(Last full moon we had a burn in the backyard. I don’t know why I try to take photographs of the moon but I do.)
How have you been?
Anyone feel like every day there is some new strange and terrible news to process? Whether it be personal or worldly? Tell me it isn’t just me, PLEASE!
I want this post to be all good things.
Sometimes that’s what I use as an email sign-off or a farewell in a card: ‘all good things, Helen’. Because I want all and only good things for people.
Here’s the first good thing. Due to amazing support for the pre-order and the book launch, The Bruise Palette had a week at number FOUR on the NZ Bestseller list! NUMBER FOUR!
Poetry rarely gets near the top twenty so this was a total buzz for me. I kept tapping the link and peeking at it sitting there at number four because I couldn’t believe it! Thank you x a million to everyone who bought a book.
(Screenshots I took of TBP in the top ten. Happy days for weird, provincial poetry.)
Another very cool things that happened recently is that I was interviewed for the Reskillience podcast. I’m a huge fan of Catie Payne’s work: her writing, her interviews, her world view, so this was an honour and a really good time.
We talked about foraging and writing and plant communication and anarchism and what it means to live hyper-locally and much more besides.
I am your neighbourhood weird pumpkin lady.
Here’s another good thing. I’m going to be reading poems with fellow poets and friends Airini Beautrais, Helen Heath and Maria McMillan in Paekākāriki later this winter. We want it to be relaxed and cosy so we’re emphasising tea and biscuits as an important feature of this Sunday afternoon event:
(This poster was not made by AI. It was made by me on free Canva with no AI tools and a photograph I took and my own questionable font-choice.)
Do come along if you live around those parts.
I’ll have some copies of The Bruise Palette for sale, too.
(But if you’d like to get one before then they are available online via Bruce McKenzie Books.)
Now to some non-writing-related good things:
Recently, fellow forager Peter Langlands and artist Erin Forsyth were invited by NZ Post to create a series of stamps around the theme of foraging!
They are very pretty and you can buy all manner of NZ Post foraging stamp products (including just stamps for mailing things!)
I love this butterfly poster that is part of the product line.
Also in the realm of art and beauty, I’ve been sniffing around the stunning art of Emma Evangeline lately because it is nearly my oldest’s birthday and I want to get him something from her work. It is proving hard to choose, though, everything is so beautiful.
I have a real thing for light reflecting on water and diffuse light through tree canopies so I particularly love her painting of Driving Creek:
Witchy herbs
I’m a self-taught (folk) herbalist and this year in my garden I am trying to find some of the more obscure and witchy/herbalist herbs to grow and learn that you don’t usually see at garden centres.
Two great places to find these more obscure herbs are:
for live plants, Kahikatea Farm.
Late autumn I treated myself to a box of live plants from here and they arrive beautifully boxed up and in great coniditon. I got horehound, two kinds of mugwort, vervain, bergamot, skullcap and vervain. How’s them for some wonderfully witchy plant names? I’m looking forward to getting to know these herb friends in live plant form rather than just the dried versions I get from the health shop.
For medicinal herb seeds, I recently bought an array from Seeds of Paheko. Again, lovely service and eco-packaged product. I can definitely recommend them.
A poem I enjoyed.
In The Bruise Palette there’s a poem called ‘Palmerston North Death Cleaning’ . Then in that way of morphic resonance, I stumbled on this poem Swedish Death Cleaning by Laura Grace Weldon published in OneArt journal.
Here’s the opening stanza… but do go read the whole thing.
“My black hole of a bedroom closet
still holds long-impossible size eights,
tattered protest posters, slumped purses,
homemade Halloween costumes,
and hopeful eyes facing the future
from a box of black and white portraits.
Each object a doorway into realms
Where light no longer escapes.”(from Swedish Death Cleaning by Laura Grace Weldon
I like the very messy human-ness in the poem and the midlife wrangling with all the selves we’ve been and then let go of along the way.
A recipe for if you think you don’t like fennel
I get a fortnightly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box from Live2Give Organics.
The joy of getting seasonal produce according to what is ready on farm rather than me choosing what I want is that each time we get the box it’s like unwrapping a present: I never know what will be in there! The challenge, however, is that sometimes we get stuff that is harder for me to convince my family to eat (I’m looking at you swedes, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, radicchio).
This week we got a gigantic fennel bulb. I love fennel but the family aren’t so keen. I googled something like ‘fennel recipe for people who don’t like fennel’ and variations on this dish are what came up.
Slow-roasting the fennel with lots of garlic, olive oil and parmesan totally changes the flavour profile of the fennel bulb. The aniseed/liquorice astringence fades and it is absolutely mellow, sweet and delicious cooked this way.
Here’s a version of the recipe from local deli/grocery Farro. I didn’t use cream when I made it but I imagine the cream would make it even more lucious. But honestly, just garlic, olive oil and parmesan makes it a decadent tasting dish.
(Photo from the Farro website.) YUM!
Now, tell me your favourite recipes to make haters fall in love with brussel sprouts …because that’s my next challenge.
A sweet song for early winter
I’ve been obsessively playing this sweet song by Truthpaste (great name, no?) over and over in recent weeks.
Something about the undulating quality of the vocals has really gotten under my skin.
Also, the part in the song where the vocalist sings ‘How are you doing? Are you holding out?’ makes me feel really emotional. I think we are all asking each other that a lot lately, aren’t we?
And the video is also very sweet:
I’ve added the song to my very slow-growing ‘Slow Small Media’ playlist on Youtube. I occasionally add a mellow, thoughtful, emotional song when I’ve ‘auditioned’ it at great length and it has passed my very exacting standards for what constitutes a great song.
Well, now I’ve spent far too long on this post when I should be doing much less fun and more grown-up things like calling people regarding appointments, sorting my taxes for the July returns, door-knocking arts organisations who are under-funded, under-staffed, over-worked and under pressure to try to promote my ridiculous little purple book… knowing that likely they will say no but i still have to try because ….I made a thing and there’s very little in the world that supports my making of things so therefore it’s very important that I attempt to champion my weird little thing in this fast, distracted, strange, anti-art, anti-deep-thought world we find ourselves in.
Time to get off here and go and have some lunch, some water and a little stretch in the sunshine, I think. I hope you found this post to be ‘all good things’ as I intended. xx
Helen Lehndorf 