Things to Make and Do

Welcome, everyone, to what is going to end up as three months of flux. Stuff is absolutely happening on every single front I inhabit: now book, new directions, art and graphic design are ALL HAPPENING. What isn't happening, and is no bad thing, is my state of identity being settled. For the longest time I've been taught that you need a brand, an identity, a focus. Right now, I don't have that.

It is 22 days until I turn 60, and this is Absolutely a Thing right now. There is no avoiding the inevitability of existence, that's just how things are, but right now it's not simply a number. It has become a means of redefinition, FINALLY, under my own terms. It is absolutely no co-incidence that my second pamphlet publishes that day. This is a beginning, and an end combined.

I am a sum of many parts, and some of them are no longer required.

Forest Management S. Reeson - presale, signed

‘A fascinating pamphlet’ - Wendy Pratt; ‘unflinching, inventive poems of discovery, trauma and healing’ - Jen Feroze; ‘...candid, skilful and often unsettling poems; a forest trail that leads us through fear and reflection to a place of revelation.’ - Nina Parmenter

The Flight of the Dragonfly Bookshop

This pamphlet has become the baseline for achievement going forward. Part of me would be hugely happy if I never had a collection published by anyone, we could quite happily keep on churning out smaller selections of work under umbrella headings for the rest of time. I am increasingly frustrated that other people decide to place me into boxes or affix labels to me with relevance simply to them and with no real value at all to me.

Then, there is the revelation of what's happened to me once I realised what happens when you teach someone else to consider the possibility of re-education. The Ways of Seeing project (which is mostly going to happen away from here on another website) gives me a vital opportunity to see if it is possible to invite others into the process of teaching themselves new ways to write.

These are Very Interesting Times indeed.

We haven't even spoken about the Art Exhibition I'll have two pieces in this month, or the graphic design work I'm about to finish for someone else. It's all poetry-adjacent too, which is all I can ever really ask for in the greater scheme of things. There's an exhibition too, only one day, but a formal setup for what Ways of Seeing is likely to become next year.

It used to bother me a lot that there was no certainty in my life, that I could not build routine in an industry which often seems to possess absolutely no concept of either time or urgency. Once I built structures for both of those things myself, things became a great deal easier to both manage and maintain, and this is now where we are.

Watch this Space, for MANY things are about to resolve themselves.