Guardian Books

 My mini review of Becky Manawatu's Auē is in The Guardian.

Disquiet

 

"Thank you for submitting to the 2021 Disquiet Literary Contest. We received over a thousand entries for this year's contest, many of them of exceptional quality. While we're sorry to say that your entry was not selected to be one of this year's winners, you should know that out of an impressive pool of work, yours made it all the way to the final judges on the shortlist.

In fact, our readers thought your entry skillfully wields the simplicity of its images to make for a vivid, enveloping reading experience. Rather than stretching language through syntactical feats, you trust the humble sentence to relay meaning in a way that is effective and clear. The world exists in your poems from the first line. The pacing [...] is emblematic of what these poems manage to do: make us feel, in transit, that we’ve found some stillness. We hope to see much more of your work in the future."

Fairly stoked to receive this feedback on top of my shortlisting! 

In the bath

 Astonished that my story is in the Bath Flash Fiction Award shortlist - thank you so much BFF!

Bath bonus

I'm stoked to have a story included in the longlist of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a bonus of which being that it will also be included in the anthology. My thanks to the judges.

Miscarriage

Many thanks to Beate Sigriddaughter, for including my poem 'Miscarriage' in Writing in a Woman's Voice.

Everywhere is

Stoked that my graphic non-fiction 'Everywhere is Now' has been picked up by WordCity Monthly. My thanks to the Editors.

On entering

 I'm absolutely thrilled that an essay I wrote back in April, during NZ's lockdown, is published on The Clearing today. Ostensibly about hedgehogs' colonial history, it also includes a mention of my darling rabbit Thunderstorm, who was tragically killed by stray dogs in October, so it brought back some bittersweet memories. I've long admired The Clearing and enjoyed the essays in particular. My sincere thanks, therefore, to Jon Woolcott and Little Toller Books for helping me realise a little writing dream of mine. You can read 'On Entering the Wrong Carriage' here.

Everywhere is now

 

 

In 2018, I was commissioned to write a Comic about war. The editor ended up being replaced and my piece didn't see the light of day, so I'm publishing it here because it seems pertinent to the current period. It was after all written in response to Trump. I had been in America for the first weeks of Trump's inauguration in 2017, researching my Mary Taylor biography, and saw first hand the women's marches protesting against his presidency and the clap-back of MAGA advertisements on TV. 

 

It's not agatha christie

Thanks to Dr Jonathan Taylor for including my review of Nigel Pantling's It's Not Personal (Smith | Doorstop, 2020) over on Everybody's Reviewing, not least because I got to indulge my love of mystery writing. If you want to know what Miss Marple has to do with Hannah Gadsby, you may only find it in this review!

Dregs

 

My thanks to Editor Christopher Fields for including my 'Dregs' at the end of this thoughtfully curated issue of Neologism Poetry, technically the last of 2020 spilling into the new year.