Good morning!
I hope you’re enjoying the sun, if you have it. I hope you’re well, no matter the weather.
Coming up very soon:
Tonight, we launch Short Films from 6pm at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. There will be readings from Claudia Jardine and Sinead Overbye, and an introduction by Francis Cooke. I would love to see you there!
Two LitCrawl events I’m popping up in:
The launch of Sweet Mammalian Issue 9, at which I am reading, alongside a gang of greats
Starling: A New Kind of Animal, which I will be emceeing with Claudia and Sinead, and which features a very exciting selection of our Starling poets
Last Thursday, Short Films officially entered the world. I’ve already been so touched by the generosity and sweetmeat kindnesses that the release has yielded, and I’m very relieved to say I was wrong in my previous newsletters: things have changed, and I can feel it. The change is a quiet one, perhaps—when I try to visualise it, what I come back with is a kind of floating, gold-flaked superimposition, flecks of light glowing as they fold through the air. Not something within me, but something I can reach toward and run my hand through. The book is in cars, and in proximity to houseplants. It’s in places I’ll never visit. It’s out there. It’s beyond me. As it should be. I hope it’s bringing each locale even just one moment of good.
The first launch—in Tāmaki, which I categorised mentally as my home court launch, because certain things linger when you play several formative years of basketball—was a dream. I said this same thing on Instagram, which is perhaps a writerly no-no, in the doubled-up redundancy, but a dream is the right description. The swirling colour of it: the ambers, the crimsons, the deep violets, that pale sage; the shoddy light; the flower petals. The surprise attendees; the balloons, all scattered. The distances people had travelled. Everything I saw and said and everything I didn’t see, every other lens, all the evenings existing at once. All the openness. All the care that had gone into it.1 The fresh care that bloomed that night. I wish there were more words to express gratitude.
I’m off to Wellington now, full of giddiness and jitters about the logistics of the flight. Perhaps we’ll see each other this week.
Either way, be well—
T
Something small that tickled me: we managed to cover the whole fantastical-aspiration menu from ‘Heading Out’ at Pici that night. In itself, a very caring indulgence from my friends, who had already overwhelmed me by offering, and then making, the dinner reservation. But also an indication of something I’m continually growing to appreciate: sometimes the things you’re imagining, the far-off lives that can’t possibly be real, can’t possibly happen to someone like you—and in the case of ‘Heading Out’, that’s kind of the point, but come on—spring up in your life anyway. And sometimes they happen so slowly, or so surely, or feel so natural, that you don’t register that they’ve happened until you run the facts of the evening back in your head and you realise you’d never have written that, actually, because it almost seems contrived. There’s too much good in it. But it’s there. And it’s better than whatever you would have thought up, anyway, because it’s fallen together, and it’s unexpected, and it’s your life.
‘Something small,’ I said. Well, I suppose you’re used to it by now.