Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • the greatest thing in the world

    (Book cover spotted in an op-shop.)

    Auckland writer and academic JACK ROSS reviewed my book (and Aleksandra Lane’s) for the Landfall Review Online. You can read it HERE.

    It is a terrifying moment when you first read a review of your work – I feel a bit nauseous, I sort of squint at the screen as I read…bracing myself for the worst…and there is definitely that ‘wearing your undies in public’ feeling of having something of myself examined and evaluated by someone I don’t know. It’s a very weird feeling.

    I’m especially grateful to Jack Ross for acknowledging that I have a long publishing history prior to my book coming out and that I’ve been working away at this writing lark for a very long time. When you publish your first book, people often say things assuming you have popped up out of nowhere and the book was written recently. The Comforter took me OVER A DECADE to write…because I had children in that decade and because I kept working and needling, editing and fidgeting, waiting for my work to be as ‘perfect’ as the vision in my head….eventually I grew weary of all the fiddling and opted for ‘good enough’.

    Anyway, this review means so much to me…and I am very very extremely very grateful. Thanks, Jack Ross.

  • the journal project

    I’m writing two books at the moment (I think I’ve mentioned this before…), my second poetry collection and a book about my journals from 2000-2012. I’m turning 40 this year, the way I journal has kind of changed lately and I want to capture what my journals meant to me and did for me during the years my children were babies, then wee ‘uns. My journals really helped me stay sane during my most intensive stay-at-home-mother years. (I always had paid work, but I did it from home when my kids were wee.)

    Here’s some of the journal pages from this project – I’m also writing a long …essay? um, prose-something…to go alongside the original journal pages…

    I veer wildly with this project between thinking it is banal and self-indulgent, to thinking that perhaps it  DOES have some merit and might be interesting to other people. This week, happily, has been the latter.

     

     

  • poetry-nerd-gasm

    The Red Cross hold an annual book sale here. It is amazing – two giant halls filled with books, magazines, music. It is so big and so busy it can be more than a little overwhelming! I go every year and always find incredible things.

    This year I decided to focus just on vintage children’s books (one of my passions) and I found plenty….but then I couldn’t help myself having a stroll past the poetry table on the way out and I am SO GLAD I did.

    Firstly I found these beauties – the Plath is a recent edition and looks in mint condition – like no one ever read it (shame on you, previous owner). I love the mushrooms on the cover. I was excited to find this early James K Baxter (pre-beard!) and someone had sellotaped a cutting out of the newspaper about his death in the back cover with a rather depressing photograph of him dead in his coffin.

    Then I found the Lowell and Ashberry and was very happy. I had nothing by either poet in my collection so they fill a substantial gap.

    But then…..THEN…>>>>>>

    I found a copy of Turtle Island by Gary Snyder! A book I’ve been hunting for for years. 

    I was so excited I yelped ‘OH MY GOD!’ out very loud and clutched it to my chest in a possessive manner.

    A man standing next to me looked at me with some amusement and said ‘What? WHAT??’

    so I held up the book so he could see the cover.

    He pulled a face conveying how unimpressed he was and shrugged….proving that one person’s poetry-nerd-gasm is another’s ‘whatevs’.

    I love Gary Snyder is an irrational, gushing kind of way. His books are hard to find. (If anyone has any Snyder they feel ambivalent about….contact me, maybe we could swap or I can buy them off you!)

    There is a wonderful photograph on the back of the book of him with his wee son Kai. I guess he was in his 30s here:

    In my studio, I have a photograph of him in his late 70s, with Alan Ginsberg which I snipped out of a New Yorker and framed. I love how happy he looks and how typically lugubrious Ginsberg looks. When I’m feeling blah about poetry, I just need to look at this picture and it makes me feel a bit better. It reminds me that a) poetry is for life and therefore I (hopefully!) have a long time to write, to improve, to grow in my work…and b) friendship, especially friendship with other writers is how you keep going through the poetry life:

    Here it is in all it’s beauty:

    Best Red Cross book sale find EVER.

     

  • art will eat itself

    I am working on two writing projects at the moment (around the day job, the kids, the endless house-keeping and cooking)…

    One is my next collection of poems and the other is less simple – a project involving over a decade of journals. I am scanning a whole lot of journal pages from 1999-2012…it will be a very visual book. This project is tricky – I haven’t quite found my way with it yet. It’s like it isn’t sure what it wants to be….I don’t want it to be a ‘how to’ about journaling, because I don’t find those books especially helpful myself…plus I don’t think I have much to add to that canon….however it may have elements of that. I am writing some prose pieces to sit amongst the scanned journal pages, but I’m not sure they are right in tone. It’s like I am putting together a book that is almost devouring itself – like the OUROBOROS.

    I’m both sharing parts of my journals and yet critiquing them and journaling and the creative process all at once.  It’s all very messy and more than a little scary, however I’m going to keep chipping away at it and trust that as I work the shape of the book will become clear. Basically, I am trying to write the sort of book I would be excited to find in a bookshop….full of images, honesty, ruminations on creative process, thoughtful mess.

    In the meantime, I take comfort from writers who have gone before me.

    ‘Any writer who knows what he is doing isn’t doing very much.’

    -Nelson Algren

    &

    ‘The furtherest out you can go is the best place to be.’

    -Stanley Elkin’

  • inspiration books

    I get a lot of magazines passed my way from family and as I read them I snip out anything which catches my eye and fill blank journals with pictures. I’m a very visual person and this practice inspires everything from poetry to life habits to cooking to gardening to craft to how I set up my house! (It’s like old-school Pinterest, right? Ha!)

    It doesn’t have to be something I would DO, or WEAR, or necessarily WANT, though…it’s more just about the visual inspiration. I don’t think about it too much – if my eye hovers over it for more than a couple of seconds, I cut it out.

    I’ve been doing versions of this as long as I can remember. I’ve thrown a lot of these book out, too – because of course my tastes and predilictions change over time and it isn’t like there is anything much of me in them – so I feel relaxed about chucking them if they no longer serve their purpose, which is to inspire me!

    Here are some pages from my 2010 inspiration book:

     

  • warm autumn

    Here is how the big vegetable bed looks right now….because it has been such a warm autumn, everything has grown quickly and lushly, which you might think is a good thing, but it isn’t really. It means that everything will be read to eat soon, and then when the really cold weather hits, the garden will be empty. Aah, well. Not much I can do about the weather!

    (Go HERE FOR A REMINDER OF HOW IT LOOKED IN MARCH.)

    I’m growing lots of Kale, green and purple, now that I’ve learned the best ways to cook it – it’s a great crop that grows throughout winter, much like silverbeet does.

    My olive tree, which was about one foot high when I bought it, is now about six feet high and after seven years, has finally fruited! Maybe moving it from from the old garden to the new garden was ‘motivating’ for it?

    There are lots of these dandelion-clocks about in the garden – I used to see them as a weed-enemy before I learned all the wonderful properties of the dandelion plant. Now I can blow them with abandon, like I used to when I was a kid.

    Make a wish!

  • Graft is launched

    I went to a lovely poetry event in Paekakariki last Saturday – the launch of Lynn Davidson’s ‘Common Land’ (VUP) and a local celebration of the recently launched ‘Graft’ by Helen Heath (VUP). Both poets were interviewed by Paekakariki poet, Dinah Hawken. It was a lovely laid-back affair with mood-lighting, a traditional ‘hall supper’, wine, tea and live music after the poetry. Quite relaxed and wonderful!

    Here are Dinah Hawken, Lynn Davidson and Helen Heath:

    Here are two of my dear friends, whom I love very much and who will probably kill me for putting a photograph of them on the internet:

    Here is a random shot of some people enjoying the night – I wanted to show you the beautiful rose-lamp! :

    Congratulations, Helen, on all the ‘graft’ that went into this terrific book. It has certainly paid off – what a great achievement!

    ‘Graft’ is rich and carefully-crafted book. There are affecting and emotional poems about the terroire of motherhood and grief. There are sad/funny/sad poems about a composite character from the Hutt Vally called ‘Justine’. There are playful and moving poems about science and scientists. In short, there is a lot going on in this slim volume and it is a dense, satisfying read.

    Here’s to charmed evenings in little town halls, with moody lighting, poetry, live music and home-made lamingtons! I could do that every Saturday…

  • there is no cure for curiosity

    A friend sent me a little card with this quotation on it:

    “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

    -Dorothy Parker

    I am an eternally curious (nosey?) person. I often follow the path of curious things, which sometimes leads to adventures and happy accidents…and sometimes to wasted time and dead ends.

    Here are some things I saw out walking recently:

    A boat called ‘Romance’…

    A bear-face in a beam – do you see it, too?

    Never forget to look UP! Look what I saw on a cafe ceiling, recently…wheat and coloured discs…

    And, in my idea of heaven…a tiny secret garden in the middle of a big city…bursting with vegetables and herbs…

    How do I know it was a secret garden? Well, firstly because it was tucked away in a corner you are unlikely to stumble on…and secondly, because the sign said so:

    I hope you find some interesting things out walking this week. X

  • i am back in town – do you hear me

    The new chair sits next to the older chair and it looks like they are having a conversation. (Maybe I have been reading THIS book too much?)

    *

    I find this slid under my door. How intriguing!

    Except it isn’t. It turns out to be from a religious zealot, just letting me know if I don’t confess my sins I will burn in hell forever.

    How much more interesting if it had been from an old friend who wanted my attention….or a musician who really, really wanted me to come to his gig….or anything else, really. Still, great title!

    *

    When I took the kids to the museum, I experienced what I would look like with skinny legs in the hall of mirrors. I stood lookiing at my illusory skinny legs for far too long:

    *

    Then I became a giant on the new Museum carpet:

    *

    Finally, with the colder weather – the monsters return for hibernation. They leave their feet at our back door:

  • the last

    I write about the seasons a lot, don’t I? I can’t help it. I grew up in a small town in the middle of farmland – my Dad was (still is) a hunter and fisherman and so we ate with the seasons and the seasons were meaningful in a way they may not be for city-folks. Most of my friends lived on farms, so the drying off of cows marked the start of winter, new lambs heralded spring. Because I do write about the seasons so much, the editor of The Comforter, Helen Rickerby, organised the book into seasonal parts. I still can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to do that – but that’s why you need a good editor, right? To show you things which are right under your nose but you can’t see because you are over-exposed to your own work.

    Anyhow, of all the seasons, autumn is my favourite. The harvest, the golden days with cold edges, the sense of melancholy. Garden fires, washing the woolens which have been in storage since September, quinces, feijoas, walnuts…picking apples – we have two apple trees at our place:

    In my book, there is a poem about the beginning of autumn, the final day of daylight saving. There is a point at the end of summer/early autumn, if you are a gardener and eat seasonally, like we do, where you know it is likely to be the ‘last’ time you taste that particular thing for some time. That final meal has autumnal melancholy all over it – it’s a farewell to summer. In the poem, ‘the last’ has a deeper resonance – because of my beliefs about the environment, I feel that anything could be our ‘last’ time, because our existence on this ailing earth is so precarious right now, and growing more so.

    Late summer this year, we ate corn for a good eight weeks, thanks to the 60 corn plants I grew – & no, I didn’t tire of it, like I do with some gluts. With the last of our fresh corn, I made a bean succotash which also contained the last of our tomatoes:

    Also, ‘last’ for the season – I made a ‘pistou’ or paste with the last of our bush basil, some pine-nuts, garlic, olive oil and salt. It’s always a sad day when the last of the basil goes. We ate it on pasta.  I like to grind such things up in my big mortar and pestle, rather than blitzing with an electronic device. It’s calming and meditative to hand-grind.

    (A Wellington friend who has never visited me at home was surprised to learn that I don’t live on a farm – he thought I did from reading my blog. I don’t know if it was just him, or if others have that impression as well – but just to be clear, I live on a very average not-quite quarter-acre section right in the heart of Palmerston North. You can take a girl out of the country, but she’ll bring her small-town/country ways to the city!)

    Anyway, here’s that poem I mentioned, from The Comforter:

    FALL BACK

    Insects everywhere – dead bees in the garden, moths

    stud the bathroom ceiling like dusty ornaments, praying

    mantises crawl out of the compost bucket. The flies.

    The last day of daylight saving. Everyone

    tired and wistful on Sunday. That feeling

    like you lost something all day.

    The last-day-of-summer pasta sauce – made with the last aubergines,

    last cherry tomatoes, the last zucchini. The garden now

    full of fledgling winter vegetables: spindles of cabbage, arrowheads of spinach.

    Manawatu gothic. Even these bright days are tinged

    with a kind of violence. There is a black velvet ribbon

    threaded through your head, collecting debris.

    The last dinner on the dehydrated lawn.

    *