Helen Lehndorf

Tag: the writing life

  • My ‘Verb Home-based Writers Residency’ begins this week

    Above: my big old monster of a desk.

    I bought my monster desk from the Wellington Central Salvation Army op-shop in 1999 – the year I was studying creative writing full-time.

    I think at the time I felt I needed a serious desk to be a serious writer.

    When I got it home, it had old papers in the drawers from the Ministry of Education so I guess that’s where it spent the first part of it’s working life?

    It’s huge and heavy and more than once when we’ve moved house we’ve had to take doors off their hinges to get it inside.

    It’s heavy and daft…and I still love it, twenty-five years on.

    *

    I share this picture of my home working space because for the next three weeks, I’m one of two inaugural Verb Home-Based Writing Residents!

    Having begun my home-based residency, I want to publicly applaud Verb for their forward-thinking, compassion and generosity in establishing this (sadly) unique opportunity for writers who have circumstances which make applying for away-from-home artist residencies from challenging to impossible.

    When I first saw the advertisement for the home-based residency, I felt so very moved and so happy for our NZ writing community. I know so many writers for whom travelling to writing opportunities is outside what is possible in their lives.

    This home-based residency acknowledges and honours the unique challenges of disability, of care work and of care load.

    More than anything else, it gives visibility to a strata of creatives who often feel invisible, unseen and unsupported. I know that while I have done my very best to keep my creative work alive it has often felt like swimming upstream of the demands of my life.

    (Btw, If you don’t know me well enough to know what my circumstances are, I have an adult son (he’s 20) with autism and I am his main carer. I do my writing work around his care.)

    I also wish to thank Verb for generously deciding to award two residencies in this inaugural year. They advertised for one and after considering the applications, awarded two. How marvellous, hey?

    My fellow ‘at-home’ resident is the brilliant Henrietta Bollinger. Do go and read Henrietta’s book. It’s smart, fierce and very funny.

    So here I sit, at home at the monster desk as usual…but with the warmest feeling of support, visibility and with large swells of gratitude.

    Thank you so much, Verb.

  • don’t buy a sympathy card, buy this

    Another thing that happened while I was too distracted by the release of ‘A Forager’s Life’ to give it the attention it deserved is that writer Iona Winter published a grief almanac called ‘a liminal gathering‘.

    I submitted poems to it and Iona chose one for the almanac, which I share below. I feel privileged to be amongst the writers, artists, musicians and photographers who are part of this precious container for giving voice to grief.

    Iona’s son, the musician and artist Reuben Winter killed himself in 2020. Since Reuben’s death, Iona has used her skills as a writer and communicator to be public with her grief in service to all who grieve and are silenced, or are too overcome by grief to speak themselves.

    A review of the almanac by Hester Ullyart says, ‘This is a hopeful resource, much needed. A rope of stars thrown out into the murk of grief. I recommend this almanac for every shelf, for death touches us all, and no one need struggle alone.’

    I so agree. This book contains both the intensity of new grief and the wearing plod of long-carried grief. It spans anger, raw shock and emotional pain through to gratitude, reverence, elegy…sometimes in the same piece of work.

    If someone you love loses someone they love, don’t buy a sympathy card, buy them this. You will be giving them the gift of a chorus of voices who dwell in the same place as them, a liminal gathering: grief.

    In his piece in the almanac Dear Reader, Rushi Vyas captures the some of the nuance of grief in his poem’s ending:

    ‘Dear Reader, go outside. Feel everything. The wind is cruel. And full of oxygen. The sun is deadly radiation. And our only source of warmth.’

    -Rushi Vyas

    & here is my poem from the almanac:

    negotiating boundaries with the dead

    grief: week one

    kaimanawa horse in my living room

    wild waters                        white flames

    grief: week two

    flower’s fingers holding medals 

    i’m a hobo pedestaled for bravery

    grief: week three

    in the musty cave mushrooms sprout from armpits

    it’s a total eclipse of the total eclipse

    grief: week four

    hurricane chasers, race to get best footage of worst damage

    a raggedy lone wolf to stare down

    grief week five: 

    bat-infested feeling my way   with echo-location

    drink puddle-water      trying for nutrition by chewing on a husk

    grief: week six

    (but wait there’s more

    were you looking for a neat trajectory?) 

    belly-crawling at toadstool height

    make the bed with a chainsaw

    grief: week seven

    turns out the source of the tinnitus is my own throat’s moaning

    some forest fires happen to crack the open the seeds of amoured shells. But not here.

    Just another searing morning. The petrol pours itself.

  • somehow, ‘a forager’s life’ is two

    On March 18 my book ‘A Forager’s Life’ turned two!

    The two years since it emerged into the world have been, frankly, mad.

    I’m a person who enjoys a slow, simple life and lots of huge (for me, anyway) and exciting things happened with the book since it’s release. In this space, I’m going to share some of the things that happened…even though they are old news in terms of the pace of the online world. They are still very much with me.

    (Above: I threw a morning tea for the staff at my wonderful local bookshop, Bruce McKenzie Books on the day the books arrived in store, March 2023.)

    I was unkind to myself and, freaking out about money once my book manuscript was delivered, started a new job before the book even came out. At the same time, my younger son who has a disability was finishing high school and in a massive phase of transition into post-school life. I had underestimated how intense of this phase would be for him, resulting in a high-pressured time where I was trying to enjoy the opportunities the book bought my way, learn and hold down a new job and be there for the kid. Oof.

    It was all too much and, coupled with the NZ government’s slashes to disability support last year, I only lasted two years in the job before something had to give and I left it so I could adequately look after my boy.

    Now I’m out the other side of the intense part of the booky fizz, the job debacle, am still navigating the kid’s shaky steps into adulthood (I guess I always will be), plus I’m in the midst of the intense mind/body/spirit shake up that is menopause.

    I’m sitting here, a bit dishevelled, trying to put myself back together. It’s been a very strange time of immense, beautiful highs and difficult, fractious lows. (Then there’s everything going on in the world beyond my front door where the world appears to have gone completely mad.) Therefore, I’m hoping this winter is very boring and nesty so I can read mountains of books beside the fire and journal a lot (on paper and here) and let it all integrate into me at a pace I can cope with.

    So, interspersed with posts about other things, there will be the occasional retrospective post my experiences with ‘Forager’s’.

    I hope it’s interesting for you to read about such things from a writer’s perspective? As writers we are supposed to act very cool and nonchalant about the occasionally great things that can happen if you write something that people respond to…but I have never managed to be cool…I’m an awkward, nerdy, sensitive person who gets overwhelmed easily. I’m not at all nonchalant…I get very revved up about exciting things. In fact I get excited about non-exciting things, like the shape of a dried fennel seed head, finding a particularly niche-to-me second-hand book, or sampling from a pan of sun-ripened then slow roasted cherry tomatoes.

    & I know blogging is long dead but (see above point about not being very cool) however I’m hoping if I write here, the right people will find me, despite claims that blogging and personal websites have been made irrelevant by speedy old social media and peoples’ diminishing attention spans. ‘The right people’ are folks who like reading longer form than an Instagram caption and appreciate the reedy, faint voice of a shaky woman trying to lure kindred people into giving their precious attention to her personal website rather than further furnishing the pockets of tech billionaires.

    If that’s you, warmest of welcomes aboard.

    (Do leave comments if you feel moved to. I read everything and promise to respond.)