Show Notes
I've been a fan of Erin Harrington's work for a long time. I love her writing and research. Over the past six months I got to work on the same floor as Erin while I was one of the Ursula Bethell Fellow at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha where Erin is a Senior Lecturer.
It was so great to talk to Erin about this article:
'As we shovel in distractions, the inner life grows dim' by Charlotte Wood which appeared in The Guardian in 2020 during lockdown. Here's a link to the article
The article was published in The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience & the Inner-Life Charlotte Woods book about creative thinking. Here's a link to the book
A Horse Walks into a Bar - Free Workshop
Thanks so much to everyone who attended and has watched the video of this workshop.
If you haven't watched the workshop yet you can learn more about it and get a link to it at my website
Action: Gaza Funds صندوق مالي لغزة
Gaza Funds is a project that connects people to crowdfunding campaigns for individuals and families from Gaza. Each time the page is reloaded, a different campaign appears. While the rotation is randomized, campaigns for the sick/injured and campaigns close to meeting their goals are prioritized. We never want any of these campaigns to go stagnant, so we make sure to also prioritize fundraisers that haven't had a donation in a while. As existing fundraisers meet their goals, they will be replaced with other fundraisers that need your help.
Here's a link to Gaza Funds
Disability Support Services Community consultation - runs from 10 February to 24 March 2025.
Almost a year since the initial sudden and unjust changes to disability support service, fresh consultation has begun on options for changes to flexible funding.
Here's a link to the submissions process
An interview with Joanne Dacombe who is the immediate past President of the Disabled Persons Assembly, and Jade Farrar who is the chair of the National Enabling Good Lives leadership group is really helpful. Here's a link to the RNZ Interview
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More from Better off Read
On the 5th of September this year, i was lucky enough to be in an event at Word Festival called I Wish I Wrote That with an incredibly talented line-up of writers including Jon Toogood. Jon had an event before ours and i watched him perform 'Home Again' on acoustic guitar from the Green Room. Even backstage and through a screen i found myself moved to tears - it's an incredible piece of songwriting that just seems to hit me more and more profoundly. About five minutes into Jon's book signing i needed to go to the foyer and it was wild. One thing became really clear - people love Jon and Jon's book and Shihad. During our event, Jon read a really beautiful piece about Aldous Harding's song 'Treasure'. One of the really great things about Jon's memoir Home Again is the way he writes about music, not just the music he makes but the music he loves.
Helen and i have been friends for a long time. Over the years her work has been incredibly inspiring to me. When i say 'Helen's work' i mean her writing, her activism, her visual art, her journaling, her essays, her thinking, her teaching, her friendship, her family-ship, her gardening and all the other amazing things she does. i also admire the way it is quite hard to separate these 'works' out from each other. If there is such a thing as an artist's life i think Helen is a really great example of that. When we met a few weeks ago, Helen brought along her journal as the object to act as a starting place for this conversation.
September is such an exciting month because it sees the launch of The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances an amazing novel written by Terri Te Tau and published by Spoor Books
i loved talking to Molly Crighton over Zoom earlier this month about her new novel The Body and the Blood out with Hachette New Zealand
i'm really grateful to Tīhema Baker for speaking with me about his new novel One Day a Taniwha (Hachette) i was a massive fan of Tīhema's last novel Turncoat and i've enjoyed hearing Tīhema talk over the last few years. i was lucky enough to read Tīhema's book last year and i loved it. i reread it for this podcast and i still love it. Maybe even more. It's an incredibly compelling story set in several planes of experience - centrally the waking and sleeping lives. It's an incredibly intelligent and beautiful novel. Through this deft craft i think it makes possible new ways of thinking about fatherhood, work, mental health and how these are effected by colonisation and colonialism. In our discussion i touch on how fresh and cutting edge Tīhema's depiction of fatherhood is. i just can't recommend it enough. This podcast was recorded over Zoom.