This year – 2010 – has been frantic but I’ve finally found a moment to update news.

New Book! A short selected, felis domestica and other poems, came out in the spring of 2009 with Picaro Press (Wagtail series, 91). Check out their website on www.picaropress.com/ to order.

Forthcoming: Picaro will publish a selection for children, Swamp Soup and Other Poems, as well as Teachers’ Notes.

This year is slipping away because of so much travel. I had a terrific first trip to Hong Kong in March for the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership Symposium. During that time I ferried over to Mainland China to run a writing workshop with students in the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou.

In April I was a guest at Salt on the Tongue: the Goolwa Poetry Festival in South Australia, organised by the Australian Poetry Centre.

The next big trip in 2010 will be to England for a Creativity, Writing and Culture symposium at the University of Winchester, followed by the National Association of Writers in Education Conference in Cheltenham, England. Busy writing papers and organising workshops!

A 2009 update: I was the keynote speaker at the Australian Association of Writing Programs Conference in Hamilton, New Zealand, in November (see ‘Living on the Edge: Creative Writers in Higher Education’ in TEXT, 14:1 [April 2010]).

In June, Jeri is off to the Blue Mountains in Katoomba, NSW, to take up a Residential Fellowship at Varuna – the Writers’ House, novelist Eleanor Dark’s former home.
Jeri’s most recent critical book is co-edited with Graeme Harper: Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, UK, 2008).

Two poems from Jeri’s verse novel-in-progress appeared in Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, published by Yarroway Mountain Press in 2008 (order online at yarrowaymountainpress.com).

What the reviewers say:

“The painful ambivalence of ageing’s inverted parent/child relationship . . . is brilliantly captured in poems such as “The Toxic Parent” and “Lift Off.” The toughness of truth tempered throughout by tenderness, this is a perceptive and beautifully balanced tribute.”
- Katharine England, The Advertiser, 8 May 2004.

“This is a wonderful collection and the teacher in me cries out for a class set of The Mother Workshops. While the texts themselves could be read primarily by senior students as exploring the poet’s changing relationship with her mother…they can also be read, more generically, in relation to all parent-child relationships, about the moments when the lines of authority and power waver and the baton – or distaff – is passed to the next generation. Furthermore, as intertextual treats for teachers and students, readings from The Mother Workshops would superbly complement and enrich texts by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Laude and Virginia Woolf…”
- Anne Magee, feature in Viewpoint 12 [3] Spring 2004 23.

But no one at home is interested in hearing Mickey whinge, so she begins to write letters to the living and the dead – the Minister of Education, Bill Gates, J.R.R. Tolkien, Napoleon, Freddo the frog (she’s a chocoholic) . . . and most of all to her late grandmother.

Mickey does have one thing going for her – her great imagination. Mickey writes to George Lucas as well, sending him instalments of her wild sci-fi fantasy about her alter ego, Space Chick Mick, where she really lets her hair uncurl.

Mickey’s Little Book of Letters offers a novel within a novel – a space fantasy as well as a witty and moving story about the uncertainties of early adolescence and the transformative power of grief. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young girl becoming aware of her talents – and having a lot of fun doing so.