Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays by Ashleigh Young.

Release date: 11 August. Paperback, $30.

With her new collection of essays to be launched by VUP on August 11th, Ashleigh Young answered a few questions for These Rough Notes.

Five questions and answers here

Here’s a sample:

This book has been a long time in the making – from when you won the Adam Prize in 2009 with a portfolio of essays, to now, 2016. How does it feel to finally be publishing your essays in a book form? How much has the work evolved in the time between your MA portfolio and the published book?

That’s a long time! I feel glad and a bit nervous, but mostly tired because I’ve been so busy avoiding this book for seven years. I know all the avoidance tricks now. I could probably organise a special conference on avoidance, or a festival. My favourite trick for avoiding this book – because it was full of problems that I didn’t want to think about yet – was to write things that weren’t this book. So I finished writing a book of poetry and started writing a blog. The blog allowed me to write my way into things I probably wouldn’t have written otherwise – cycling, odd encounters, mental health, phrases and gestures, friendships, members of my family, inner voice … Sometimes the posts were intensely personal and sometimes detached.

The launch:

Victoria University Press warmly invites you to the launch of

Selected Poems
by Jenny Bornholdt

&

Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays
by Ashleigh Young

6.00pm–7.30pm, Thursday 11 August
at Unity Books
57 Willis St, Wellington.
All welcome.

Buy both books on the night for only $60 (normally $70).
This offer applies at the Unity Books launch only.