Returning in 2025

A Holiday picnic basket to farewell 2024

Hello friends,

It’s been a while, but I couldn’t let the year end without saying ‘thank-you’ for reading the Juvenile Geriatric in 2024. I promised a weekly post at the start of the year and until November I was doing ok. But weekly posts mean little other work gets done and when there’s a book to finish, difficult conversations to be had and polished up for the new theatre show, and other exciting projects dangling in front of me, I came to realise that, strangely, nothing gets finished when you don’t do the work.

I recently had super fun as the guest speaker at the Society of Women Writers Gala Luncheon in Sydney, where I spoke about conviction and ambition and how it manifests in our lives and careers. The room was filled with amazing women (and some partners) who have both ambition and conviction to create, despite often being side-stepped by mainstream publishers. I met poets, academics, authors, editors, novelists who, like me, are all struggling with the shortage of time and the urgency of our projects.

images from SWW luncheon courtesy of ©Rita Shaw

I’ve realised that by having conviction in a project means there are sacrifices to be made. We cannot give our full attention to everything that we do. I draw comfort from one of my favourite passage from Letters to a Young Poet by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, love your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, 16 July 1902

I’ve discovered that when I manage to live the questions, the satisfaction is so much sweeter, but this requires constant questioning and clarifying: ‘What’s important to me?’ ‘Why does this matter?” “Why do I care about this?” “How will I feel if I turn my back on this?”

This feeds into one of the projects I’m doing right here on Substack which is very dear to me. I’ve been thrilled with the response to the Forget-Me-Not series on How We Memorialise, a collaboration with the fab

Barbara at Projectkin

. Last week Dr James Ware PhD joined the series with a very personal presentation on the celebration he prepared earlier this year for his wife Cindy Booth Ware. If you missed it, you can listen to that here.

In early January 2025 Barb and I will release details of the final three speakers in the series. Since you are treasured friends, I can tell you before the Events Page is up, that the brilliant storyteller Rhonda Lauritzen will be joining us for the January conversation on the 21/22 January 2025. I’ll be back to tell you more in early January when we open up the bookings.

On the subject of memorials, two of my favourite guests on the interview show I used to present on TV, One Plus One, died this week. Author John Marsden and Cartoonist Michael Leunig left us far too early. They were so talented and complicated, perhaps. I pay my respects to them. I’m also thinking about anyone who has lost a loved one recently or who is alone or who finds holiday seasons like this difficult to handle. Please take care and try to lower your expectations so that you can get through your difficult times.

I look forward to sharing more good things with you in 2025. Stay Safe, dream big and don’t forget to exercise!

Curtain Call in Difficult Conversations Show featuring from L-R: Jane, Debra Keenahan, Jeremiah Egadbami, Benjamin Law. September 2024, image @Phil Erbacher