One also discovers what it is like to have a subway train scream past ones window every minute throughout the night, without curtains to screen one from the eyes of passersby.
One discovers that the large police presence in the nearby subway station is both necessary and helpful.
One discovers that smart and Famous People can be fun to hang out with.
One discovers that hundreds of folks might come out to support a LGBT reading in a Jewish space.
One discovers that one’s friend is even more lovely than previously suspected.

retreads: tires that have had rubber put back on them…old women wearing tight spandex…old men who play at being boy soldiers

ringbarking: cutting or eating the bark in a strip all the way around the outside of a tree, thereby killing it.

king snake: king brown, dugite, bloody dangerous snake that can make you really sick or kill you if it bites you. Fortunately not fond of people.

“our native friends”: indigenous Australians, aboriginals.

gidji: a kind of sharpened wooden spear for stabbing at stuff. My Mum used to scream at us for chasing each other with gidjis. She’d yell”You’ll take out an eye with that!” Eye, nothing…we wanted to take out brains.

salmon gums:

jarrah:

golden wattle:

ironbark: Just because I love it so, here’s a poem about ironbark. Gilded youth. Oh I love it.

mallee:

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A reading of short fiction by local readers such as Darwyn Jones and Kurt Heintz

A reading of short stories, by local writers such as Edward thomas-Herrera, Darwyn Jones and Greg Shapiro.

Well, anyway, I wanted to start at the beginning of the book and add a couple of words a day, or maybe some pictures of tress or bushes or birds or whatever comes up next.

Here goes:

FOGEY: Um, is this Australian? It means an old conservative person, the kind who might gossip about you if you got your hair dyed blue.
BLOKE: a man. A good enough sort. Rough around the edges, like a kettle made out of a kerosene tin.
COCKIE: a cockatoo. or a land owner. They both make a lot of noise.
PODDY: an animal that has been abandoned by its mother. A poddy lamb is the little stinker who walks around after you, butting your bum, trying to get you to give it more milk. Leaves droppings all over the verandah.

My novel, for better or for worse, is coming out in the US tomorrow. It scares me and excites me. I want to hold the book in my hands, a weight, what many years of work feels like. I want to walk past a bookshop and see it in the window and get a little jolt of recognition: That’s my work. That’s what I spend the day (and night!) doing. I want to think that those words between the covers might touch someone far away. I want to gloat and do a war dance…see…I wasn’t slacking off all that time! I was doing SOMETHING.

Mostly, I want to lie in my hot bath and be still and thankful for all the fine twists of fate and kindness that have brought me to this place, because I know, really know, that there are many much finer writers than me who have not had the same good fortune that I have.