Did You Miss The Best of 2024?

A Wattletales Christmas Roundup

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for your support in 2024. This year, Wattletales brought you a number of posts about ageing, which is fast becoming my specialty, as well as a mix of features, including AI, feminism, a short story, observations about the power of words, guest posts, and more. 

Each post was graced with positive feedback and great comments, and I hope our guests’ work has received just a little more exposure by being on Wattletales.

Guest Posts

Our guests in 2024 were Kuma Subedi, Valerie Volk, and Shaine Melrose.

Kuma Subedi

Kuma is an award-winning, Adelaide-based poet who grew up in Nepal. His knowledge and love of Nepali and Western classical poetry traditions give him a unique poetic voice.

In his post, ‘The Play of Nature, Love and Oppression in Poetry‘, Kuma invites us into his childhood and speaks of the simplicity and rhythms of the songs he sang during seeding and planting seasons as a young one and how proud he was that his father was a farmer.

And, in his words —

My love for writing poetry in English was catapulted by Shakespearean sonnets, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Andrew Marvell, Sylvia Plath and P. B Shelley. I dearly admire E.E Cumming’s and Emily Dickinson’s style, and was profoundly influenced by the romantic elements in Wordsworth and Keats.

Valerie Volk

Valerie introduces us to her new poetry collection, Marking Seasons, which was published this year as a special edition of the journal Studio. She talks about how hard it was to choose poems from six earlier poetry collections (plus some new ones). As the blurb says —

Marking Seasons is a record of one woman’s life in poetry. Poems dealing with love and loss, poems telling stories of the past, poems where characters reveal their own lives, or the poet responds to the natural world — this is a remarkably diverse collection. From tender and elegiac love poems to fondly nostalgic reminiscences of past days to the misery of deeply-felt family tensions to the sharply pointed, witty and even scurrilous retelling of classic fairy tales — there are poems in this collection for every reader.

Shaine Melrose

Shaine first contributed to Wattletales in 2021 with her piece ‘What Made Me a Gardener.’ This year, in a piece entitled, ‘Slaying the Demon of Doubt‘, she talks of her declining health and how it offered a turning point, leading her deeper into her creativity. In her words —

When my life choices were critically challenged by declining health, I was forced to reinvent myself. No longer free to use my limbs and horticultural knowledge at a whim, I returned to poetry. 

It’s a powerful piece, and Shaine’s poems are superb. When her post went online, her first poetry collection, The Natural World Somersaults, was forthcoming. It is now published and available in various bookshops across Adelaide.

Wattletales Standouts

Three Posts about Ageing

In case you missed them, here are the links to 2024’s posts on aging. This subject increasingly occupies my attention not only because of my slow but noticeable decline (one cannot hide a walking frame or oxygen bottle in a purse) but also because I’ve begun working on a novella entitled By Way of Dying.

Parcelling Time and Conserving Energy in Old Age

How to Maintain Dignity with a Walking Aid

Progress or Decline: Ageing in the Modern World

By Way of Dying has a posthumous and somewhat unreliable narrator called Marigold Merriweather. Not one to hold back, Marigold (not her real name) uses only first-name pseudonyms for all her characters to avoid being sued. Stuck in a liminal space with nothing but her memories, Marigold is unable to rest in death until she understands life.

Who Are We? Reflections on a Life Half Hidden

Who Are We? Reflections on a Life Half Hidden is my favourite post for 2024. It was inspired by V.S Naipaul’s book, Half a Life, in which he explores how difficult it is to find a coherent self. As someone like me who has moved on average every 18 months throughout her life and lived in Japan, Sri Lanka, and the Australian outback, travelled in India and Nepal and lived in various Australian states, cities and towns, I explored how so much of our lives remains hidden in embedded experiences that are unseen by others when we move a lot.

The 1947 photo in this image is of the Marunouchi Hotel, where I lived as a little girl in post-WWII Tokyo. Kuma Subedi kindly took the 2024 photo of the Marunouchi Hotel as it is now. The juxtaposition speaks to the idea of hidden histories.

In Conclusion

I hope you take the time to catch up on some of these posts if you missed them.

And, wherever you are, whoever you are with, I wish you a joyous festive season.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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