Do you ever have movies that you love so much you watch them over and over?
I am an obsessive re-watcher, re-reader, re-listener. When I really love something, I want to take it in over and over again, enjoying it manifold times and, in the process, getting new things from it. I’m not someone that needs endless novelty.
One of those films I love to re-watch is a wonderfully odd documentary from 2013 called ‘Cutie and the Boxer’.
It’s about two Japanese artists, Ushio Shinohara and Noriko Shinohara, living in New York City. They are a married couple and they are startlingly honest with one another. Their creative paths have caused them all sorts of suffering and tensions…and yet they can’t help but live for their art despite art being ‘a demon that drags you along’ as Ushio says at one point.
Whenever I’m feeling a bit gloomy about my creative life…feeling fatigued from the endless tenacity it takes to keep writing on top of the endless demands of family/community life…I like to rewatch this film and it always lifts me back up and re-invigorates my love for the creative life.
Both Ushio and Noriko are very dry, very blunt and very funny (maybe it’s a Japanese quality? I don’t know enough Japanese people to know.) Even though there are very sad elements to their story (poverty, alcoholism, domestic inequalities) …ultimately the film is a testament to never giving up your creative aspirations.
Do you have any movies you like to watch over and over when you need a lift? Films that feed your creativity? Tell me in the comments – I’d love some recommendations. I especially love documentaries.
Here’s one of my favourite Ushio moments from the film (I captured these by taking photographs of my TV screen so excuse their bad quality):
This residency is aimed at writers who can’t, for personal reasons, go away to multi-month/year-long residencies, or overseas residencies.
I think it is so wonderful that Verb Wellington has created a residency with this kaupapa.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve had raw and deep conversations with fellow-Taranaki writer Cassie Hart (who also finds it hard to get away from home) about how most residencies leave out writers who have health issues or care loads that prevent them from accessing the usual style of residency. We chatted about what our ideal residency would look like…and we agreed it would look like a financial stipend and no need to go anywhere!
I thought about lobbying CNZ to try to make something like this happen but I never got around to it, because: care load …
…and then Verb Wellington created one which looked just like what Cassie and I had talked about!
It means SO MUCH to me to be selected for this residency. I have been writing poems and essays this year and the residency will assist in getting those closer to publication.
(Above: journal word cards I make for my workshops.)
Over the weekend, I was at a beach-side retreat for women so I was meeting some new people. I had just taught a journaling workshop (if you’re reading the blog because of foraging…you might not know my second book was about the practice of keeping a journal and I teach journal workshops) and a new acquaintance asked if I were an artist.
I made some digressive, stumbling reply about how I loved to ‘mess about’ with art, had a visual element to my journal practice, love to play with art materials…mumble mumble… but ‘no, I am not a ‘proper’ artist.’
My friend C, who was standing there, who is a visual artist, has been to art school, etc, interjected and said,
‘Helen, you are an artist. You are. You spend a lot of time doing art. You’re an artist!’
I thanked her…the conversation moved on…but it left me reflecting.
(Above: Mixed-media chamomile from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)
I have taught creative writing for most of my working life (at university) and there I was, encouraging my undergrads to claim the ‘W’ word, ‘writer’ for themselves.
‘If you are passionate about writing, you spend your time writing, you are a writer!’ I said to them. I meant it, too. I felt there was power in the claiming of the word for themselves.
And yet…and yet…here I am, old enough to know better, and still wiggling around doing the same thing for myself in another creative discipline. I studied creative writing at university and spend a great deal of time writing so it feels simple to claim ‘writer’ for myself. I still wobble around with claiming ‘artist’.
Aren’t our brains fascinating, and odd, and annoying?
(Above: Mixed-media red clover from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)
I think part of it is where a passion intersects with an audience, or with capitalism. I find it easy to claim ‘writer’ because I have published things and had an audience respond to them. My words have earned me (a little!) money. I have been successful in selling books.
(Above: art manifesto in the making. Sketchbook notes.)
My art is mostly in the vein of play, experimentation and enjoyment of the creative process. I have exhibited art work and sold a few things. When my children were small, I supplemented my income with making self-designed and drafted textile crafts and paper goods. I love taking photographs. I feel I have a good visual eye.
So how is it, I can, for years, have encouraged students to claim ‘writer’ for themselves and yet fail to take my own advice in another discipline?
Do you have a creative practice noun -artist, writer, musician, singer, potter?-…..you yearn to claim and inhabit but struggle with? I’d love to hear about your blocks or advice for overcoming this odd phenomena.
(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.
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.
Introducing … Slow-Small Media for the Weekend, a weekly digest of things which have caught my eye lately. My hope for these digests is that you can curl up with with a cup of tea over the weekend and enjoy these things as an antidote to the overstimulation of social media.
Her article about progressive pickles and caring for her child particularly resonated with me. I, too, have had to let go of a lot of ideas about what loving family routines ‘should’ look like. I have a family member who dislikes eating with us. He eats his meals alone out on the porch.
Kirsten writes:
‘I have learned that insisting that we do things in the Family Way (…) was something I needed to let go of. (…)
Care can look like learning to pay close attention to what is actually doable for this kid, this day, rather than assuming I know better and pushing them too far.’
If you have time, read her other essays, too. All rich, contemplative stuff about nature and art and care.
A song
When I find a song I love, I listen to it over and over and over. It feels like spending time with a friend. This has been my song of early autumn: ‘Time to Bide’ by New Zealand artist, Monty Bevins. It’s a whole journey in one song and a great example of song as storytelling.
I love the spaciousness of the beginning. The song begins in Māori and then switches to English. Then just as you think you have a handle on what the song is going to be… changes pace. It is a song which demands close-listening.
+ It’s a song that references cold weather and fires so it is a beautiful one to play loudly beside the fire.
The Theme Zine is a project which brings together an international cohort of artists and writers to collaborate on zines based around set themes. Their latest issue’s theme is ‘Nature as Sanctuary. It’s beautiful short read (and best read on a laptop so you can enjoy the art).
It’s got me thinking about where in my small garden I can intervene even less and ‘rewild’ small pockets for all the other creatures I share this little patch of land with. We (humans) like to try to be in charge of our gardens…it takes some real reprogramming (deprogramming?) to let go of control and let nature do what it is so good at, romping greenly.
+ I recommend Mary’s two books, also. I’ve read both and they are beautiful and inspiring.
A recipe
If you were too busy in late summer to make a tomato kusundi, Nicola Galloway has a fantastic version made from feijoas. If you like Indian flavours and haven’t tried kusundi before you will love this spicy, aromatic pickle. It’s a great thing to have around to liven up winter sandwiches.
This weekend I’m planning on sharing a morning tea with friends, making Nicola’s kusundi with our feijoa abundance, painting a new sign for the sharing shelf (the orange one in this post got stolen) and digging up some of my abundant strawberry and yarrow plants to share.
Tell me what you’re getting up to in the comments. Happy weekend, friends!
(Above: plastic rubbish I picked out from my vegetable beds last week. I collect around this much rubbish each time I tend or harvest from my vegetable beds.)
I enjoy the writing on The Dark Mountain Project. It’s an ongoing project (based in the UK) that publishes ‘uncivilised writing’, holds gatherings, creates a space for conversations about all manner of unsettling and challenging elements of living at this point of human history. There you will find writing beyond polite eco poetics or nature writing that merely holds nature in a human/nature binary of saccahrine reverence. I don’t always agree with what I read there and that is why I like it.
At first it seems a deceptively simple piece of writing, Amy describes a group of parents at a childrens’ birthdday party. One of them brings up the subject of the finding of microplastics in human placentas. The piece explores plastic: our culpability and the unavoidable enormity of the tsunami of plastics in our lives.
I have a fairly high threshold for ingesting media about climate collapse and environmental degradation. I don’t have my head in the sand.This is not because of courage but more that I am an anxious person who approaches life in a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ sort of way. I like to know something of what’s coming so I can consider in advance how I might respond. (I’d prefer not to be built this way but there is only so much you can do about your neurological wiring.)
I was surprised by my visceral reaction to this piece with it’s blunt presentation of human culpability in terms of the use of plastics and refusal to look away from the idea of microplastics in human placentas, in human bodies. ‘Now we recognise ourselves less and less’, Amy writes. A familiar feeling for the eco-anxious amongst us and a statement that works on many levels.
A few years back I wrote a poem in a similar vein about digging up the backyard of my crappy Wellington flat to grow food for my oldest son when he was a baby …only to years later find out that backyard had been a dumping ground for old car bodies and broken machinery and was no doubt full of petrol and lead and other toxins. In my youthful naiveté, I hadn’t considered the urban soil’s history.
These human missteps we make in the name of love: a birthday cake served with a plastic fork, feeding a baby mashed carrots grown in polluted soil…the hell we plod towards on our road of good intentions.
The depth to which I was triggered by Amy’s writing surprised me at first (I thought I was made of tougher stuff by now). But then when I thought about it, I realised it touched on a tender spot in my own gardening practice…a spot where I choose to put blinders on.
I live in the centre of a city. Every time I weed or harvest from my front yard garden (tended so carefully with the best organic soil amendments and lovingly homemade compost) I fish bits of plastic out of my garden: plastic bag fragments, fruit stickers, junk food packaging, lollipop sticks. Some of it seems to get into our compost somehow, despite careful sorting at the kitchen end. The plastic in the vegetable beds seems to blow in from the street.
(I wondered if this plastic trash were an urban problem but a friend who lives rurally said that there is just as much plastic trash out her way, in the road gutters, in streams, from the plastic packaging of hay bales and farm products.)
I throw the bits of plastic into a colander that I have with me in my harvest basket then put them in the rubbish bin where they will travel in a plastic bag to the plastic afterlife, which is to say slowly deteriorating into microplastics in the city’s landfill.
I dwell in a space of both knowing that I have my stubborn blind spots (the macro and micro plastics in my own food garden and in the soil I am creating in my compost) and also having no inclination to stop. I will carry on composting. I will carry on growing food in this microplastick-y soil I am making.
I enjoyed this essay about composting by Scottish writer Fraser MacDonald (found via Pip Lincolne) He, too, is carrying on composting on despite tangible evidence of plastics in his compost. He writes:
‘I make my own compost so that I can convince myself that even when the world seems socially and ecologically broken there are still mechanisms for recovery: it shows that change is possible. Composting is a simple habit of composition or gathering together that integrates past fragments into a future whole, so that what matters is not the individual ingredients but the fertile new thing they can become.‘
& that ‘fertile new thing’ possibly contains microplastics…yet still I persist in habits which put me squarely in the ‘doing’ space of the world, in flawed creative acts which give me a sense of agency and regenerate my spirit if nothing else.
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.
I called mine ‘The Brilliance of Others’. On the cover is a somewhat gloomy photograph of the reading chair of someone famous. (I didn’t record who so if you recognise it–let me know.)
On the inside cover it says, “Personal Poetry Anthology: words by other people that move, stimulate, excite…& at the back, quotations.”
I guess I hadn’t heard of commonplace books then because that would have been a much more succinct title.
I started it in April 2004 which was around when I became pregnant with my second child, Magnus. I guess that is why, after over twenty years, it is only half-way full. Nine months later, a decades-spanning distraction was born.
Still, from time to time, I remember it exists and I add something. There are currently 51 entries.
In it there are poems I’ve copied by hand from library books, some snipped out of the New Yorker (now yellowing…that New Yorker paper doesn’t age well), or printed out. From time to time I subscribed to the Academy of American Poets‘Poem a Day’ emails and I would print out the ones I particularly liked.
(I’ve subscribed to this so many times over the years…usually when I feel like I’m not reading enough new poetry and I should make more of an effort to ‘keep up’…but a poem every day to your in-box is so many poems! & so many emails. Therefore I usually only last a month or two and then unsubscribe again after getting overwhelmed. It turns out even poets can be exposed to too much poetry.)
(Above: This Merwin poem on brittle, yellowing New Yorker paper still gets me in the gut. What an ambiguous, radiant, brutal final stanza.)
There’s also the occasional dashed-down note which must have seemed very relevant to something I was thinking about or working on at the time and now I have no clue why. Thus:
Do you have a commonplace book or something like it?
Here’s a quote I wrote down from G.K.Chesterton. Why younger me liked it so much, I’m not sure…possibly the poetry in the final eight words?
“He discovered the fact that all romantics know–that adventures happen on dull days and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight then it breaks with a sound like a song.”
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.)
Late last year we put a sharing shelf outside our front fence.
We’ve always shared excess produce from our vegetable garden by putting it in a box on the community seat (for more about the community seat, check out my last book, ‘A Forager’s Life‘) but I wanted to make it a little more formal so that it could be a site of #radicalreciprocity* in the neighbourhood and many people could contribute to it.
(#radicalreciprocity is how I try to live my life. Giving generously, receiving with gratitude and humility, and trusting that there is more than enough to go around if we can all learn to do both.)
I bought the planter from a local young woman who makes them from upcycled pallets and then I painted a dandelion motif on it. The dandelion is a plant that means a lot to me and acts as a symbol of courage and generosity in my personal symbology.
It didn’t take long -a few weeks or so- for neighbours to get the idea and things began to appear in it that weren’t from us.
Part of putting something like this into a public sphere requires a willingness to look after it well so I check it twice a day, first thing in the morning and then at dusk.
Although the purpose of it is to share the excess garden produce and garden related things, occasionally people put perishable or pantry food in it. The perishable food (things like bread, sandwiches, etc) I dispose of (usually feed it to the backyard birds, or my worm farm, if possible) because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting ill from spoiled food. Mostly, though, people seem to get the idea. There’s been all sorts of vegetables, seedlings, cut herbs. It’s been mostly delightful things.
My original sign (paint and vivid marker on an art canvas) melted away in the rain, so I painted an old cutting board with outdoor paint in an attempt to make a more weather-proof sign:
People have not 100% ‘been cool’. There’s the occasional beer bottle or pizza box after a Friday or Saturday night. There was one incident when someone kicked the front of it in, breaking a board. But for the most part, it’s been a success and a fun, new element in my days.
March has definitely been the month of the giant marrow. Hearteningly, these swollen offerings have all been taken, though so I guess there are some good marrow recipes being cooked around Takaro. There’s also been lots of bags of tomatoes and apples.
Every day is different in the sharing shelf. Things flow in and out.
With feijoas just beginning, I’m expecting it to become mostly a ‘freejoa’ booth any day now.
Helen Lehndorf 