Here’s the latest, dear friends.

Forgotten Corners bubbles nicely along, though the divining of book-selling strategies appropriate to this mysterious digital age is a challenge that continues to flummox me. But we soldier on – and the exciting news is that this very Friday (that’s February 21 – by the time you see this it’s also, most likely, tomorrow), the wonderful Cameron Hindrum will be fronting a Launceston launch of Forgotten Corners. I’m thoroughly agog. It’s at Petrarch’s (what a great name for a bookshop!) at 6pm. If you’re thereabouts, attendance should be deemed mandatory. Even if you already possess a copy.

Meanwhile, back in January Paul and I performed twice at the Cygnet Folk Festival, and what fun this was!! You get paid in peanuts, but it hardly matters. On the Saturday we opened with ‘Indignados!’ in the Supper Room of the Town Hall, where we had an enthusiastic, packed-to-the-rafters house, and backed up on Sunday in St. Mark’s Church to present a show based on Girl Reading Lorca but with enough re-casting for us to badge it as ‘Pete and Paul’s Greatest Hits’. I even edited down the long poem from Girl Reading Lorca, ‘State Road 40’, and read it at the Poets’ Breakfast on Sunday morning, having been rightly chastised by Joy Elizabeth for turning up on the Saturday morning with nothing to read.

Which brings me to the second incarnation of Physick: Catharsis and ‘The Natural Things’ (I’ve taken to giving it it’s full name, the important sub-title having largely been lost in the abbreviation of time). A second edition, to be published in Christchurch, New Zealand (on the opposite side of the globe to the first edition!) is coming together with bewildering rapidity, thanks to the enthusiasm and skill of Quentin Wilson, my new publisher – though that should more properly be termed ‘renewed’. Watch this space. This also gives me a chance to rectify a regretted omission from the first volume – the inclusion of Tom O’Hearn’s dark and whimsical image, ‘Emu Eats the Future’, to be re-united with the poem that came from the collaboration (in which we were paired) in the 2013 Bett Gallery’s Poets & Painters exhibition.