Barefoot writing: "A month of simple Sundays", my new book

I'm excited to announce the quiet launch of a little project I've been working on: a new book, in fact, unlike any other I've written. It isn't about travel. It's not a guide. It's still non-fiction, sort of.

A month of simple Sundays is an accidental collection of 30 prose pieces (and a few poems) written on idle Sunday afternoons with a pen on paper outdoors, mostly while looking at the sea, for no one but me - until now.

It's illustrated by Melbourne-based artist Kia Maddock, who was living in northern NSW at the time and did many of the drawings in the places where I wrote the words. (I did a few of the drawings too.)

It might be a new book, but writing short pieces, by hand, is something I've been doing for a long time - at least since I was 12 when an uncle gave me my first diary and set me on the journal-writing path. I still believe there's something powerful about writing by hand. Part creative expression, part therapy, it grounds me and help me know how I am inside.

Sunset pandanus, one Sunday

It also helps me reconnect with where I am. Writing helps me get my bearings, recalibrate my internal compass, find my feet - which, when I'm writing like this, are usually shoeless and buried in the grass.

Here's a bit about the book:

"It started a few years ago. Whenever I was free on a Sunday afternoon, which was deliberately often, I'd set off with a small bag containing a notebook, a pen and maybe a thermos of tea, in search of a quiet natural spot to write. My intention was simple: to find my way back to what's real, by which I mean whatever is going on right now, in and around us, wherever we find ourselves. 

"One night on a whim, I read a few of these short pieces to someone I love and he loved them so much I thought I'd put them together into a little book for him. Then the idea grew and before I knew it I had this collection, a month of Sunday writings, lightly edited and presented in no particular order, all written during solitary sessions on windswept headlands in Sydney and on [Australia's] NSW north coast, where I now live."

Bare feet are happy feet

And a sample piece of Sunday writing:

"Bare feet listening to the drought-dry grass tell its survival story. Living things want to live, without having to know it. What wants to be written today, seen and listened to? The curled-up feeling not sure of its own name. The animal impatience wanting to not live corralled by schedules and deadlines. The angel-winged serenity letting go, letting go, wanting only peace, everywhere. The wind blows again and leaves only this fluttering on the page, a streamer of letters tossed into the air to mark the occasion, celebrate the fact that Look! I was witness to this window of time left ajar and everything I saw made me want to keep looking and to pick up the streamers and show them to you. Here, see what I saw?"

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Paper daisy, wild and free

A month of simple Sundays is available here on the Blurb bookstore, where you can read a 15-page preview. More information on my Books page.

Inside us all is a creative light that wants to shine and be seen. Thanks so much for supporting mine by reading my writing here and elsewhere.