New Zealand

Have spent the last ten days in New Zealand - Wellington, Napier, Picton and now Nelson. Lots of busyness! Amazing to see how many secondhand bookshops are thriving here - counted (and visited!) four in Wellington alone. But what really blows me away is the craftwork.

So, I've been thinking a lot about craft and how, constant as it has been in my life, I don't really push any boundaries with it. I'm a jobbing knitter and sewer. This year I'd like to try to be more innovative. I'm already doing more spinning but that isn't quite enough. How to push further?

I've been thinking the same thing about poetry. How to push that further - what to do with it. One of the problems, I think, is that I'm no longer immersed in the poetry world. My world has become divided between writing novels, teaching and family - it's hard to add extra things into that mix and poetry is something that needs more immersion, more thought, more experimentation and more reading.

I acknowledge it's hard to do everything - but...

I want to!