Gut Feelings

I'm pretty sure the first book I ever made as an edition was Dislocation*. It's an accordion fold with simple pop-up panels for the text, illustrated with line drawings with bit of collaged colour. It was laser printed (I was years away from access to letterpress) and since I had no idea of how to make a decent book cover back then, its the simple folded card cover that makes me cringe when I look at it now. But the content of the book is still as strong as it ever was.

Dislocation is a longish poem about travel and homecoming, in particular it's about jetlag, and the profound effects it can have. I included excerpts from the poem in this post, written almost exactly one year ago. A year ago, six months ago, I was still in my profoundly anti-travel state of mind. I really should know better than to ever say never! With my recent trip to Queensland I have done one of my famous about-face total attitude shifts. My own unpredictability is, as usual, keeping my friends endlessly entertained.

In the first day or two back from my January trip, I wrote this little poem with a very different (to Dislocation's) interpretation of the meaning of my jet lag feelings.

Gut Feeling

I left my juice and my heart behind in the tropics.

Vital fluids trailing my obligations by three hours,

I can see them back there, a languid puddle in the heat

With the sea lapping up warm and salty,

saying belong belong belong

here.

Yes my guts are hardly missing me, this empty shell of self

whithering dry and itchy,

All the moisture in me has been cried out.

I work carelessly, distracted

by my chest aching a hole where my heart should be.

And yet I don’t want to call my heart home.

I want to pack up my shell and return to

my centre, my passion, my guts.

* I still have copies of Dislocation available, discounted to $100 because I don't like the cover. Email me at the address on the right.

The beautiful photographs of Dislocation are by Katrina Ching

Sagittarian Retrospective and Giveaway

The year's turning begins for me at the start of December, with my own birthday that gives me a head start on a new year's retrospective annual assessment and goal setting. There's plenty to be pleased about looking back on 2009, and I am filled with anticipation for more progress in 2010.

Looking back over this year's blog posts, I see that in January I was getting 150-180 unique hits a week. These days there are more likely to be around 350. These numbers are no great shakes compared to many of the blogs I follow, but I have a sense of a loyal readership growing sustainably.

For those of you who are new to Bibliophilia, here are some of the highlights of my year that were documented here:
Making my first commissioned artist book edition, while moving between two towns and 4 studios!
Making a Hamilton park into a giant book of love poems
Developing a philosophy to teach book making
Sketchcrawling the Tron
You are an Agent of Change chosen as a Finalist in the National Contemporary Art Awards
Embroidering fossils and Mars gardens
Returning to the Daintree for a week of rainforest and coral reef
Another commissioned edition, this time in one place and collaborators
Spending three months as Writer/Artist in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School
My first live online cyberperformance
Hand stitching an island
Some public speaking

In appreciation of my new and long-term readers, I'm celebrating the end of the year, the end of the decade and my birthday (a prime number beginning with 4) with a special giveaway! December's prize is a bit bigger (and more expensive) than usual and there are more ways to win.

The prize is one of my early editioned artist's books, called Dislocation, still in stock in my Etsy shop.

You can enter as many times as you want in any of the following four ways. Entries will close on 15 and the randomly selected winner announced shortly after.

Ways to enter the Bibliophilia December Giveaway:
1. Comment on this post.
2. Link to any post on this blog on Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, and let me know (with a link) by commenting on this post (up to three entries per day).
3. Link to my Etsy shop on Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, and let me know (with a link) by commenting on this post (up to three entries per day).
4. Purchase something from my Etsy shop: every item purchased is another entry. It's a great place to do your gift shopping for mums, dads, crafty friends, philosophical acquaintances, economical budgets and extravagant spenders.. (NB NZ buyers can pay in NZ $ by bank transfer- select the 'other' payment option in Etsy's check out.)

Re-location

Aaahhhh, what a relief to be spending my first day at home in ten. Too much time away from where ever I call 'my place' and I start to lose track of myself, my soul, my being, my happy, my place on the planet, my goodness, my hope and no amount of fun, meditation, exercise, focus, food, or friendship is enough to compensate. Coming home, staying home, being here at last, enables my soul and my body realign in a long sigh of relief.

My usual toxic response to not being home for any length of time is exacerbated by crossing time zones. Fortunately I haven't been that far in the last 10 days (just Tauranga, Hamilton, Pekapeka and Paraparaumu). But I wrote about jetlag in one of my earliest artist's books, Dislocation. Here's an excerpt if you haven't got your own copy yet (I've still got eight left of an edition of 30, at only $100 for blog readers who email me before the end of March).

"...Oh we are torn from ourselves
by jet planes
crossing the date line.
...
I have left a little ghost in each time zone,
How to ingather my scattered selves from seven airports?
I call myself home
to turangawaewae.

Each breath of this air
stitches my selves back together
pulling them in like
beads on a string
until we are all lined up
and can be fixed here and now..."

(Turangawaewae is a Maori word which in this context means home-place.)