what’s occurring? June to October

Hello!

I am resisting the temptation to apologise/explain for the gap between updates here because I know literally no one minds.

Instead, let’s crack in: here’s some recent book news and life stuff…

Somehow The Bruise Palette, has been out for six months already!

Here are the adventures it has had so far…

Hamesh Wyatt reviewed it for the Otago Daily Times (which I think might be the last newspaper which still reviews poetry?)

There was a review on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon by Lucy Black.

Lucy also reviewed it for her excellent bookstagram Two Books Black.

In August, I read poems with dear friends Maria McMillan, Helen Heath and Airini Beautrais in the dear St Peter’s Village Hall in Paekakariki.

Among the audience were some terrific poets including Dinah Hawken, Tusiata Avia, Hinemoana Baker, Rob Hack, Apirana Taylor and several other greats. I tried not to visibly quake in my plimsolls reading to such formidable talent. I coped by staring into the middle distance lest my eyes settle on another face of NZ poetry royalty. Paekakariki seems to be a hot-bed of artistic talent.

An article about the Paekakriki reading by Dani Deluka.

In September, there was an overnighter up to New Plymouth to read with Airini again and Mikaela Nyman . The reading was great fun and we attracted a writerly audience who seemed very interested in ideas around writing craft. It was an intellectually satisfying conversation…& David Hill came along!

(An aside: For the Paekakariki reading, Airini had sprained her foot and was on crutches. For the New Plymouth reading, she was off her crutches but I had pulled a calf muscle and was limping. Poetry is a dangerous business, it would seem.)

Another no-AI poster, this time made by Mikaela and Airini:

If you enjoy literary podcasts, the lovely pip adam recently interviewed me on her podcast ‘better off read’.

We talked about grief, the place poems come from, our shared love for the reality TV show ‘Alone’ (Pip calls it ‘competency porn’) and how nature is more punk than metal:

& here’s an event still to come (and more posters made without AI) both posters for an upcoming lunchtime reading at Unity Books Wellington. Airini made the first. I made the second.

Do come along if you are near by and free.

Other things lately…

A lovely gift from my parents:

Another birthday rolled around and F and I went to the same place we went last year. Just after my birthday last year a whole lot of hard, weird shit happened so I don’t really feel like I got to experience being 53. I was in a kind of free-fall. But time doesn’t care and now I’m 54, like Andy Warhol’s studio.

Here’s the hut from a nearby hill:

I got book vouchers for my birthday and (above) is what I chose to spend them on. Old-me would have saved the vouchers to use for Christmas shopping for other people. New-me indulged.

So far I have read the Hustvedt (heartbreaking, clever, she writes about what the ‘us’ in a couple is rather than she and her deceased husband as individuals, and the loss of that ‘us’) and I’ve started the Robert Lord diaries. I think I was hoping to find he might be NZ’s answer to Derek Jarman (in terms of diary-writing) and he isn’t so far…but I’m only part way in. There’s still time.

I spent a good chunk of August’s writing time applying for three big things. Applying for big literary things takes so much time. It’s like applying for a job with extra levels of humiliation.

I’ve already heard back that I didn’t get two of them. One to go.

I think I made the mistake of falling for the illusion of continued success. I got a couple of things last year and so I thought, way hey! here we go!

But no, a couple of successes doesn’t guarantee you ‘go’ anywhere. Still, each application means my CVs, etc, are all up to date & that’s a mercy.

Speaking of literary things from last year, I published the diary from one of the residencies. It’s a bit of gloomy read because I got horribly sick that week.

But if you are interested in creative process, the tensions of care work versus creative work, the non-linearity of time, zen philosophy, the making of something from nothing…there might be something of interest?

(Or maybe you just need a good dose of schadenfreude? It might scratch that itch, too.)

I think that’s all my news?

Of course there’s been a lot happening in the garden (seed starting! getting the backyard shipshape for summer lolling around) and the kitchen, too (making ferments from the last of the winter crops, enjoying warm potato salads made with little new potatoes – except swap the green beans for new season asparagus.)

I’ve been starting all kinds of tomatoes: yellow pear, money maker, sweet 100s, and the delightfully named ‘Olga’s Round Golden Chicken Egg’ from here.

Yes! It’s time for tomato dreaming.

To sign-off, three good tomato-related things I’ve enjoyed lately:

Lucy Dacus wrote a tomato song! – truly uplifting tune and video:

“Life is just a series of close calls.

One day, one will come to end them all.

But before then, I’ve got some ideas.”

From Orion Magazine ‘The Tomato Cure’, a beautiful essay about the ‘quiet medicine of small jobs’.

& I love a tea towel printed with a recipe – this one by Ruby Seeto is just $10 from Wallace Cotton and $6 from the sale of each tea towel is donated directly to the Starship Foundation, to benefit the young patients and families of Starship Children’s Hospital.

It would be great for lining a picnic basket, I reckon:

Here’s to longer days and the smell of sun-warmed tomatoes,

x Helen