A confetti shower of updates!

This missive is gravely overdue, but I have a legitimate excuse**!

I have a deluge of updates, so I’ll try to keep things concise.

…in paperback, e-book and audio!!! I’m so excited about this, especially the audio release which will make the book more accessible to readers everywhere. Not gonna lie, it’s surreal seeing the book listed at Waterstones.

You can pre-order a copy right now—pre-orders are a real gift to writers <3

Thank you to the dedicated team at Verve Books for taking on my book and for this gorgeous, haunting cover.

Thank you Affirm Press for the re-release of EVOY in this little-sibling B format (on the right—which I covertly love more than the original size). You can find a copy of the B format at these places. There’s also a link at the bottom to check your local indie bookstore. If you still have trouble finding a copy, drop me a line.

Digital Love, or How I Got You Back in Westerly 69.1

• dude installs neural implant to generate AI recreation of his ex-girlfriend

• things start to go wrong…or do they?

• read along with this song

In Your Eyes in Spinning Around: The Kylie Playlist

• feminine hive-mind hunts narcissistic boyfriends for sustenance

• avoid if first-person plural POV is not your jam

• read along with this song

Mothertongues in Meanjin 83.3

• feelings about my son learning to speak in English

I was thrilled and astonished to be shortlisted for the inaugural Paragraph Fellowship for my novel-in-progress, Caretakers.

I didn’t win, but my shortlisting was such an encouragement for me to keep working on my second novel.

The Paragraph Fellowship is a new initiative that recognises “the difficulties writers in Australia face in earning a living from writing…writers in Australia have a hard time making ends meet, with many writers’ incomes falling below the living wage.” The winner’s grant of $25,000 literally provides time to write.

**I have a newborn baby! Adequate sleep, savouring a meal, doing things with both hands, adult conversation, a sense of linear time…all of the above have gone out of the window, at least for the time being. I did find myself wondering, shortly before baby arrived, whether I’d still feel creative in the postpartum year. I won’t deny that it’s difficult to actually create art when your head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool, washing your hair becomes a luxury, and your life revolves in dreamlike repetitions around caring for a helpless tiny human. But I have been pleased to discover that my delirious mind still wanders into creative realms and ponders new sparks of inspiration. I may not make as much sense, and I may emit more errors, but I still feel the urge to create. I also find that the postpartum is a period of destruction and recreation, of the self and the structures of our lives. It’s terrifying but exciting, to feel my self expand to encompass these small humans, and to think about pruning the unnecessary.

This time around, I’m reading Matrescence by Lucy Jones (thanks Rachel Ang for the rec!) and it’s helping me to grapple with the uniquely turbulent, violent, visceral, physical-emotional-spiritual transformation that is birthing and caring for a baby in late-capitalist, individualistic, gendered society. The ecological anecdotes are also a wonderful framework for displacing me from an anthropocentric perspective and locating me as a biological body in a complex environment.

With first baby, I read What We Carry: Poetry on Childbearing, which features more than 60 Australian poets and, as poetry does, moves towards expressing the inexpressible; Eleanor Jackson’s moving Gravidity and Parity; and Rachel Cusk’s cathartic and honest A Life’s Work.

As always, thanks a million for supporting my creative endeavours. See you in the next missive!

With love,

Grace