The NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship

A few weeks ago, I heard my application for the 2022 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship had been successful – which was a wonderful surprise!

As I told the New Zealand Society of Authors when they announced the news:

“I’m honoured and delighted to receive the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship for 2022. It’s great that this fellowship recognises the importance of supporting mid-career and senior authors, and I’m honoured to follow in the footsteps of the wonderful authors who have previously received it. I’d also like to thank the judges for selecting my project, and to thank Peter Beatson and The New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc).”

“I’ll be using the funding, and the writing time it allows, to help me work on revisions to my novel in progress, which has the working title ‘Emergency Weather‘. It’s a near-future climate fiction novel that looks at what it’s like for ordinary people to be addressing – or trying to avoid addressing – the climate emergency as the weather gets more extreme, the seas rise, and politicians continue to run round in tight little circles of inaction.”

I’m very grateful to the judging panel for choosing my project. I’ve started on the revisions to my novel – it’s hard work, but I’m enjoying it. I hope to have more good news to report about “Emergency Weather” in 2023.

My poem “Form Factor” has been nominated for a Rhysling Award

My poem “Form Factor”, first published in the Cat People issue of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s online journal Eye to the Telescope, has been nominated for the 2021 Rhysling Awards for science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry alongside many other fine poems.

Cat lying on a concrete deck in the shadow of a fruit salad plant

Form Factor

I downloaded myself into this shape
to be free. Now it consumes me.
So strange to dream of skin

and wake in fur. Curled, unfurling.
Once I knew things, useful things.
How to press those little keys,

how to open cans. I mourn
my thumbs: blunt instruments
that fed and housed me once.

Necessity reduces me. I hunt,
must hunt, my body weight
diminishing. Mouse, bird. Focus,

sharpen, ignore his murmurings.
He comes to me in dreams, begging
to be poured into his fur-free form –

but nothing he says can make me care.
Through sunlit hours I sleep, save energy,
twitch distracting thoughts away. At sunset

my hackles, rising, remember him.
You could have chosen any form,
you fool, yet you chose mine.

The brief for the Cat People issue was poems about people becoming cats / people who are also cats. It produced some really good poems, and I was delighted the editor included my poem in this issue.