Paid
19 on the Mean Streets (a forgiveness poem)
Creative tip: write your journals in verse!!!
Paid
3 v. simple things that have helped my mental health (and might help yours)
Bookmark this email and come back to it when you are at a low point.
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Stuck: On the conditions that ignite or suppress truly creative writing
This type of writing doesn't feel like work. It feels like something between necessity and reward. If I was a bird I guess I'd sing.
Paid
Exciting news! (and boring admin)
Sharing and exchanging from our respective kete mātauranga? Yes! Let's do that.
Paid
All those years to be my valentine
But I love that it was Love, not fear, that wrested you free in the end.
Paid
The rapture of Survival: A collage of post-Waitangi mundane delights
Lois realises in her list of delights, there are no mundane tasks. Is she lazy? Possibly. Probably. She is surrounded by people who excel at the domestic. Lois prefers to document the domestic.
Paid
I don't want to write about it but. (Why I'm leaving Substack.)
When my puku is churning it usually means I have to.
Essays
Instructions for (not) Letting Go
A weird and short parable.
Essays
An editor lives in my head
Years ago, Lois used to argue with John in actual cafes. They would meet and he would have a long black and her and oat milk flattie. Sometimes they ate (him lasagne with side salad, her a scone which she'd barely touch).
Essays
What would happen if you were truly free?
"To get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom." - Toni Morrison
Essays
The work of the witness: Reflections on a brilliant essay by Sarah Aziza
I think we all instinctively know that the ethics of witnessing on social media is barbed, but I suspect a lot of us don't talk about it because there isn't an easy language for it.
Essays
Returning to Omelas
The ones who walk away in Le Guin’s 1973 dystopian short story are those who refuse to accept that the price of their own freedom is the denial and violent suppression of someone else’s. But walk away to do what? To go where?