Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • travel in a tin

    Often when I mooch around a deli it is the food packaging that catches my eye more than the contents.

    Chillies from Mexico…

    Smoked paprika from Spain…

    Plain old tinned tomatoes from Italy…but somehow the Italians manage to make a quotidian product look appealing. Those bold, shiny tomatoes against that black background. Whoar!

    (Although this is obviously their export packaging because the text is in English.)

    I like the packaging so much…I’m loathe to eat the contents because I like having the tins on my shelf…cheering me up with their hints of hot, exotic locations and a life less ordinary.

  • my journals keep me

    Do you keep a journal?

    Sometimes I feel like my journals keep me.

    They keep me sane, keep me engaged, keep me feeling creative even when I don’t have time for larger creative endeavours.

    I’ve been teaching journal-writing for years. Teaching is a good reminder to me in how important it is to keep on with journals. People often start the journal workshops with slightly skeptical, guarded expressions…(I don’t know what they are thinking, but I imagine it is something along the lines of ‘Is she going to make me write about my feelings and then read it out?’) but after a couple of hours of my raving and sharing my work wth them, they light up, they see possibility, they go out the door with a new resolve.

    Now that book one is nearly birthed, I am working on the next projects. There will be more poetry, of course, there’s another thing I’m working on which I am calling ‘writing blobs’ at the moment, because I’m not sure what they are yet – not poems, not stories, just blobs. Finally, I want to write a journaling book. I’m feeling my way into what that might look like – probably a mix of my teaching and my own journal pages. Would you read a journaling book? What would you like to see in a journaling book?

    Here is a recent journal collage: ‘water’:

  • teaching your mother to suck oranges

    I was sitting across from Magnus watching him eat his dessert which was, that night, two cut-up oranges.

    Magnus was really eating those oranges. He was so present in his enjoyment – he was sucking every drop of juice and had the fixed stare of someone experiencing great sensory pleasure.

    I love that about children. They are great teachers in being fully present in the moment.

    Watching Magnus eat an orange made me want to eat an orange, so I did. It was delicious. We sucked oranges companionably for a good ten minutes.

    Messy fruit offers a particular pleasure, I think. Sensual and fun, all at once. It also demands presence of mind. You can’t suck oranges and read. You can’t chew out a mango and talk on the phone.

    Messy fruit as zen practice? Why not.

    At least we are free to suck oranges in public…unlike in this quotation about oranges in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell:

    “When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.” 

  • beach treasures

    One of our favourite things to do as a family is visit a body of water – be it creek, river, lake or sea.

    We tend to split into two camps – the stone throwers and the foragers.

    Magnus and Fraser are the stone throwers. Fraser likes to skim stones, so actually, he has to forage a bit for good skimmers.

    Magnus just loves to throw stones in water. He has since he was tiny. So he stands at the water’s edge: plop! plop! plop!

    Willoughby and I are the foragers – we mooch about picking up bits of shell, rock and plant that interest us.

    I’ve taught Willoughby to, at the end of our visit, sort through everything he’s collected and only take home a couple of favourites. (‘Leave only footprints, take only photographs’ etc…) Both of us, with our magpie tendencies find it hard not to take a small treasure home.

    Here is a photograph of us sorting through beach treasure from a recent visit. That’s my lap, and you can just see a bit of W at the top.

    So many lovely things! You can see why it takes us a while to put some of them back.

  • this is a post about the rugby world cup (kind of)

    There’s a Rugby World Cup on.

    I’ve noticed it more than I might usually because in my new job at the Palmerston North City Library, we are hosting public screenings of many of the matches which means I’ve been tying up flag bunting and making party food. (Who would have thought I could feel ambivalent about bunting? but the flag bunting is kind of cheap, synthetic and nasty…& probably made in China.) Up goes the Argentinian flags, down they come, up goes Samoan flags, down they come, up goes French flags…etc.

    Anyway…rugby isn’t really my thing, but I was really moved to see this when I was walking the boys to school the other day….a house with a Tonga connection draped their entire front fence with beautiful Tapa cloth. It was quite a sight and made the boys stop and stare.

    It beats that cheap nylon flag bunting any day.

  • there is no perfect time to do anything

     

    I’m working two jobs, my garden is a weedy mess, in a week it is the school holidays, I have nearly 100 essays to grade, I’m training to teach yoga, lately I only get to see my husband at bedtime…

    …golly gee, I think I might publish a book.

    While I’m at it, why don’t I start a new blog?

    Some of you might say ‘why start a blog right now, Helen?’ and cynically think that it is just to publicise the book, that it is all about self-interest and the blowing of one’s own trumpet…

    You’d be right.

    The book is coming out with a wonderful small press, Seraph. When you publish with a small press you are accepting that there is little marketing budget and everything you can do to promote your own book is going to help a lot.

    Welcome to my self-promoting soap-box.