a while…I’ll sign off here.

(If you pre-order a book, you’re an absolute gem and I send you air-kisses and warmest wishes.)

I’ll be back again soon. Thanks for reading. x