big changes for me on the work front

I've been a little distracted of late with work. After five years, I am closing my business and moving on...and moving away from working six days, sometimes seven days a week.
It is liberating (and a little bit sad) and exciting. The 'greed' factor which has invaded our sleepy little beach town saw my rental for premises double,( just the boomboom times we're in) - and I have decided not to play that game.

I've done ok in my business, have kept many treasures that I couldn't bring myself to sell, including two beautiful leather bound books from the mid 1700's with artwork and hand written notations - 'how to clean and store feathers'; a beautiful oriental urn with incredible detail dated from the early 1900's; some early Australian cedar furniture; and lots of other small and unique treasures.

I've also discovered heaps of interesting things about the people in my town, found pain and pleasure and stories to last me well into my dotage.

Around the time when I first thought about getting out of my business, my creative side was powering into overdrive, and I was taking work to work to work on...one of the best things that came out of the later end of last year for me, was the development of my long poem 'holding Job's hand'. I was so involved in making this work, that it went everywhere with me, in a notebook. One of the local poets, who also shopped in my store, kept coming in for updates as the poem was being developed. The pleasure for me in that response and the joy, will be with me always. When the visual artist Clyde McGill, who is collaborating on the project by producing 50 only individual printed covers (and a digitally reproduced double centrefold for each of the 50 copies) first received the poem for perusal, he said that he carried the poems around with him for weeks, reading and responding to the ideas...he has made some truly outstanding art out of his take on our collaboration. Angela Gardner - Light Trap Press (more news and links soon) is looking at a launch in Melbourne in August for this work. I'm so happy to have the 'job' project interwoven in the end days of my business, almost as swansong.

During this period, I also was selecting work for foam:e #5 which I have edited and which should be going live very shortly, so stay tuned - ( a week's delay - due to delay type things). Issue 5 of foam:e has more than fifty contributors and I found the opportunity to participate very rewarding, even though it added so much more to my workload, that sometimes I wondered how I could ever get it done. But it does get done, and for me, if I am interested in any project, it will be followed through. It's impossible for me not to find time for things that are worthwhile.

In the five years that I worked so slavishly in my business, many friends and extended family saw less of me than I would have liked. My own personal space was reduced to the number of hours each day that I could shave off sleep and still survive. I can only think about each day at a time at the moment. I don't know what I will be doing next...it is a great feeling to be uncertain about my future. So many possibilities are open to me now.