Helen Lehndorf

Tag: a foragers life

  • Sometimes reaching out to your heroes works out

    (Above: Morag Gamble + my book! *squeals with delight* Image borrowed from Morag’s website. I love this photograph. I look at it when I’m having low moments to do with writing stuff and it cheers me up.)

    Today I’m returning to an occasional series of sharing anecdotes from my experiences after publishing A Forager’s Life . This is a story about how I reached out to some writing or permaculture heroes, people I respect and look up to, and how it panned out.

    I have an amazing publicist at Harper Collins, Sandra Noakes, without whom I would not have had such good reach with the book or opportunities like feature articles in national publications, appearances at literary festivals and featuring on the bill at WOMAD.

    Any writer worth their salt, however, will do their best to get word out on their own steam as well. If you believe in your work enough to publish it…you have to keep backing it beyond publication. Publication isn’t the finish line. In some ways, it’s just the start line of phase two. Reaching out to people can be an excruciating experience. You have to steel yourself for plenty of ‘thanks but no thanks’ or, worse, silence. (*cue the sound of crickets chirping.*)

    Just after the book came out, I wrote to a dozen people (nature writers, permaculture heroes, eco-podcast hosts) introducing myself, explaining why I thought they might be interested in the book and offering to send them a copy. Out of that dozen – two said yes.

    Out of the two who said yes please to me sending a book…one worked out wonderfully well. The other person ghosted me. Being real with you, it’s hard not to take it personally…but for my mental health I’m choosing to believe that they were in a place of overwhelm with life and my book was one of the things that could fall off their ‘to-do’ list with minimal consequences …rather than: they just didn’t like the book.

    I share these details with you, not for sympathy, but to demonstrate how thick-skinned you have to be in the writing. business (and I’m not particularly…I bruise fairly easy). Take my recent lovely news about the Verb Home Based Writer’s Residency. I’m still so over the moon about this. What people don’t see, though, is the manifold rejections from other opportunities that I have thrown my hat in the ring for. The writing life takes tenacity…the amount of tenacity demanded can be wearing and I have definitely had fallow years where I just couldn’t find the grit to keep on trying. Or when the responsibilities of my life precluded space for creative pursuits.

    Anyway, this is a happy story, not a gloomy one!

    One of the permaculture heroes I approached was the indomitable, prolific, generous Morag Gamble. This name might not mean much to you if you aren’t active in the permaculture world but in permie-land, it means a lot.

    Morag is a permaculture teacher, mentor, writer who lives in Australia but works at a global scale. She has an excellent Youtube channel with dozens of helpful permaculture clips, she teaches permaculture teachers at the Permaculture Education Institute, and she runs a non-profit which gifts permaculture education to refugees in East Africa. She’s an incredible woman for whom I have a lot of admiration and respect.

    You can imagine my delight when she took me up on my offer to send her my book. I wrote a friendly letter and posted it off and then a while after that…she got back in touch to say that she’d read and really enjoyed the book (!!) and invited me to be a guest on her podcast! I was, and still am, thrilled.

    + Morag’s daughter also reviewed the book here.

    The podcast was conducted via Zoom. On the day, I was so nervous, my mouth kept going dry which is very annoying when you want to chat away and try to sound relaxed. I needn’t have worried, though, because Morag is just as warm and genuine as she seems in her videos and podcasts and talking to someone so aligned in values was an absolute dream.

    Here’s Morag’s description of our conversation: “As a published author of books like ‘A Forager’s Life‘, Helen has a beautiful way of emphasising humans’ reciprocal relationship with plants and the wisdom of plant tending. She also highlights the significance of hyperlocal food systems and the power of food commons and radical reciprocity.”

    You can listen to our conversation here.

    & while I didn’t have to tell you that I got the slot on Morag’s podcast because I chased it…I like to be honest about ‘behind the scenes’ things in the writing world in the hope it helps people get a sense of how things work and (maybe) to inspire you to keep going with whatever your dream is…even when things feel too huge or overwhelming.

    People will say no to you or they won’t respond at all…and that’s okay. Everyone is busy, often to the point of overwhelm, and I think one out of twelve is not too bad…especially given how delighted I was with the outcome. A more courageous writer than me would have sent out hundreds of emails…not just a dozen…but that was the maximum of what my nervous system could handle.

    I hope this story might have given you a little bit of inspiration to take the next step forward in working towards your aspirations. x

  • How I auditioned to play myself and got rejected

    (An occasional series where I write about things that happened around my book, ‘A Forager’s Life’.)

    (Above: The audiobook as a tangible object!) 

    In winter 2023,  a few months after ‘A Forager’s Life’ came out, I received the exciting news that the book was going to be made into an audiobook with Bolinda Audio.   

    (By the way, it’s also available as an e-book) 

    Bolinda told me that they would soon be casting a voice artist and it would be recorded in Australia. They also asked me if there was anything particular criteria I would like for the voice actor. I replied that I’d like a warm, friendly voice and that it was very important to me that the Māori words in the book be pronounced correctly. 

    After I sent that email, I got to thinking ‘hang on a minute, don’t some authors read their own audiobooks?’. Of course they do…although it’s more common with celebrity authors or for celebrity memoirs. But in 2020, I’d had a bit of a go at recording some of my original meditations for the meditation app, Insight Timer.  I’d really enjoyed doing this and I thought my voice sounded pretty good… calm, composed. 

    So then I did something I almost never do…I advocated for myself and asked them if it would be at all possible that I be cast as Helen Lehndorf for the narration of the audiobook?

    They were very gracious and replied, ok, although it was unusual for the author to narrate their own audiobook, I could send them an audition ‘tape’ (MP3)  of me reading a part of the book. 

    I duly locked myself in my office and spent a couple of hours getting a decent recording of about five minutes of one of the chapters which had a bit of dialogue in it so they could hear me doing multiple voices. Listening back to it, I thought it sounded pretty good. I sent it off feeling reasonably confident. 

    A few weeks passed…and then I got an email to say they were sorry, but they didn’t feel I was suitable. 

    In other words, I’d failed the audition to play myself.

    They told me they had cast a young Australian actor, Ayesha Gibson. Then, (possibly because they felt sorry for me?) they asked if I would like to record the book’s epilogue. It would involve a trip to Wellington and a few hours in a recording studio. By this stage I felt a bit embarrassed by my bid to read the book myself, however I thought it would be an interesting experience so I said yes. 

    (Above: A photograph Ayesha sent me of herself in the Melbourne recording studio.) 

    I was booked to record in the same week as Ayesha. She recorded the whole book over just a few days. (The audiobook version is around eight hours long.) On the day I travelled to Wellington to record my little bit, Ayesha and I were in Whatsapp conversation about the recording process. She was (very sweetly) giving me little updates on how it was all going and would occasionally send me a question about pronunciation or meaning. It felt surreal to be getting these messages as I travelled on the train southwards…knowing we were both recording bits of the book at the same time in two different countries, timezones, studios. 

    My recording session wasn’t until the late afternoon. I was so paranoid about wearing out my voice so bought throat lozenges, a lemon honey drink and tried not to talk as I mooched around Wellington waiting. 

    I turned up at The Armoury Studio trying to look nonchalant and no doubt failing. I had around 3000 words to record. 

    Friends, it was challenging. It was harder than I imagined. Now I understand why Bolinda prefers to hire professional actors. I had to do retake after retake because of all manner of things…throat-clearing, dropped words, flubbed bits, weird nervous breathing. 

    (Above: one of the lovely (and patient) sound engineers at Armoury on my recording day.) 

    I don’t mean to make it sound like I did a terrible job…I didn’t..but nor am I a professional voice actor. And the sound engineers were lovely and reassured me everything that was happening was totally normal and I was ‘doing great’. However, it was precise, intense work. After just a few hours in the studio, I was so tired. 

    On the train on the way home, I felt relieved I had failed the audition to narrate the whole thing myself. Ayesha did an amazing job and I feel so proud of the audiobook version. 

    A few months later, I got sent a few copies of the Audiobook as a tangible object … an MP3 CD! It’s also available on Audible and, if your local library uses the service, Borrowbox. 

    And that is the story of how I failed an audition to play myself. 

  • The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    My friend, the writer Mary Walker, recently invited her Instagram followers to request a poem for a particular mood or need. She said she would see which of her poems came forward as answering the request. Mary is a sensitive listener -of both people and the land- so I immediately took her up on the call.

    Mary’s invitation…

    I have a new book coming out next month. It’s a funny thing…publication is both a writer’s dream…and yet is not without it’s challenging elements. It can feel so strange and exposing. Each time I’ve done it I feel a very odd mix of elation and also queasiness and vulnerability. As writers we hope our offerings will be met with kindness, generosity…but once the book has gone from the writer’s mind to becoming a tangible artefact – all control is lost and the work must be let go to have a life of its own, for good or ill.

    So I asked Mary for a poem for ‘vulnerability and visibility’.

    Here is what stepped forward for me…

    Mary’s ‘Wild Fruit’

    A more perfect poem I could not imagine. I was moved to tears when I read it.

    Mary can’t know this (and yet somehow she did) but my book opens with a scene about me picking blackberries as a child…and about blackberries as a powerful edgeland plant with much to teach us about boundaries, courage and tenacity. Mary gave me just the poem I needed…at the moment I needed it. I cannot thank her enough.

    Mary’s new book is available for order now. Her poems reveal her deep enmeshment with the land and a fearless engagement with all of the challenges of being a deeply-conscious human in this world. Thank you, Mary, for this timely gift. Thank you for gifting blackberry back to me…an uncanny coincidence, a portent, and a sign…that there is magic in this world if we invite it and then listen carefully for the evidence.