I'm honoured to be stepping into the shoes of Lynley Caldwell as I take over as Curator of Janet Frame House in Oamaru, hometown of New Zealand's most successful writer.
Janet Frame House is open to the public from November to April - I look forward to meeting people who are as enthusiastic about Frame's fiction as I am.
Although I won't be teaching next week, members of the public of all ages are still welcome to use the zine-making station to create an entry for the competition (I'll be judging) before the October 25 deadline.
Alternatively, stop by and collect an instruction form and make a zine at home in your own time and drop it back at the gallery before the 25th for a chance to win a $50 book voucher.
Many thanks to Elizabeth King and Forrester Gallery for facilitating the event.I
didn't stop to think how my friend would feel to be the subject of a
book of poetry about friendship. I got so caught up in wanting to show
her how much I appreciate and love her. I trusted she'd be OK with me
being me. But I should have asked. In her own words, Lori wrote about
how it feels to be put on the
page.
"Rachel Fenton’s Charlotte Brontë is the best friend anyone could want: someone who is there, who doesn’t judge and understands the drive to write [...] someone you can run seemingly-daft ideas past and get useful replies. Someone to share a beer with."
Many thanks to writer Emma Lee for taking the time and care to read Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York, and for writing this smashing review here.
Big thanks to Overground Underground for making my graphic memoir 'Dance the Night Away' free to read along with some wonderful works from other writers in their inaugural issue, which you can read here (scroll to p58 on the site bar, p52 on the magazine itself for my Comic).
The Beating Heart, by Denise O' Hagan (Ginninderra Press)
I stayed in bed in the morning to finish reading the poems in The Beating Heart before my household dragged me into the loud day. There is a gentleness to the poetry in this collection that rewards the reader for a few moments of silence in which to savour them, such as in 'What was' - the simple ritual of coffee opening the memory’s shutters; the way O' Hagan evokes past times rich and fluidly and with the ease of pouring a cup, and now I am tied to this poem of hers – her memories – through the shared act of sipping coffee; such a wonderful way to bring readers into the heart of her poems, a heart that filled me with wonder and at times aching sadness, such as in ‘Recalling Sarah’, ‘A stain the shape of Italy’, and ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ that with its similarly deceptively simple nursery rhyme chime tapped into the child’s vulnerability in all of us, so that when I read “your too eager embrace of people/who used you and bruised you and left you alone?”, I felt urged to reach into the past to help then at loss because of course the past is the past and what’s in it can be no more retrieved than the suitcases left “fully intending to retrieve them”. The way O' Hagan's poems intersect like the Italian streets from her childhood, containing a lifetime’s worth of things to puzzle and discover, is a marvel to me. I loved, too, her exploration of the gaze in ‘Old man’s eyes’, and that, perhaps, is my favourite.
I highly recommend this collection.
The Berg Collection Reading Room at New York Public Library.
June is Pride Month! So happy that radical lesbian playwright, actor and activist Carolyn Gage interviewed me about my debut poetry pamphlet Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, and we also talked about Betweenity, my graphic biography of Mary Taylor, and so much more.
It's publication day - my debut poetry chapbook is here!
My grandest thanks go to my brilliant publisher Sara Lefsyk of The Ethel Zine and Micro Press for making this dream of mine come true! Sitting up all night on the settee with a two month old on my breast when I submitted my poems, publication seemed as elusive as sleep. I'm forever grateful to Sara for bringing my chapbook into the world.
Could not be more stoked to have the news that the YA novel I wrote over lockdown last year made the long-list of 12 out of over a hundred entries for the Michael Gifkins Unpublished Novel Competition. It's my second time in this position, having also had Some Things the English, the novel that placed second in the Dundee International Book Prize, in the long-list in the inaugural comp.
Astonished that my story is in the Bath Flash Fiction Award shortlist - thank you so much BFF!
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.
Many thanks to Beate Sigriddaughter, for including my poem 'Miscarriage' in Writing in a Woman's Voice.
Stoked that my graphic non-fiction 'Everywhere is Now' has been picked up by WordCity Monthly. My thanks to the Editors.
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.
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!
