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Aussie Book Review: Poet’s Cottage by Josephine Pennicott

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Early reviews so far have all been wonderful for Poet’s Cottage. I’m so thrilled to see other readers enjoying my characters and my Tasmanian mystery! This weekend I’m definitely going to create a review section on my Blog! Thank you to Aussie Book Review for this review. I’m so chuffed to read the following :

 

Poet’s Cottage is a ghostly mystery which spans three generations and covers themes of mental illness, infidelity, childhood abuse and the dramas of a small town in the 1930’s.

 

In the author’s note, Josephine says she set out to create an English-style mystery but with an Australian setting and I think she captured this perfectly. When I read this, I felt as captivated as I did when I read Sara Foster’s ghostly mystery Beneath the Shadows- which I also loved.

 

Highly recommended!

Aussie Book Review: Poet’s Cottage by Josephine Pennicott.

A House with a Tale to Tell

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One day I will organise myself to do a proper media section for my Blog. But at the moment I’m still doing publicity for Poet’s Cottage and finishing off the first draft of my Currawong book. For now, here is a peek at the article that appeared on my in Sydney’s Sunday Herald.  If you press on this link HERE, you can read it. Thank you to my writing friend, Richard Harland who owns a scanner and knows what to do with it. xx

A House with a Tale to Tell Josephine Pennicott in Herald

A long playing record for the weekend.

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Another busy week doing publicity for Poet’s Cottage and still trying to finish the first draft of the Currawong book.

This has to be my favourite graffiti in Newtown yet. My friend snapped this photo for me today and no – I didn’t do it.

I’ve so enjoyed meeting journalists like Blanche Clark (Herald Sun, Melbourne) and Steve Meacham (Herald, Sydney). One of the biggest surprises of the publicity part of writing was the pleasure of meeting people whose names I’ve seen in print for years. Not that I met Blanche in person – but I know what my tired brain is trying to say. I am still being woken nightly by my daughter who has developed a terror of her school-hat at night.

For my Tasmanian readers, the Sunday Tasmanian will be running a piece on Poet’s Cottage and the Tasmanian influences behind it this Sunday.

Tonight I am off to see the ever beautiful Jane Birkin sing. I’ve always been partial to this duet, Je Taime… Mon Non Plus she did with Serge Gainsbourg and have thought I would like it played at my funeral just for a change of pace. My god they both look so beautiful in this video. I read that it was rumoured by the media that Serge had sex with Jane (and his previous girlfriend Brigitte Bardot) when he recorded it. He apparently quipped to Birkin, ‘Thank goodness I didn’t or it would have been a long playing record.’

Enjoy your weekend. May it be filled with amorous creativity, passion, beauty, and adventures. xx

A Different Light

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I’m not the world’s biggest Marilyn Monroe fan but for some reason I seem to own five rather large coffee-table MM books which I can never bring myself to cull because I love looking at her jewellery, gowns and make-up. I caught the movie My Week With Marilyn with Art School Annie last week and thought Michelle Williams did a very good job portraying such an iconic figure.

I admire Marilyn because she came from a humble background (like moi) but was always trying to improve herself. Unlike the stars today who often brag about being dumb, Marilyn desperately wanted to be taken seriously. She sought out the company of intellectuals and writers. I feel so dispirited at times with the ‘skank’ culture of today.

I love Marilyn for her book collection of over 400 books and because books were such a refuge and joy to her.

I admire her strength, her insecurity, her tenacity and her love of animals as well. There’s a blog HERE that covers Marilyn’s love of books better than I have time to do.

This weekend displayed to me how much can change in a year. Last year my daughter’s party was about tulle, tiaras and pink princesses. This year we had Goth-painted nails, monsters, black balloons, ghouls and creepy Monster High dolls.

I have a busy week of doing interviews for Poet’s Cottage and trying to nail the first draft of Currawong Manor. Here is a link to another early review HERE which I loved for Poet’s Cottage. It still seems so surreal that people are actually reading the book I spent so many years upon.  I shall have to organise myself to add a review section to my tatty, scatty website.

After the party. Daisy and I walk home in Sydney light.

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Enjoy your week and happy reading. xx

LIFE’S SO LIGHT

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It’s been a busy and exciting week for me with interviews for publicity for Poet’s Cottage and working on the FINAL stages of the first draft of Currawong Manor. Yes, it’s nearly there! The characters are doing their usual games with me at the moment but I think I’m following behind. Thankfully, this bunch is patient.

 

I’m so thrilled to post the first review of Poet’s Cottage HERE. It’s such a surreal feeling for me to see the book that has been part of my life since 2007 now out there in public. I know Booktopia have preorders available HERE and thank you to the lovely friends who have put in orders.

If you are interested in chasing down my original magical trilogy then Momentum have all three books (with brand new covers) as EBooks. YOu can find them HERE.

I am in my garden writing shed. It is pouring with rain and I’m so blissful I could melt. There’s no greater joy than writing in the garden in the pouring rain.

I have to also mention one of my favourite Blogs, The Local Rose, has just celebrated its first birthday. I don’t have a lot of time to visit Blogs but this is one I always love.

Shiva and her lovely daughter

My dream is to buy a writing retreat and head to the bush as often as possible to live a glam and bohemian a life as Shiva Rose. Her lovely, light-filled home was also featured on Apartment Therapy this week.

Shiva's home via Apartment Therapy

 

And in moments of great joy or sadness, I always turn to one of my favourite movies. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

 

 

This move is so beautiful, so haunting, it hurts.

Life’s so Light.

Thank you for visiting me. I should also mention that Poet’ s Cottage will be featured in the March edition of Good Reading magazine. The article will tell the story of how a family holiday inspired my mystery novel. Have a beautiful weekend. I am hoping for a couple of dawn writing sessions to get the first draft out of me.

This morning my geranium at the front of the house which I sadly thought had died has a lovely red new flower for me to marvel over. xx

“She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.” ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

 

A Scorpion in the Corner and Publicity for Poet’s Cottage

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February has been a blur as publicity for Poet’s Cottage begins, ahead of its release in Australia.

My garden writing shed

I’m sitting in my courtyard garden now and the weather is so sunny for a change in Sydney.

I had plenty of chances to use my Mary Poppins umbrella this rainy summer. Of course, I’ve loved the rain.

This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed at home by Mr Steve Meacham for the Sun Herald newspaper. I say it was a pleasure because this gentleman wrote one of my favourite pieces recently,Writer’s Craft is now a Ghost in the Machine. You can find a link to this article here.

I find the whole interview process very daunting as I often get so tongue-tied and a shambling, rambling mess when talking about myself. I take heart from Arthur Boyd who was reputed to be woeful for the journalist to follow in interviews. I found that one of the most endearing traits of Arthur’s.

I was delighted to start off the publicity for Poet’s Cottage with a phone interview for the Tasmanian papers. I shall let you know when they are coming out.

I cannot wait for the Kerry Greenwood TV series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, starring my favourite, Essie Davis. You may recall I have bragged often about Essie and I being at the same College of Creative Arts in Hobart. I think she’s perfect casting for Phryne and I love Kerry Greenwood. I’ve won The Malice Domestic Award twice (okay, that’s a little brag again, but forgive me, another thing that I could have said to Steve and forgot). And because Essie is a Tasmanian girl (go Tasmanian girls!) I had her in mind for my character of Pearl Tatlow when I was writing Pearl.

Except now she looks just like my Pearl from Poet’s Cottage (I love her with the dark bob) but she’s Phryne. This show looks wonderful and I can’t wait to see it.

A million times better than the ghastly Underbelly offering which I wrote about here. A small slice of Underbelly Razor.

Tonight I went to the movies with Art School Annie and saw The Artist which is as wonderful and lovely as the reviews said it was. How magnificent is the dog Uggie?

And the two leads, Berenice Bejo as Peppy and Jean Dujardin, are perfectly cast. Not to mention all those fabulous 20’s frocks and shoes…

And a favourite book I read in February: Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers.

I‘m in awe of this book. I prostrate before it. So beautiful, powerful and inspiring. Alice Hoffman brings the bones to life so eloquently in her account of four women at Masada in 70AD. I take my hat off to Hoffman for her reminder of how powerful words and tales can be. This is a book that will give you strength. It’s raw and graphic and some of the passages will nearly destroy you with how inhumane people can be – but then the doves are always there as a symbol of goodness and hope. And Hoffman is writing at the top of her powers. She creates a spell just as powerful as Shirah does in the story. A wonderful novel about women, women’s mysteries and women’s stories.

This reads like a channelled book that contains the prayers and devotions of a real group of four women who would have been lost to time. But it really does contain messages and symbols for modern women as well.

Hats off again to Alice Hoffman for opening a portal where I could glimpse a world where fortunes were divined by scattering dove bones, Lilith was feared for snatching babies at night, girls were given in arranged marriages at thirteen and a Scorpion in the corner is a sure sign a witch is present.

As for my current book, Currawong Manor, I’ve finally reached the 100 000 mark of my first draft. There’s still a bit to go and for reaching that important mark I treated myself to this lovely black telephone.

I feel as if Hercule Poirot is exercising his little grey cells as he chats to me on the other end

And of course, I can’t leave this post without one little peep at Johnny.

Thank you for visiting me. xx

 

Haunted Sydney

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Sydney’s restless to-and-fro energy comes out of a nagging sense that something is missing, even, or perhaps particularly, when the city is at its most soft-aired and shiny. This feeling has many causes, which has been my impulse to try to uncover.
The first of these is the destruction of the language and culture of the Eora before the loss could even be grasped. This was a human tragedy. It was also the cause of an existential dilemma. For to live here is to always feel that the place has a secret life that resists you. This sense of hauntedness is not necessarily  always conscious, but expresses itself in our tendency to judge, to boast, to act out, to bully, to look for visions; or, failing that, to revel in the city’s sweat and grit. Almost all of Sydney’s emotions, even the most violent, can be traced back to a longing, which sometimes seems to have an almost geographic force. When we love it, that love is aching. Even our famed showiness is driven by a sense of loss.  This overcompensation makes Sydney the most dynamic of cities, although it can agitate at such a high vibration, as to appear almost still, to masquerade as torpid.
True to this spirit, I love and hate the place at once. But on nights like the summer evening earlier this year when I walked home through a limpid dusk, all is forgiven –  its brutishness, its piggish bush drivers, its violent moods. As I set out from the city’s southern end, the sandstone walls beneath the Central railway line still held the day’s heat.  The neon sign above Wentworth Avenue had gone from Sharpie’s golf house, but I remember the little golfer who used to guide his golden chip-shot endlessly, toward the nineteenth hole. In Darlinghurst I passed a row of old terraces where feral banana trees had colonised the tiny courtyards behind them, and walked on, past the smell of Thai food, up dirty William Street  Outside my flat the flying foxes were landing in the Morton Bay fig, and already their squabbles had sent a thick fall of fruit onto the pavement, which smelled phlegmy, and sweet in the dew. The moon rose from the invisible harbour into a sky of such a deep royal blue, it was almost impossible to believe in. The street smelled of low tide. For all its beauty, the city could return in an instant to pulp. And that thought was strangely cheering.
From Sydney by Delia Falconer
I too have a love/hate relationship with Sydney. I’ve been reading Delia Falconer’s wonderful book Sydney which manages to describe the ghosts and the dreamers in the shadows in Sydney’s streets so beautifully.
Today is Australia Day and at dawn I was in our local park for my morning walk. The trees were filled with dew  and the bush smelt of the rain that had been falling all night and morning. At the top of the hill, I paused as always to reflect upon the different elements and look at the city which spread as far as I could see. I was as relieved as ever to spot the airport, where it was reassuring to know escape was near. And as I do every morning, I paid my respects to my own ancestors and the ancestors of the original people. But the smell of the rain-soaked bush was a perfect way to begin Australia Day.            

MONA, QUOLLS, MEDIUMS AND A CANNY WITCH

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I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year. We escaped to my favourite place on Earth – my home state of Tasmania – for a family Christmas.
I sighed over houses in Bellerive.
Ate fish and chips at Mure’s
and saw the incredible MONA gallery which has to be one of the most exciting venues for contemporary art in the world. A must-see if you’re heading to Tasmania and really worthy of a blog post of its own. Hats off to the flamboyant David Walsh, who chose to put the fortune he made from gambling into art.
Bless you, David Walsh, for creating such an exciting and rich exhibit for Hobart. Not all of the works were to my taste but that’s part of the fun. You select what you love and hate with the O machine that you carry around; you can also see how other visitors voted. I found the Poo Machine really silly (I couldn’t stay in the room with the stench) and the Vagina Wall wasn’t really my cup of tea, but it’s all interesting. It wasn’t as shocking as I imagined but then I did spend three years at the College of Fine Arts so it takes a lot to rock me. But MONA was way, way better than I had envisaged it would be.
We journeyed to Bruny Island for a few days where we fed wild quolls, watched hard-working fairy penguins and shearwaters return from a day at sea, and explored desolate beaches.
Daisy swapped television and city streets for nature, no shops, very late nights with our wildlife watching and the most pristine air and views imaginable. Not to mention the most luscious food on the planet. If you haven’t eaten fresh Tasmanian raspberries, just-picked peas in the pod and my total favourite of them all – pink-eye potatoes – then you must or bust. I’m always a glutton in Tasmania and the owner of the unit we stayed at on Bruny claimed the food is better because the climate encourages a slow growth which makes all the food tastier.

Josephine Pennicott and Daisy on Bruny Island

 

When you have a parent die so near to Christmas, the day can never be as magical as it would have been. Despite the silence that fell upon us at times there were many treasured moments.
I love the fact my daughter is still so innocent and believes so strongly in the magic of Father Christmas. She did ask David why so many of her toys were made in China. As he paused to consider a reply, she said with a triumphant chorus, ‘I know! It’s because the elves were lazy and bought them from the shops!’
 
It’s always so difficult for me to return from the shimmering beauty of my home state. Returning to Sydney on New Years Eve, we were greeted by the rudest taxi driver you could imagine and the usual long queues at the airport and gritty industrial city streets. ‘Welcome back to Sydney’ I sighed to long-suffering David who knows he is now in for several months of me frantically trying to come up with every reason why we should all relocate to Tasmania. I can spend hours surfing Domain, dreaming as I cluck over the houses and prices. ‘If we sell up here, we could buy a house and a boat in Tasmania’ is my current, cunning lure to my Sydney-loving man.
My daughter is home on school holidays which always impacts on my word count. Just before Christmas, I had the agony of my new laptop falling from the bed, breaking the hardrive and I lost a week of unbacked work on my Currawong Book. Luckily, my characters are patient with me. This book is different in that a lot of it came to me already fully formed – unlike Poet’s Cottage which flowed as I wrote. I knew from the beginning with Currawong Manor, where it was heading and all the character’s secrets. Hopefully, it will work. The first draft is always a vexing time and often it feels as exciting as my Foxtel guide.

Josephine Pennicott and Allison Dubois

And I have launched into 2012 with a very spiritual week ahead. As you can see from the photograph which I posted on my Facebook, I once again was in a VIP audience with Allison Dubois of Medium fame. Alas, no connection was made for me but many interesting and poignant stories from the audience, including a suicide and a murder case which Allison channelled a lot of information through. It’s the second time I’ve been in the VIP audience and although disappointed not to be selected for a reading, it’s always emotional to witness the shock, elation and tearful joy of people who receive strong readings from Allison.
On Saturday I visit renowned witch and tarot reader, Ly de Angeles who has quite a reputation for giving you the hard truth. You can read more about her death prediction to one of her clients HERE. I’m looking forward to meeting with Ly as I’ve read quite a lot about her over the years. She sounds like an amazing character and I’ve wanted to have a reading with her for years. Fingers crossed for this session…
Wishing you a magical 2012. May this year be the one that you follow your Bliss, appreciate the present moment and live the amazing life you deserve. I’m very into Gratitude at the moment and have started a second blog to journal online a year of gratitude. I’m not expecting anyone to follow this one but I do feel it’s important for me to appreciate what is here right now as I tend to always be focusing on the absence. I’ll post a link when I get it up and running. 
Here’s to being present and appreciative in 2012.
Thank you for visiting me. xx

LET IT GO

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Hello,


Some sage writing words extracted from Cate Kennedy’s article in this month’s Country Style magazine.

‘Writing mirrors all of this – the disorder, the piercing together, the realisation that the distraction itself may actually turn out to be the inspiration. If there’s a mantra, it’s Let it go.’

and

‘So I’ve learned to go with the cobwebs, the giant huntsman spider on the bedroom ceiling, the skinks running across the living-room floor, the frog in the shower recess. I’m at home with the mess and disarray caused by kids making batches of cupcakes and elaborate cubbies, the dirty clothes that are proof of a day well- used.

I know that one day, trusting this process, I’m going to make something out of all of this; but for now, while the larger world is in full flight, I’m learning to put the dream of undisturbed, uninterrupted, artistic tranquillity in the corner, where it belongs.’ 

As the school holidays have just started, I really needed to hear those words as a reminder, Cate!  Not to mention that yesterday I dropped my brand new laptop, smashed it to bits and lost a week of writing which wasn’t backed up. I’d love to return to the days of writing with pen and paper and no stress. 

via my friend Dianne Wise-Carroll

 

If over the holidays you are in dire need to read more inspiring words on writing and creativity here’s an article I wrote about some of my creative journey towards Poet’s Cottage for Ian Irvine on his writing blog, you can find it HERE.

Wishing you wherever you are in the world, a wonderful Solstice, Christmas and New Year. May it be filled with all the chaos, inspiration and distraction that your soul desires.

 Thank you for visiting me. It has been raining for weeks now in Sydney with cool weather which is wonderful compared to the usual Christmas humidity. And I am 80 000 words into a very rough first draft of Currawong Manor. Thankfully, my characters are patient with me as I can only work in scrips and scraps with Miss Daisy home. Let it go. Let it Be.
 

Merry Christmas. xx