It's here! Treasure Ground, the last publication of the year, finally done -- and it looks gorgeous. I get very parental about all these productions but I am particularly pleased with this one. The collection is a sequence of connected pieces, all arising from day to day life on Woodlands Organic Farm, and it threads its way across the seasons. You need to read it from beginning to end (not, as I often do, backwards).
It's been cold this week. Not deep snow like in part of the States, but serious frost so you slip all over the place on your way out to the car.
It's mega parcel time again - sending stuff all over the place, little packets of this that and the other. Another hundred quid to the local post office this morning. Stamp, stamp, stamp!
Laurna Robertson's Sampler is done, and very nice it looks too. And Deborah Trayhurn's Embracing Water, a sequence quite unlike anything I've ever published before. Little packets of them are fleeing hither and thither, to copyright libraries, authors, friends, family and early orderers.
This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn't read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother's bookcase: John Smith's My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn's poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that's where I knew them from!
Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.
There's at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there's at least two, no -- three.
In my editorial, there's 'arrive' with one 'r': Christmas is due to arive shortly.
Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn't called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.