poetry – twenty-one words

Odyssey

September 25, 2026Posted in a thought, Australian bush, books, favourite quotes, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, Other people's words about ..., poetry, reading, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Ana Kinsella, book-review, books, Charlie Smith, despair, fiction, flash-fiction, Frida Slattery as Herself, poems, poetry, publishing, reading, short-story, Stephen Dunn, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … becoming yourself

During the forty minutes she was in the audition room, the rain in Waterloo had stopped. If I lived here [in London], Frida thought, walking along the South Bank, what version of myself might I be? She was thinking of the clutter in Catherine’s kitchen, the fridge magnet shaped like a sheep from a holiday to Scotland, the orange Le Creuset casserole in which Catherine had cooked dinner the night before. What did Frida even own? Some old clothes that she didn’t particularly like, and a bunch of second-hand books. From a distance things in Dublin [her home] felt flimsy. Shored up by lollipop sticks and an over-dependence on her sister and tiny nieces for a sense of self. Frida thought she wouldn’t get this [acting] job, but increasingly she felt she’d get some other job and end up in London anyway. There were Irish accents here, people passing her on the riverside with warm, familiar voices. What Frida wanted was the same thing she had always wanted. Didn’t success inevitably involve leaving home? Put like that it had the ring of Greek myth, and Frida liked that: herself as Odysseus, not Penelope. It had been so long since she really thought about what she wanted from life. Now she pictured the entrance to Catherine’s flat, the colourful rag rug, the coats hanging on the wall. A little dish for keys and a heavy stone paperweight on top of the day’s post. She imagined having these things for herself. It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that she would have to turn away from Dublin sooner or later. Who had it in them to stay put forever?

From Frida Slattery as Herself, by Ana Kinsella

Herself as Odysseus, not Penelope: these are the words that stopped me when I first read the passage I’ve quoted here from Ana Kinsella’s wonderful novel, Frida Slattery as Herself. Frida, who is in her twenties, is an actor, and in this passage she is on her way to the audition that will ultimately change her career and lead her to success in Hollywood, though she doesn’t yet know it. All around her, her friends are pairing off and marrying, buying houses, having children, but Frida has until now held out, refusing to give up on a life of art. As a result (as yet, that is) she’s still living a self-described flimsy life. I smiled when I read her description of the things she owns: Some old clothes that she didn’t particularly like, and a bunch of second-hand books. I lived like that once, too — not in fact just at Frida’s age but well into my thirties, during which decade I wrote and had my first two novels for young adults published.

In some ways, unlike Frida, I still live like this. I own more than just clothes and second-hand books, admittedly, but I work part-time and live on a moderate income, and so my possessions are relatively few in comparison with my peers, and my lifestyle similarly pared back. In place of material luxury, I have this: I write a lot, I read a lot, I walk, I run, I cook. What Frida wanted was the same thing she had always wanted — in fact, that’s still me even now, as a woman in my mid-fifties.

Returning to Odysseus and Penelope, though, I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with an old friend of mine, a man I first got to know in my twenties. Our conversation on this day was about poetry; he is a poetry lover and, having recently begun to discover the joys of reading poetry myself, I’d shared a poem with him that I’d stumbled on and loved and that I thought he might love, too. The poem was Charlie Smith’s ‘The Rose’ (available in his collection The Palms), which begins as follows:

I’m looking everywhere for new ways
poking, selecting, looking everywhere,
turning the trees over, rummaging among skirts
and stars.

Those wonderful phrases turning the trees over and rummaging among skirts / and stars! I love them. And then, too, in some lines towards the end of the poem, there is this:

I’m stumbling against
beauty and not apologising, I’m almost naked here,
skinnier than I used to be, almost helpless
or maybe I’m completely helpless as the religious
say is the way to heaven — all right I’m helpless —

That almost helpless and the answering all right I’m helpless — every time I read this poem, these words undo me.

Deep Creek, September 2026.

In exchange, my friend sent me back a poem that he loves, Stephen Dunn’s ‘Odysseus’s Secret’, which begins with the following lines:

At first he thought only of home, and Penelope.
But after a few years, like anyone on his own,
he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen
from what had chosen him.

Dunn’s poem, too, is beautiful. It’s a poem that makes you think, one that I’m glad my friend shared with me and that I’m glad to have read. (You can read it in full here; it was published originally in his collection Different Hours.)

I say that, and yet there’s this:

But by the middle years this other life
had become his life. That was Odysseus’s secret,
kept even from himself. When he talked about return
he thought he meant what he said. Twenty years to get home?
A man finds his shipwrecks,
tells himself the necessary stories.

What bothers me about these lines? A man finds his shipwrecks.

A man.

That’s what bothers me. Everything in me, every tiny feminist part of me, rises up in protest at this, and perhaps in protest at the original Greek myth itself — Odysseus, who is gone from his wife at home for so many years, and whose return to her is so celebrated. I don’t know. I still love Dunn’s poem, but women find their own shipwrecks and I want to read about them, too.

And so when Frida Slattery wants to think of herself as Odysseus, not Penelope, I am with her all the way.

Lately I’ve been reading …

(poetry, stories and the occasional essay from around the internet)

Relax. This won’t last long: ‘Poem for People Who Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry’, another poem by Stephen Dunn.
I love to hear that another memoir has been exposed as a big phony. I think, Fiction wins again! ‘Little Ears, Little Eyes’, a short story by Samantha Hunt.
Every cell learned rank. / Fear became my spine: ‘good soldier’, a poem by Augustus Owlyce.
When the hurricane came, I watched my childhood street rearrange itself into a map of everywhere I’d ever wanted to escape: ‘The Ocean Never Really Leaves You’, a piece of micro fiction by Bethany Bruno.
Even before my husband died, I was treated like a widow: ‘Compromise’, a short story by Ada Zhang.
Today’s dominant therapies offer medication or homework by way of cognitive restructuring worksheets and mood-tracking apps: ‘Therapy Used to Be Hot’, an essay by Robin Kirman.
My mother says my father’s 30-pound weight loss is the result of a renewed commitment to his health: ‘The Wintering’, a piece of micro fiction by Maureen Aitken.
I feel guilty for the way meanness pokes through my skin like some artichoke spine when I am unhappy: ‘Simple Instructions’, a short story by Sam Simas.

Thrum

September 4, 2026Posted in a thought, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, snatched phrases, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, creative-writing, despair, fiction, flash-fiction, Lily King, poetry, publishing, reading, short-story, Writers & Lovers, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … writing a novel

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision. The emotion gets heightened. I give the reader more pleasure. In the margins Muriel has written, ‘Linger here’ or ‘Let us feel this’, and I try to stay and feel the moment and my understanding of it expands. Small unexpected things begin to thrum across the whole book. I feel like a conductor, finally able to hear all the instruments at once. I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubts and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.

From ‘Writers & Lovers‘
By Lily King

I love King’s description in the passage above of that moment when you’re writing a novel and you begin to find things resonating across the manuscript — especially when those resonances are unexpected. For me, this is one of the reasons I write. These moments, when I find the little repeating motifs and echoes in my manuscript, are a form of recognition, an acknowledgment of my purpose. This is what I am writing about, I find myself thinking: This is my story.

I’ve been working on a novel-length manuscript now for a couple of years and I know in my heart that, like King’s narrator Casey in Writers & Lovers, it will take me at least a couple more years to finish the current draft (especially as I keep getting distracted by writing short stories). I know that by that point each chapter will carry with it memories of different places and times, different moods in my life. And like Casey, I know that it’s the little ‘knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me’ that will sustain me through all of this.

This is my story, I will keep telling myself: This.

Coastal vegetation, 2026.

Lately I’ve been reading …

i stand before you to say / that today i walked home / & caught the light through / the fence & it was so golden / i wanted to cry: ‘Testify’, a poem by Eve L Ewing, reproduced in poets.org
When the hurricane came, I watched my childhood street rearrange itself into a map of everywhere I’d ever wanted to escape: ‘The Ocean Never Really Leaves You’, a piece of one-sentence micro fiction by Bethany Bruno, in Complete Sentence
My grandfather used to leave me trails of breadcrumbs. He would exit the house holding a loaf of bread, dropping crumbs behind him. I would follow at a distance: ‘Breadcrumbs’, a short story by Andrew Plimpton, in Hayden’s Ferry Review
If you are under the age of forty-five and have not had the pleasure of a colonoscopy, allow me to share the specifics: you can’t eat for twelve hours, then you drink chalk, shit liquid all night, get knocked out at the hospital, and wake up an hour later to a nurse handing you juice: ‘A Potion for Sadness’, an essay by Megan Stielstra, in The Rumpus
My mother was walking in a storm when she saw it face-up in the snow. She knelt down. It wasn’t breathing. She gathered it close: ‘A Frozen Bird Too Beautiful to Bury’ and three other prose poems by Mike Bove, in Electric Literature
Eli is at the bar because his partner Dylan is in another man’s bed. He orders a dirty martini from the bartender, tells her to add triple the normal amount of olive juice. I want it so filthy I have to go to confession after, he says, and she laughs, one of those head-back, full-throated numbers that clangs around the empty bar: ‘Make it Dirty’, a short story by Christopher Gonzalez, in Grist
‘I think it’s an osprey,’ he says, but it isn’t: ‘Bad Artist’, a short story by Francesca Carra, in The Rumpus
I recently came across an old cryalog that I kept during the month of April in 1998. ‘C’ stands for the fact that I cried, the number of C’s represents the number of times I cried, and ‘NC’ indicates that I did not cry on that day: ‘Pause’, an essay by Mary Ruefle, in Granta

You cannot win

June 16, 2026Posted in a thought, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, Winter, writingTagged book-review, books, David Santos Donaldson, despair, fiction, flash-fiction, Greenland, poetry, reading, short-story, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … the White Gaze

My perception of any given situation is sometimes clouded by the ever-hovering cumulonimbus of racism. And so, at times, it’s hard to know what’s what. This is one of the biggest problems with being Black. You live with this ever-dangling question: Is it racism or not? If, for example, a waiter attends to a white person before me, it could be that the waiter simply has missed seeing me, or is absentminded, or is already in the middle of attending to that white person in the next booth of the diner; but also, the waiter could be racist.

It’s a pernicious mindfuck that never goes away. I need to validate my suspicions, but I can never be absolutely certain. And so, when that hypothetical waiter at the hypothetical diner finally arrives at my table, I’ll usually test them carefully by smiling to see if I’m met with a warm, receptive gaze, and also to show I am not one of those savages or thugs to be feared. Sometimes, though, to prevent any further confusion and degradation, I might demand that the server provide me with equal service. I’ll point out how every white person was attended to first. Yet, with either of these approaches, I’ll risk seeming either too complicit in my own degradation or else too rude and demanding. I may even come off as straight-up paranoid: What if the waiter was simply nearsighted and missed seeing me, and it had nothing to do with race at all? I cannot win. And yet, I’ll have to choose what kind of Black person to be at any given moment — accommodating, demanding, silently paranoid, or overtly paranoid. And it could all be for nothing! It is exhausting to be Black and go out in public at all.

From ‘Greenland‘
By David Santos Donaldson

I think the passage above is one of the best, most succinct explorations of the White Gaze that I, as a white person, have ever read. Donaldson’s narrator in his novel Greenland, Kip, is Black, male and gay, and he lives with a white man, Ben, several years older than himself who, while loving and desiring Kip, is growing tired of the courage it takes to do so. But Ben is afraid to admit this. What he believes, and what he tells Kip, is that he has been seeing Kip the whole time they’ve been together. This is, after all, what everyone wants, isn’t it? To be seen.

The tiredness Ben feels about their relationship takes the form of telling Kip that he can’t make up for everything that every white person has ever done to Kip. That he can’t make up for all of the history that Kip is a victim of. That it is, finally, too big a wound. What can Kip do in response but watch Ben retreat, even as he, Kip, is not afforded the luxury of being able to retreat? Kip, who wants only to be seen.

Some months ago, I quoted a passage about the White Gaze by another writer, Brandon Taylor, from his latest novel, Minor Black Figures. Taylor’s narrator, Wyeth, describes the experience of being a Black artist as having: a tiny white man in your mind to argue with constantly all the way up and down until you died never having had a single thought that was not either about whiteness or a reaction to whiteness.

What I love about both Taylor’s and Donaldson’s writing in these passages is how they go about making it clear that there is no such thing for a Black person (or, as in both these cases, a Black man) as playing the race card, no such thing as getting over it. There is only living with the cards you have been dealt (that word again, card, in another guise) and understanding how much you have internalised them. There is only the daily decision you have to make about whether you have the energy and courage to go out again in public for another day.

Even Ben’s tiredness is a privilege. Ultimately, that’s what he has to learn.

Reading nook, June 2026.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Some people collect dirt from significant places. / Or spoonfuls of cloudy oceans inside jars: ‘Vivarium’, a poem by Jenny George, accompanied by a discussion by the wonderful Devin Kelly of Ordinary Plots
What I didn’t know before / was how horses simply give birth to other / horses: ‘What I Didn’t Know Before’, a poem by Ada Limón, along with another of her poems, ‘What I Want to Remember’, in the Washington Square Review
One gallon of water, one first-aid kit, one pocket knife, two boxes of granola bars: ‘Go Bag’, a piece of microfiction by Chris Scott, in Milk Candy Review
There are no stupid questions—: ‘There Are No Stupid Questions’, a piece of microfiction by Elena Zhang, in the Offing
The girl I love wears a harness everyday under her shirt, worn brown leather, I made it from the straps of an old saddle myself: ‘Nervous Thing’, a piece of flash fiction by Ani King, in Pithead Chapel
I’m just sitting down at a table at the back of the bookstore café with a stack of books and an iced coffee, and the woman at the next table, thirtyish, dreadlocks, librarian glasses, nose ring, leans over and says, ‘Skip that one’: ‘The Last Reader’, a piece of flash fiction by Jess Row in The Commuter
The first time he calls you a whore, you laugh: ‘Bad Artist’, a short story by Francesca Carra, in The Rumpus

Muddy like my feet

May 16, 2026May 16, 2026Posted in a thought, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, despair, fiction, flash-fiction, Kingfisher, poetry, reading, Rozie Kelly, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … beauty

I have always been described as beautiful. Or sometimes pretty, which is worse. It started when I was a child, and my teachers would admire my pale blonde hair. But then it darkened and is now a muddy brown. Muddy like my feet. I don’t think boys are meant to be beautiful. They don’t know what to do with it. I certainly didn’t. When I look at beautiful women, especially young ones, there is a resignation to them. They understand that they have been gifted a very particular currency. They have lots of it to spend but it’s laced with mercury, or perhaps lead. Some kind of metal that will eventually make them sick. I do not desire young women. I rarely desire any women at all, but young women make me sad. Along with the resignation that young women possess, comes a certain amount of understanding. They know what to do with their beauty. I never did. I worried that my face was too feminine, that my full lips would somehow give me away, would let the straight boys at school know that I wanted to taste them. And I wasn’t wrong, most of the time.

Now that I’m older, I’m careful to dress in a masculine way. I never shave my face cleanly. But when people talk about my beauty it still makes me panic. I could not take off my shirt in front of the poet [at the picnic] because she might read some meaning into it that I hadn’t intended. Despite having seen me naked, multiple times, the idea of being shirtless and barefoot and lying on the grass in front of the poet made me feel as if I had no skin, and that my flesh was just open to the sun.

From ‘Kingfisher‘
By Rozie Kelly

I first ‘read’ Rozie Kelly’s novel Kingfisher on audiobook, which is to say that I listened to it. I am not in general someone who chooses often to listen to audiobooks; I find they encourage multi-tasking, whereas I like to read with a book in my hands, immersed only in the text itself. In a world that is all about reduced concentration spans and multi-multi-tasking, I treasure the simple, slow luxury of reading.

Having said that, I have recently begun listening to audiobooks when I’m out walking. Long-term readers of twenty-one words will know that I live by the beach and like to spend time walking there, but during the worst of the algal bloom that hit the South Australian coast last year, I found that I couldn’t bring myself to do this anymore. Walking on the beach during this period meant encountering dead marine animals in their masses, and even after the State Government took to cleaning up the beach each day to remove the carcasses, it remained for me a place that triggered grief. The ocean felt to me like a graveyard.

While the worst of the algal bloom is now deemed to be over, at least for now, I still don’t feel the same about the beach. What happened along our coast over the last twelve months is for me clear evidence that we are at the tipping point of irreversible climate change. These are sad, sad times.

So I have taken to walking around the streets where I live, along tree-lined footpaths, past houses with neat and not-so-neat front yards, along the railway. And because this kind of walking isn’t the kind of nature-immersion exercise that walking on the beach has always been for me, I’ve started listening to audiobooks while I walk. Kingfisher was one of the first novels I listened to in its entirety in this way, on loan from my library, and I loved it. (I loved it so much, in fact, that I bought the print version so that I could re-read it whenever I want to.)

Garden flowers, April 2026.

There is so much to unpack in the passage I’ve quoted above. I love Kelly’s exploration, through the voice of her unnamed male narrator, of beauty, and her description of beauty in young women as being some kind of metal that will eventually make them sick. I love, too, the way she explores the idea that beauty is different in men, that it has different implications and obligations and connotations. I find the narrator’s need to mask his beauty, to make himself more masculine, and his fear as a beautiful man of being misinterpreted — this man who is, at this point in the story, in love with two people, his male lover Michael and an older woman, a poet — poignant and convincing.

On the topic of stories about beauty and the experience of embodiment more generally, I’ve had another short story published recently. If you’d like to read it, you can find it over at Peatsmoke Journal. It’s called Instructions For Living A Life.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Two weeks before I lost my home, I found a coat hanging in the attic. It was a large coat of pilled gray wool, worn out from years of use: ‘The Ghost Coat’, a short story by Catherine Lacey in Granta.
I am standing in line at the cash register to buy a ticket to the museum, and it is a weekday in spring, and it is crowded with people. It is not exactly a line, because the gift shop is not set up for there to be enough space for a line, it is more like a loose milieu, and even though I think it should be clear that I am in the milieu, that I am waiting for something, a man and a woman in their sixties, both white, step in front of me: ‘At the Gift Shop in Los Alomos’, a short story by Claire Stanford in The Offing
Tell me a story, he said. A happy one. Your stories are always so sad: ‘True Love with Three Olives and a Twist’, a piece of flash fiction by Peter Kazon in Electric Literature
Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton / you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying / silver carp: ‘How to Apologise’, a poem by Ellen Bass

This world

October 8, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged algal bloom, books, Clare Chambers, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poem, poems, poetry, reading, Small Pleasures, writing3 Comments

Other people’s words about … kindness

He knelt down to undress her, his shaking hands fumbling over every button and zip and hook, until she was naked in front of him. Then he stopped and looked up at her with a troubled expression.

‘I haven’t done this for seven years. Will you forgive me if it goes badly?’

Jean laughed, amazed at her own boldness in displaying her body while he was still fully clothed. It was the strangest feeling, placing herself in someone else’s power with complete confidence. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

‘Well, I haven’t done it for longer than that. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re kind.’

And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. And afterwards they lay for a long time pressed together, her head on his shoulder, his hand stroking her hip while the night deepened around them. There was no urgency to move apart; morning and work were a long way off.

From ‘Small Pleasures‘
By Clare Chambers

Depictions of sex are notoriously hard to get right, and what sets those that work apart from those that don’t isn’t always obvious (although personally I feel that it helps if the writer avoids analogies with mountains and valleys, and doesn’t refer to a man’s ‘member’!). But I think the passage I’ve quoted above, from Clare Chambers’s lovely novel Small Pleasures — a novel set in 1957 — is one of the most moving sex scenes I’ve ever read.

It’s also somehow shocking. How many sex scenes have you read recently where the lovers were explicitly kind to each other? I can’t remember a single one. So when I say the scene is shocking, I mean, not that Chambers sets out to describe something graphic or taboo-breaking, but the opposite — that this is the word she uses, kind. And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. How beautiful is that?

Deep Creek, September 2025.

I’ve been quiet over here for a while, not because I haven’t wanted to write a post, but because I didn’t know how to find the words to do so. Earlier this year, a toxic algal bloom hit the coast of South Australia. It began in regional locations but then spread to the metropolitan coast, killing marine animals in its wake and turning the ocean into a graveyard. Although scientists originally predicted that it would disperse during the cooler weather of the winter months, it hasn’t done so, and as summer approaches it’s clear that the bloom will remain for some time to come. There are thought to be several causes for it, among the most obvious of which is global warming: we are experiencing a marine heatwave in South Australia.

When I think about the algal bloom, I feel powerless and devastated. I have lived the whole of my adult life around the sea. My house is within walking distance of the sea. My holidays and camping trips are centred around the sea. I walk and run by the sea. I go to the sea to remind myself that there is another world beyond the human world — to tune the rhythm of my breathing into the rhythm of the waves, in and out. In and out.

But now what I feel when I go to the sea is grief.

Deep Creek, September 2025

It’s impossible for me to write a post here, on this blog in which I have for so many years celebrated my life by the sea, without acknowledging the algal bloom, and yet I find it almost equally impossible to write about it. And so this is the reason for my quietness. These words, even as I write them, do not come easily to me.

The effects of climate change are not kind. This is not a kind world.

Deep Creek, September 2025

I will finish by saying that the photographs that accompany this post come from a recent trip I made with a friend to Deep Creek, to the place where I spent a week on a writing residency around the same time last year.

Wait — let me rephrase that: I will finish by saying that Deep Creek is a place of stunning natural beauty and I am grateful for my time there, but that it, too, like the ocean, is vulnerable to climate change, because this is not a kind world.

It is not a kind world.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, discussing the poem Hurry by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges in this essay artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
These poems remind me that one reason why I turn to poetry is because of the ways that some poems acknowledge, so often, our ever-present inability, and, in doing so, they perform exercises of coping. They reimagine lives. They repeat. They open doors. They enter: Devin Kelly again, this time exploring Matthew Nienow’s poem For What it’s Worth.
Thank You For the Tulips: more poetry here, perhaps because I need it — this time a poem by Lisa Bellamy on motherhood and love.
At 50, Choosing New Make-Up: one more poem for good measure, this one by Wendy Barker. In fact, there are several others by Barker if you scroll down the page, though this is the one that first drew me to her poetry.

Soar

June 26, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, Winter, writingTagged All Fours, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, Miranda July, poetry, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … tea

You made me tea
while I shook the rain from my jacket
You stooped to fit into the kitchen
but handled the cups as if they’d been
the fontanelles of two young sons
whose picture sits in the hip of your 501s.
We spoke of — what? Not much.
You weren’t to know how your touch
with the teaspoon stirred me,
how the tendons of your wide, divining hands
put me in mind of flight.

You wouldn’t have known
when you bent to tend a plant
that your shirt fell open a smile’s breadth.
You parted the leaves and plucked
a tiny green bud. Best to do that
with the early ones, you said.
I thought of the salt in the crook
of your arm where a fine vein kicks.
Of what it might be like to know
the knot and grain and beat of you;
the squeak of your heart’s pips.

From ‘Tea’
By Tiffany Atkinson

Once upon a time, I used to describe myself as someone who drank ‘endless cups of tea’ — which was indeed true, once upon a time — but these days I’m sensitive to caffeine, and so my morning pot of tea, the treasured pot of tea, is the only tea I drink for the day.

And while I drink that pot of tea, I write. Some years ago, when I decided to make a commitment to writing something every day, no matter how little, I linked the commitment I’d made, very strategically, to my morning pot of tea. That way, I told myself, even when I’m filled with doubt about whatever it is I’m writing at the time, even if every part of me wants to give up on it, even if procrastination and writer’s block are overwhelming me, I still put myself through the process each morning — because of the cup of tea that accompanies it.

That’s how I wrote Ravenous Girls, in fact — one pot of tea at a time.

Morning pot of tea, June 2025.

Tiffany Atkinson’s beautiful poem Tea — which I found in a book that a dear friend gave me, Sophie Dahl’s Ten Poems about Tea — isn’t about tea, not really. It starts with a simple, everyday gesture, a man making a woman a cup of tea, and then, like all the best poems, it takes flight. It soars.

It’s a poem to be read slowly, to be savoured, just like a pot of tea.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Bluebells are popping up and there are patches of bracken: Phoebe Weston explores the ‘ghost woodlands’ of England, tracts of land that have been grazed for centuries but are now being returned to their original woodlands.
I am actually grateful that I have an opportunity to correct the record on this because I think people have the wrong idea about my path: Brandon Taylor, in an interview at The Republic of Letters. I am a huge fan of Taylor’s fiction, and perhaps for this reason it has come to me only slowly that I am less enthusiastic about his online presence. I don’t know why this realisation astonishes me — this is true about many of the writers whose fiction I admire: it’s their work I love, not them. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating interview in which Taylor articulates his thoughts on writing, writing success, the state of fiction in the US today, micro-agression, and literary criticism.
The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel”, which is incorrect – not because you could easily name 10 others, rather because what it ignited was not an honest heart-to-heart about hormones, but something far more radical. What if a woman just told the truth, about sex, monogamy, marriage, mortality, domesticity, friendship, the life of the mind?: Zoe Williams in conversation with Miranda July, author of the novel All Fours. This is an interesting interview, even if, like me, you are not a fan of All Fours. Disclosure: I didn’t plan to read this novel. I felt that I would loathe it, for reasons that are essentially encapsulated in the quote I’ve used here. Having now (reluctantly) read it, I can say that I found it both unexpectedly better than I thought it would be and just as irksome and loathsome as I had thought I would find it. Mostly, though, I think what I object to has less to do with July’s writing (which is at the very least thoughtful and entertaining) than with the way that since publication All Fours has been heralded as ‘the truth’ about ‘perimenopausal’ women. Why do we even need to look for one single ‘truth’? July’s truth is not mine, but in all fairness, she may not have set out to write ‘the’ perimenopausal novel in the first place. What do you think?
One of the admirable things about All Fours is that July lets her protagonist have such ugly feelings: Okay, or maybe the reason I didn’t enjoy All Fours is simply that it offended me? Here’s Garth Greenwell on why it’s important to set aside your offence as a reader.
The dog barks only at pigeons, no other bird species. The amount of discussion the owners have given this topic could constitute a peer reviewed paper: And finally, a piece of short fiction, Weike Wang’s hilarious and poignant story about dogs and their owners.

The soft clatter of keyboards

June 4, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, Winter, work, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poetry, reading, The Modern, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … crying at work

Anthea told me she went to the bathrooms in the basement, by the cinema, when she needed to cry at work. Joanna recommended the stairwell behind the librarian’s office. I just sat silently at my desk, staring hard at my computer screen, rubbing my eyes as if they were smarting from all the data entry.

I was lucky to be here, checking measurements and shining the sentences that would appear on object labels. The open-plan offices felt like a new-age monastery; we showed our devotion through our long hours and low salaries, our gratitude and obsession with our work euphemistically called ‘attention to detail’ in the job advertisements. These offices were almost always silent save the soft clatter of our keyboards and the occasional ring of the elevator doors opening when somebody left for the galleries filled with bright, white light, where the crowds gathered to take photographs of endlessly reproduced images, paying homage to our gods, to modernism.

I wanted to stay, forever, because of the paintings.

From ‘The Modern‘
By Anna Kate Blair

The lines I’ve quoted in the passage above, which make up the opening sentences of Anna Kate Blair’s novel, The Modern, have stayed with me ever since I read it, some years ago now. The novel is about art, love, self-doubt and work — most of all, perhaps, about how in our society one of the things that determines our conception of ourselves, the way we see and value ourselves (and others), is work.

The ethos of work.

What I love, though, about this particular passage (which in fact turns out not to be particularly essential to the course of events throughout the rest of the novel, at least insofar as what happens to Sophia, the narrator), is its tragicomic depiction of women crying in the workplace. Blair dispenses here with the need to explain why Anthea and Joanna and Sophia are crying, and why they assume they have to keep their crying secret. Crying in the workplace, she implies, and secret crying in particular, is a commonplace for these women; they all simply assume, in some kind of tacit shared understanding of themselves and their lives, that they’ll end up crying at some point during the working week.

Aldinga Beach, May 2025.

I’ve worked in several workplaces over the years, and, just like Anthea and Joanna and Sophia, at some point in each job I’ve gone in search of a private place to cry. When I worked the afternoon shift in the call centre of a community health provider, I used to take the lift from the fourth floor down to the car park, walk around the corner of the building to a little alleyway on one side and lean against the wall to cry. When I was a cook, I’d step into the cool room and close the door behind me to cry in refrigerated privacy, crouched in among the cartons of milk and bowls of pastry cream and half-wheels of cheese. I’ve also done my fair share of crying in the office toilets like Anthea, and, yes, like Sophia, I’ve sat at my computer furtively blinking and dabbing at my eyes, all the while hoping that no-one would notice. And/or that no-one would notice me.

What is it about workplaces that reduces women, some women, to tears? Is crying part of our make-up, or is there something about the conditions of our workplaces — the buildings we work in, the people we talk to and report to, the conditions we’re bound by our salaries to — that makes us cry? Or is it rather the space the workplace occupies in our lives, the way it’s crammed in uneasily among everything else that belongs to our non-working selves, those selves we perhaps think of as our true selves?

I don’t know. But I think of Sophia, fellow workplace-weeper, from time to time and smile wryly.

May 2025

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, exploring the poem ‘Hurry’ by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges here artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
The Kiss, by Pamela Painter: Over the last year, I’ve been exploring, both as a reader and a writer, different forms of short fiction, including flash fiction and microfiction. Here’s a flash fiction story I recently read and loved.
We do not pay rent for the air we breathe: Poet and essayist Anne Boyer, exploring capitalism. If you read one essay this week, read this. It’s astonishing — an exhortation, a plea. A prayer.

Treasure your beautiful world

July 15, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, coronavirus, depression, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, Winter, writingTagged bushfires, climate change, coronavirus, poetry3 Comments

Wild Geese (a poem by Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

It was the wonderful Gena Hemshaw who introduced me to Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wild Geese’, and I have loved it ever since. Like Gena, I’ve found that the poem comforts me in times when the thoughts in my head are loud and tangled. And like Oliver herself, I’ve sought comfort in nature for many years. Looking up at the sky and down at the ground and out to the horizon reminds me of my place in the world. It heals me, if only temporarily.

Light on water.

But how true are Oliver’s words these days? How much longer can we find solace in nature if by nature what we mean is the way things are naturally, the way things have always been and the way they always will be?

It is impossible to ignore the discussion scientists and environmentalists are now having across the world about the climate crisis, the climate emergency. (That is, it’s impossible to ignore unless — and forgive me for saying this, but I will say it anyway — unless you are a white, male, middle-aged politician who thinks only about getting re-elected for another term of leadership.) It is impossible, too, to ignore the evidence of it as we go about our days. Wildfires, polar ice melt, rising land and sea temperatures, coral bleaching, floods, not to mention pandemics — here they all are, right in front of our faces.

These days when I read Mary Oliver’s words I feel despair rise thick in my throat.

Clouds above water.

I work very hard to inject a positive note in the posts on this blog. I don’t intend this to be a site for depression and maudlin pondering. But I cannot find a positive note to interject here when it comes to our changing natural environment.

I can only urge you, each and every one of you, myself included, to read Oliver’s poem often, to experience the feelings that arise in you as you read it, and to do what you can, in whatever way you can, to treasure this beautiful world while we still have it. Meanwhile the world goes on, Oliver says, but does it anymore?

Dying light.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Climate change isn’t just a thing that’s happening, it’s a series of choices made by actual people who are sharing this planet with us: Eric Holthouse on climate change, climate emergency, and why this is a public health issue.

Go out and spend: time in the sun and money in the bar, and subsume yourself in breathless companionable laughter and don’t think for a moment about what you lost, or you’re weak and strange. It is so very unnatural, and so very American, and I want my piece of this sweet and terrible lie and can’t have it: Talia Lavin on how the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic have worsened her agoraphobia.

This is my work

February 3, 2019January 23, 2019Posted in anxiety, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, life, nature, nature writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, sea quotes, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, the seaTagged poetry1 Comment

Other people’s words about … the sea

Vale, Mary Oliver. I’m not a fan of all of her work — not by a long shot — but I do love the way she observed and wrote about nature: intimately, intricately, affectionately, quietly, humbly.

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

‘I Go Down to the Shore‘
by Mary Oliver

That lovely voice

Tipping point

June 23, 2018June 17, 2018Posted in a thought, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, life, moments of beauty, on writing, reading, resilience, Uncategorized, writingTagged depression, despair, fear, gratitude, poetry4 Comments

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

by Jane Kenyon

I have never known whether this poem, which I love, is about gratitude or fear, joy or sorrow. Is Kenyon, who experienced terrible bouts of depression throughout her life, describing her gratitude for, and joy in, the small moments of beauty and happiness she has experienced on the day she describes in her poem — the peach, the walk with her dog, the work she loves, the time with her mate?

Or is she describing her fear of losing these moments — of tipping away from happiness, back down into sorrow and depression?

A small thing, this, of beauty.
It might have been otherwise.

It’s a see-saw, this poem, I think. The poet hangs in a kind of precarious balance between one life and the other, without knowing when the hinge will tip her down again, away from the things she loves. It might have been otherwise, she writes at the start, and then, later, sadder and more afraid: it will be otherwise (my emphasis).

Gratitude. Joy. Fear. Sorrow. Grief. Yearning. They’re all there in this one, short poem.