It has been a long time since I last wrote a post. As it happened, this was not long after my book came out — a little over six months ago.

Remembering a Great New Zealand Poet.

While the power of poetry has been recognised and cherished in many cultures, it is possibly in Ireland that it has been most impactful both as an instrument of great beauty and great resistance.

These two sentences are how Google’s AI chatbot Gemini introduced its response to a Michigan college student Vidhay Reddy while engaged in a back-and-forth conversation about the challenges and solutions for aging adults, intended to assist Vidhay with his homework.

Every now and then, and much rarer as I get older, a book I read throws (disturbs, rattles, unsettles) me in a way I didn’t think possible.

Today, I learned that for quite a number of ladies over there in America, the election was a “referendum on women’s rights and reproductive freedom.”

The morning after the American elections, the world has woken up much the same as any other morning, despite the hysteria and fear-mongering of the preceding months. 

Yes, it is an odd title and, given my writing style, highly unusual. But if you bear with me for just a few moments more, I’ll explain.

I wish spring in Wellington is less nippy, less like a small dog around the ankles, and more like a honey-coloured cat that brushed past me last night.

I’ll admit to having given a few, if any, serious thoughts to editors and what they really do, until I became in need of one.

Like everyone else around the world, I too woke up on Sunday morning to the news of the attempt on the life of Donald Trump.

There are few places where the art of storytelling has been woven into the fabric of societies as persistently as in the magical and mysterious lands of the Balkan Peninsula.

Today is the 19th of June 2024. Three decades to the date since I landed on New Zealand’s shores.

Paul Benjamin Auster, known as “the patron saint of literary Brooklyn,” according to The New York Times, and “literary Brooklyn’s first great pinup,” according to the Guardian, passed away at the age of 77.

On Saturday morning a young man half-walks, half-jogs into the mouth of a giant, steel-glass-and-concrete temple where other men and women worship gods of plenty every day of the week, and sometimes even on the in-between days, pulls the blade he brought with him and stabs six people to death.