Southern China dispatches
Notes from working the land and Keyboard
Documenting the daily rhythm of cultivating a small holding in China and raising fowl. A return to writing after eight years in the teaching wilderness and a new novel serialised as its written.
Agrarian stewardship
From manuscript to soil
The transition from pure literary work to active land management began on the typhoon hit land of the south. Physical earthwork demands absolute presence, and a great deal of nagging, offering a vital counterweight to the solitude of writing.
Each chapter of the third book will be produced when the opportunity to correct past wrongs is evidenced. The hard physical working of land gives rise to numerous ideas away from the chalk face. Only when outside of something can you truly see it for what it is, and what it is not.
Writing practice
Written in the quiet hours after fieldwork, these dispatches record the unhurried observations of rural peasantry.
Seasonal cadence
Working this soil demands accepting whatever arrives—the sudden downpour, the blighted leaf, and the quiet reward of a finished row.
Amor Fati journal
