BOOKS:
A Forager’s Life (Harper Collins, 2023)
A memoir about belonging and motherhood, told through the author’s lifelong passion for wild food. Weaving memoir with foraging recipes, principles and practices, A Forager’s Life is an intimate story and a promise that, with the right frame of mind, much can be made of the world around us.
Available in print, ebook and audiobook.
Read an excerpt from the book on The Spinoff: ‘The Most Urgent Search of My Life’
Write to the Centre (Haunui Press, 2016)
A nonfiction book about the practice of keeping a journal, including examples of my own practice, plus encouraging and accessible exercises for those wishing to start a journal practice.
‘Written for anyone seeking creative, inspiring tools to help contemplate the torrent of life and eddies within, Helen’s warmth, humour and edgy honesty envelops you.’ –Bettina Anderson
The Comforter (Seraph Press, 2011)
A collection of poetry: these poems are grounded in place, nature and explore the nuances of entanglements with people and the more than human world.
‘In this much-anticipated debut poetry collection Helen Lehndorf explores the joys, pains, beauty and ugliness of life. These are poems that don’t shy away from grit, know that real love isn’t sentimental but fierce, and like to get elbow-deep in rich garden soil.’ –Helen Rickerby
ANTHOLOGIES:
Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology, (Otago University Press, 2024)
Edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan
‘Koe is an essential anthology for anyone interested in ecopoetry or our own literary heritage. Its poems resonate not only within the local context of Aotearoa, but also within the broader global conversation about humanity’s relationship with the earth. Through these poems of celebration, elegy, fear, hope, and activism, Koe offers a profound meditation on the history that holds our future.’ –Chris Reed
My poem Oh Dirty River was selected for Koe.
Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry
Edited by Paula Green.
Wide-ranging, engaging and affecting, Wild Honey celebrates the many ways in which poems by women deserve a place in the literary canon of Aotearoa. Charming and unique, the book’s chapters follow the structure of a house, with different poets discussed and assessed in each of the house’s rooms.
I was fortunate to be included in Paula Green’s insightful and intelligent exploration of New Zealand Women’s Poetry.
Edited by Thom Conroy
A collection of non-fiction pieces held together by the theme of ‘home’ and commissioned from twenty-two of New Zealand’s best writers. Strong, relevant, topical and pertinent, these essays are compelling, provocative and affecting.
‘Lehndorf’s essay is about the complexity of home. When life is challenging ‘home’ loses a little of its role as sanctuary. The first line of her essay is “Home was hell for a while”, and it falls from there in an urgent tumble of communication about what life was like when her son was diagnosed with autism.’ –Carly Thomas
‘I felt very at home with Helen Lehndorf, who writes with power and honesty about her son’s autism, and about love. ‘All the good fights I fought, I fought for him.’ –Annaleese Jochems
Swings & Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood
Eighty of the finest New Zealand poems on parenthood brought together in an endearing, intelligent and accessible anthology by editor Emma Neale.
My poem Aroundabout is in this anthology.
Buy swings and roundabouts: poems on parenthood
Kaupapa: New Zealand Poets, World Issues
Poets from Aotearoa take on the world. Enormous issues bevelled down to small, shining things. A sackful of hand grenades and fireflies. Selected by writer and musician Hinemoana Baker and activist and writer Maria McMillan.
‘There are some powerful poems in this little book.’ –Rachel Sfogs
My poems Three Hulme Street Stories, The Middle Class Girls and Oh Dirty River are in this anthology.
A Magpie Stole My Heart: Ten Years of the Whitireia Writing Programme
‘Here we have the alternative face of emerging New Zealand writing. One of the functions of literature is, I think, to show us what kind of society we live in, and this collection is a literary profile of New Zealand in the 21st century; multicultural, passionate, funny, sad, surprising.’ –Sue McCauley
In literary journals + online
Landfall 238: Spring 2019 ‘Johanna Tells Me To Make A Wish’
4th Floor Literary Journal 2019 ‘fortune cookie’; ‘nature is just too damn much’; ‘nice dystopia’.
4th Floor Literary Journal 2016 ‘White-knuckling It’
4th Floor Literary Journal 2014 ‘So Much White Noise‘ ‘Hunker‘ ‘The Same Bedtime Story’
Tuesday Poem 2013 ‘Oh Dirty River’
Booksellers Blog ‘Jeez Michelle’
Booksellers Blog ‘Tincture’
Best New Zealand Poems 2011 ‘Wabi Sabi’.
Reconfigurations journal, ‘A Silk, A Sulk, A Skull’ & ‘101 Questions about Roses’.
My tribute to Ruth Dallas on NZEPC
JAAM 27 Wanderings ‘Helen Lehndorf’s short story: A Stumbling into Motherhood: In Which the Author Saves for a Trip to India But Ends Up Staying in Wellington to Have a Baby Instead and Mainly Finds It Quite Challenging, Perhaps Even More Challenging Than Negotiating the Rajasthani Camel Fair, which is true in plot and in humour to its title, but which is also a sad, serious, and witty contemplation of modern-day motherhood.’
4th Floor Journal 2008 ‘Inside Out’
Blackmail Press 13 ‘Glamour Gardener’ ‘Capsule’ ‘Six Ways of Looking at a Paua Shell’
INTERVIEWS
Helen Lehndorf talks Poetry on ReadNZ
Better Off Read podcast with Pip Adam
Kahini asks 5 quick questions with Helen Lehndorf
A conversation with Melissa Wastney
An interview on Stuff by journalist Carly Thomas
My Favourite Table That time journalist Kimberley Rothwell interviewed me about my favourite place to eat in Palmerston North. (Sadly, the chef who made those amazing muffins moved on. I still lament their absence.)
REVIEW WRITING & JOURNALISM:
The Spinoff ‘Crashing Down on a Crossbar: The New Zealand Man in a Smiths Video‘. My interview with Hector Hazard, who in 1987 starred in a Smiths video. 2017.
The Beautiful World: A review of Some Things to Place in a Coffin by Bill Manhire, in Pantograph Punch. 2017
Down Any Road Is A Poem a review of Hannah Mettner’s Fully Clothed and So Forgetful and Kate Camp’s The Internet of Things, in Landfall Review Online. 2017.
Our Wishful Thinking a review of Jenny Bornholdt’s Selected Poems and Michael Jackson’s Walking to Pencarrow: Selected Poems, in Landfall Review Online. 2016.
AUDIO
I read ‘The Things You Are Not Ready For’ for Poetry Shelf
Rebecca Latham reads my poem ‘Fall Back’
Musician Bryan Gibson plays guitar with my poem ‘The stay at home mother contemplates flight’
EDITING Publications I have edited
Catch and Release: Poems from the Manawatu
The Night We Ate The Baby by Tim Upperton
Helen Lehndorf 