see here

Author Paula Morris was teaching an MA class at the University of Auckland, when her mobile phone rang and as it was a Wellington number she didn’t recognise, she stepped outside to take the call.

Minutes later, she had to return to the creative writing class and resist the temptation to tell her students – and the rest of the world – that she would next year travel to Menton, in the South of France, as the 2018 Katherine Mansfield Fellow.

Weeks of secrecy end today, with the Arts Foundation officially naming Morris as the recipient of the prestigious residency, which allows a New Zealand writer to live for up to six months in Menton. While there, writers have access to the writing room in Villa Isola Bella where acclaimed NZ author Katherine Mansfield once lived.

Full details

List of excellent poetry books from 2018 chosen by Steve Braunias, Bill Manhire, Courtney Smith and me. Such a good year for poetry not all best books can fit.

Yeah to all the poetry presses in NZ who take risks and keep publishing poetry. Thank you! And the bookshops that put poetry on their shelves. And the festivals that slot in poets. And the readers who keep loving local poetry books. Thank you!

Lynn Davidson is part of this online collective

I really like this idea – I wonder if we could do the same here?

’12  is a collective of women writers using a shared Google document to post monthly poems in response to one another’s writing. The collective originally formed at the request of Sophia Hao, curator at Cooper Gallery in Dundee, in order to create work echoing the collaborative Feministo Postal Art Event of 1975-77. For that project, women made art at home and posted it to one another, generating home-based art collections and a tight-knit community of women artists.

The poets in the collective so enjoyed writing in a safe and easily accessible space, with a simple constraint and support garnered from working alongside and in response to one another’s creativity, that they decided to continue. One poet writes a lead poem each month and the others each post a response. The writers in the original collective were Tessa Berring, Anne Laure Coxam, Lynn Davidson, Georgi Gill, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Jane Goldman, Rachel McCrum, Jane McKie, Theresa Muñoz, Alice Tarbuck, Karen Veitch and JL Williams. Since then, Rachel McCrum and Karen Veitch exchanged places with Em Strang and Lila Matsumoto.’