Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • ‘The Comforter’ has a cover!

    My book is going to print at the end of this week! I can’t believe it.

    Helen Rickerby, who owns Seraph Press and edited the book, has somehow made the process of editing and co-ordinating the book (seem) effortless AND even fun. She is a wonderful editor who really gets behind the poets she publishes, deeply engages with the writing and works to present the poetry in the best possible way.

    So anyway, drum roll please, here is the cover! (There is much more to Sarah Laing’s design than just the front cover – there is a beautiful back cover, book flaps, inside cover and illustrations within – however – I want to leave some of it as a surprise for the ‘in real life’ experience of the book!)

    So for now, here’s the front:

    The textile art is by Melissa Wastney, a friend whose artwork I love very much.

    I wanted something for the cover that combined my love of nature and textiles, and which was elegant and understated. I think designer Sarah Laing has more than achieved that. Thanks so much, Sarah! I love the texture and wrinkles of the slubby linen and the way the trees look like they could be underground…

    (The book will be launched in Palmerston North on the 2nd December and in Wellington on the 3rd December. Launch details to come.)

  • the trail is not a trail

    One of my favourite poets is American poet Gary Snyder. He is described as the ‘poet laureate of deep ecology’ by some and I would agree with that. I guess he is a natural fit for me – he studied Zen Buddhism in Japan for years and writes a lot about the human spirit and nature.

    I have to defend his work from most of my poet friends who think his stuff is ‘obvious’ or romanticises nature or whatever – but I think a) the simplicity of his work often echoes that of the Zen Koan (short poems or spiritual conundrums) he is obviously schooled in.

    You could say this very famous poem by seventeenth century Japanese poet Masahide is ‘obvious’ and yet in its simplicity it also contains multitudes of meaning:

    Barn’s burnt down-

    now I can see

    the moon.

    *

    And b) I don’t find his nature writing to be ‘romantic’. I find it to be frank and direct. However, it is hard to write ANYTHING about nature in the 21st century and not be accused of being ‘romantic’ and Wordsworthian. Nature poetry has an undeserved bad rap, I think.

    Anyway, here is my current favourite Gary Snyder poem. Like a Zen koan, it is deceptively simple and yet depending on your reading of it can blow out and up and be a big existential gesture. As well as enjoying it aesthetically, I am returning to it lately as a reminder of mindfulness…because the trail is not a trail, there is no destination, ….or if there is it is only death – hence the pressing need to be present in the moment!

    Here it is:

    The Trail is Not A Trail

    by Gary Snyder

    (from Left Out In The Rain, North Point Press, 1986)

    I drove down the Freeway
    And turned off at an exit
    And went along a highway
    Til it came to a sideroad
    Drove up the sideroad
    Til it turned to a dirt road
    Full of bumps, and stopped.
    Walked up a trail
    But the trail got rough
    And it faded away—
    Out in the open,
    Everywhere to go.

  • peel the beet

    The garden is warming up to the point that some of the things which have been in it over the winter are starting to bolt.

    I harvested my beetroots the other day, as they’d been in there since autumn. Time to pick them to make room for some more exciting summer vegetable.

    Beetroots are great to have in the garden over winter because while they are growing you can pick the leaves off them and eat them as you would spinach. So by the time you come to harvest the roots, you’ve had months of greens off them as well – making them a very generous plant.

    People think beetroot is messy to prepare, but I’ve worked out that by doing it the following way – there is not a stain anywhere. Not even on my hands.

    Ignore all the recipe books which tell you that they are too hard to peel raw and that you should cook then peel. Cooking then peeling = MESS! & They are no harder to peel raw than a potato.

    Of course you don’t have to cook them – you can eat them raw, but I prefer them cooked as I’m not a huge fan of their uncooked dirt-like flavour.

    Helen’s No-Stain No-fuss Beetroot Preparation Method

    1. Fill the sink with warm water.

    2. Chop the leaves off the beetroots. Keep the tender leaves for eating, (leaves not in this recipe, put them in your fridge and eat them later!) discard the rougher ones.

    3. Throw the beetroots into the warm water. Using a potato peeler, peel the beetroots UNDER THE WATER. Check it out! No stains on your hands. Awesome.

    4. Cut the wet beetroots into appealing chunks. Throw into a pot.

    5. Fill the pot with 1/3 vinegar (I use white or cider), 2/3rds water, a teaspoon of salt and the spices of your choice. Because the beetroot is so plain and earthy tasting, I like to use strong flavours like a bit of curry powder, lemon zest, cloves and wholeseed mustard.

    6. Boil until the beetroots are just tender. Cool. Eat! They are great added to salads, sandwiches or just as a side-dish by themselves.

    (Because they are cooked in vinegar, what you don’t eat right away can be stored in the fridge in a container with a lid and will last a couple of weeks.)

    & Super-thrifty tip: when you have finished eating your beetroots, the juice can be used as a natural dye for cotton or wool or a food-colouring replacement for baking (you only need a drop or two, so the vinegar-taste won’t appear in your baking.)

    So there you go – that’s what I do with my beetroot! How do you like to eat beets?

    …& the beet goes on…(groan)…

  • snatched creativity

    Mothers who are also creatives (writers/artists/musicians etc) are extremely resourceful in terms of snatching creative time from days that fill up (and sometimes overflow) with children and domestic stuff and work.

    I feel like everything I make is done in intense short bursts, taking half an hour here, an hour there, ten minutes over here to quickly write/stitch/grow.

    Like most creative mothers, I look back on how I spent my pre-children time and shake my head at the ‘waste’….ha ha. But to do that is silly and ‘mooching’ is an important part of being young.

    It’s an interesting issue. On one hand, I get enormously frustrated at the lack of time I get to spend on creative work, I long for the space to deeply engage with the thinking and processing needed for quality creative work. I daydream about what I could create with more time.

    On the other hand, my creative ‘muscle’ is in peak condition. I can whack out a poem draft in a stolen ten minutes, I can add another layer to a journal collage while I wait for pasta to boil, I draft writing in my head while taking the kids to the park – scrawling notes on the back of receipt.

    Something about the urgency of snatching the time makes me more determined, more tenacious. I value my time more than I ever have before and I try not to waste it. I am good at saying ‘no’ to things I don’t really want to do (a skill which took YEARS of conscious work.)

    I feel like I could write lots, lots more about the topic of mothers who are creatives (maybe I will when I get time – lol). I would love to hear from you about how you cope with the twin demands of children and the creative compulsion…? How do you cope? What methods have you employed to stay sane and keep in the flow?

  • keeping the prunings

    Every time my lavender needs a prune, I tie up the prunings and hang them up in our porch to dry. Then, some months later when I have a spare hour, I pull the dried blooms off the stalks and add them to my lavender jar.

    My friend Melissa makes lovely lavender sachets with hand-printed linens. I think everything Melissa makes is beautiful.

    I like being thrifty and so I get a kick out of turning prunings into something useful. It’s a process that (to me) is lovely at every stage – the lavender is beautiful on the bush while it’s growing, it’s attractive hanging to dry on the porch, it looks nice in a jar and it will be delicious in a sachet – the heady scent of the blooms living on long after the stems have turned to compost.

  • fly away home

    I was sitting at the table and Willoughby said: ‘What’s that black spot on your skirt, Mum?’

    It was a green ladybird (I think) – dark, pearlescent green. I’ve never seen a green ladybird before. I looked it up on the ever-wise internet and found that ladybirds can be “yellow, green, orange, grey, white and brown, but are most commonly red. There is even a breed of ladybird which is black with coloured spots.”

    I got her to model for a couple of photographs and then I went and released her back outside.

    When you wear a lot of floral, you attract all kinds…

     

  • forgetting and remembering

    I’ve had a week of battling my ‘monkey mind’ – that part of the mind that is unsettled and dissatisfied, busy and graceless. This week my monkey mind has been a place of impatience and regret – both fairly useless emotions.

    It’s the school holidays, I’ve got far too much work on my plate (which I can’t get to, because it’s the school holidays) and I’m burning, itching, yearning to get to some creative work -writing and making- which is coming waaaaay last at the moment, because of the aforementioned kids, work.

    Cue the negative internal brain loops.

    The good thing is, I see it, I notice it for what it is – useless thoughts, pointless mental torture – and so as they arise, I work (and boy, does it feel like work) to let them go.

    Feel it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, wrangle with it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, watch it flare, notice it, let it go.

    When I’m wrestling with my demons, the best thing for me to do is to go outside. Be with my plants. They bring me solace. I can get perspective out in the garden, also nothing soothes a restless mind like a bit of weed pulling.

    All over the garden, forget-me-nots have self-seeded. They are growing all over the place, occasionally in an actual garden bed. I didn’t bring them to this yard, so they are an inheritance from the gardeners who lived here before me. I love the self-seeded flowers best of all – staunch, self-sufficient little fellas.

    Bright blue flares of tiny flowers everywhere – they’ve come in just the right week, when I need reminding what is worth remembering and what to forget.

     

     

  • colour in the winter vegetable garden

    I know it is spring now – but in terms of the vegetable garden, most of what is in there is still wintery-fare.

    Where I live, what I can grow in the winter is mostly green things: silverbeet, leeks, spinach, spring onions, brassicas, herbs. I’m grateful to live somewhere where it is possible to grow food all year around, but all the same, by the end of winter – I get a little tired of just greens and look forward to the colours of the summer garden: chillies, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers, the bright red flowers of scarlet runner beans…

    In winter, I have to sneak a bit of colour into the garden – just to cheer me up. This is how I do it:

    Choosing rainbow silverbeet – the stalks are wonderful candy colours – bright pink, orange, yellow.

    & Growing marigolds as companion plants. I know some people think they are tacky – but I love the colour they bring to an otherwise pretty dark winter garden.

    Harvesting greens in my op-shopped bright red colander.

    & Growing radishes – their hot pink pop can really liven up yet another green salad. Also, they grow from seed to plate in about three weeks. The closest thing you can get to instant gratification in a vegetable garden. These ones are ‘French Breakfast’ – which I grow because they are much sweeter and milder than other varieties, so more child-friendly.

    I saw on an Anthony Bourdain Food show that in France people smear these with butter as part of a breakfast meal. I tried it and found it to be kind of gross, to be honest. I think I’ll stick to chopping them up and chucking them in a salad. The French love to put butter on everything, don’t they?

    Have you got any other ideas about adding colour to a winter vegetable garden?

  • the birthday cloth

    I enjoy ironing. I think if you like to sew, you have to like to iron because ironing is such an key part of sewing.

    I even have a poem about ironing in my book, called ‘Sunday Night’.

    It doesn’t mean all my clothes are perfectly ironed, because I am a haphazard ironer. I only do it when I have a spare hour, which isn’t often.

    The other day was a lovely sunny spring day, perfect for a bit of laundry – I got my vintage tablecloths out of storage – thinking ahead to summer meals on our porch. I gave them a wash, dried them in the sun and then spent a happy while ironing them.

    One of my favourite cloths is one I picked up at an opshop, ‘The Birthday Cloth’:

    It has all the months of the year around the outside, with that month’s birth-flower and birth-stone. Here are a few of my favourites:

    As well as the vintagey (50s? 60s?) flowers, I love how quaint and twee it is. A cloth just for birthdays, which women must have laid on the table to serve tea and birthday cake to their friends or family.

    If you like vintage textiles, there is a great New Zealand blog called Glory Box here – where they examine all manner of fascinating stuff around textiles and textile history.

    I think it is important to USE the vintage textiles (and anything else!) you have – don’t worry about spills and wear. I firmly believe there is no point owning beautiful things just to store them. If they get ruined, ah well. It’s a good lesson in not getting attached to arbitrary things…nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever.

    I’ve used the birthday cloth a few times for friend’s birthdays. It makes people smile.

    I like imagining all the birthdays that might have happened around this tablecloth.

     

     

  • grow your own way

    In autumn I planted a whole lot of bulbs: ranunculus, freesias, gladioli…and the other day the first of my ranunculus flowered.

    I bought all white bulbs, as I’d planned to have all white flowers in pots on the porch for added cooling effect, come summer.

    As you can, see not all of the bulbs came up white.

    Hello, bright pink interloper.

    The same thing happened with the dahlias I planted. The packet said ‘white’ and they flowered bright red.

    I don’t really care – in fact it makes me like them even more somehow. I always do like rebels and non-conformists best.

    Also, why should I get to dictate what ends up in my garden? I share the space with all manner of flora and fauna.

    White or not, they are very pretty, right?