get good news

And apparently, you’ll tell three people. Get bad news, you’ll tell ten.

But sometimes you’re tired and it’s hard to type all the time, and you have to rush. So you tell all the good that you got in three sentences.

In the Good News column:

– The Nimbin Poetry Cup was an experience. No two ways about it. Experience. A good one. Humble thanks and gratitude to the organisers and to the members of the Nimbin community who supported, worked, clapped, endured, and then went through it all again. I’m oddly awestruck at the experience. It was not at all what I was expecting. To be surprised is the greatest gift.

– Candy Royalle was the luminous and deserving winner of the Cup. Seventh times a charm. She also lured me down to Lismore, for another surprise/gift/astonishment/reset.

– I have a piece in the Audio Overland. This is effectively the most undeserving I have ever felt. I’m painfully conscious of the terrible recording (technical limitations being all my own, blah blah) but honoured nonetheless and delighted that Maxine Beneba Clarke would ever sit my work in that place. I will put it up there with getting door listed to Bikini Kill.

There’s a lot of compliment and honour that comes from standing beside writers you admire and respect – physically, like at Nimbin, and electronically, as with Overload.

I can’t pretend that I’m expressing this clearly, because I’m kind of rushing and multi-tasking, but I’m basically speechless after the weekend, which for me – is saying a lot.