I wrote this poem after returning home from a GIPCA memorial reading held in his honour last October. I seldom take my poems out in public until at least a year after writing them, sometimes longer if they’re written in the grip of strong emotion. But a friend said something lovely at the time: that as a poet, Stephen got to be authentic for a living — which meant risking telling people, in writing, how he really felt about them, the world, what was inside his head — and that it was fitting that the death of a poet should trigger poetry. And I wanted to do something to mark the anniversary of his passing. Hence this risk.

Eleven things not to do when newly reborn

Don’t go to a memorial reading in honour of a friend lost too early.

Don’t listen to his words, read by others (some gruff with tears) and remember his voice, his dark-blue eyes, the curve of his mouth as he spoke.

Don’t listen to any poems. Stop your ears. Or accept that you will come unravelled.

Don’t embrace people from other lives, people that you remember you miss.

Don’t kiss any cheeks, much less with tenderness.

Don’t stroke his widow’s back in lieu of words.

Don’t drive home via the Atlantic coast, the last of sunset separating the blurred grey sky from the ridged grey water.

Don’t swing round curves in the road under the Twelve Apostles.

Don’t remember that he’ll never see fynbos, now a show of pelargoniums and aristeas, shifting from spring to summer again.

Don’t look back at Hout Bay with Hangklip shadowed on still sea, the lights of the old fishing village starting to bleed across the water.

Most of all: don’t do any of these things when you’re alive again, naked as a newborn, after the longest winter.

However, the one thing that drives me to write is physical extremity. Right now, as a precaution against cancer and other nasties, I have to take progesterone every three months, in spite of the fact that it makes me insane by any legal or medical definition. This morning it brought me to a pitch of desperation that could only be assuaged by writing. Some dim part of me is also aware that the scenarios it creates have a certain savage comedy.

Last night Colleen Higgs, my very dear publisher, told me that for the umpteenth time, she’d gotten mail from someone who’d read my poetry collection Strange Fruit (in which I write about being infertile), and found it comforting. I get this kind of feedback regularly, even nearly three years after it came out.

Colleen gets letters like these all the time about Malika Ndlovu’s Invisible Earthquake (on stillbirth), and Beverly Rycroft’s Missing (about surviving breast cancer). Finuala Dowling apparently gets similar responses to her books that deal with the loss of her mother to dementia — her poems Notes From the Dementia Ward, and her novel Homemaking for the Down-at-heart. These books — novels and poems — help people.

So, in the interests of (a) recording those fragments of my writing that aren’t related to my day-and-night job and (b) letting others in the same pickle know they’re not alone, here you are:

Day six on progesterone: Wake, for the second morning running, convinced that my cat Lily has drowned in the landpersons’ pool. So, like yesterday, the day begins with me stumbling down the garden, calling her hysterically. After a few minutes, it dawns on me that both Lily and Meg are trailing me, a tad concerned about their wild-eyed mother. I play with them for half an hour while the sensation of imminent heart attack recedes. Remember lovely evening before. Calm, calm…

This fortifies me for a daunting morning: I have to visit bank, post office, pick up mended shoes, get cat food and human food. This means Long Beach Mall on a Saturday morning. I manage most chores, and apart from being unable to locate familiar shops and shelves when I’m standing in front of them, the only sign of instability is when the musack system plays the Beatles’ “Let It Be” and I start crying.

I spend a small fortune on Vit B6, magnesium, borage and omega oils and buchu capsules, the pharmacopoeia I remember from another lifetime, when I had such bad PMS my doctors told me I posed a risk to myself and others. Feel righteous: I am Taking Charge. Quell the thought that I am spending money I don’t have, with no guarantees of any improvement.

I’m almost ready to leave the mall when I am suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that my breasts are too small. (Yes, I know. Jaw-dropping.) I charge into Woolies to look at push-up bras. Get grip. Lean against pillar, panting with horror at near-loss of mind. Am distracted by jeans on sale and haul them, plus all my shopping, into change-room. Where I discover I have lost my car keys. Empty handbag, wallet and all shopping bags onto floor, and search — in vain. Sink down onto seat weeping at the thought of revisiting bank, post office, etc. Become aware that something is digging into me. I am sitting on my keys, which are on the seat where I put them down upon entering the change-room.

And it’s not even lunchtime yet.

NB health warning: there’s a name for this condition — progesterone intolerance — and it’s quite common. Unlike me, most sufferers do NOT have to endure it. See Megan Kerr’s handy blog, and consult your doctor if you too lose your marbles on progesterone.

PS: As I’m in this for the duration, my thanks to the lovely friends (you know who you are) who comfort me when my teeth turn to fangs.

Here’s the one for publishers, for example.

Some folk are already sick of the meme, and there are some lovely parodies as well, but it really tickles me.

I think this is because I love what I do so much, and yet it isn’t immediately clear to folk what I mean when I say I’m an editor. I sat next to a very clever British engineer at a wedding this week, and upon hearing what I did for a living, he said “So you correct people’s grammar, then?” Sarah Lotz overheard, and zinged back, “She tells authors to cut the crap, and that they can do much better.” Cue confusion.

So I went home and collected the following images, which Rustum Kozain very kindly made into a poster so I could put it on my Facebook wall. (Thanks, Mr Grondwerk — it’s much appreciated.) And so this, my dear ones, is what I do, what I love doing, and what I will be doing until I drop in harness, or the world ends, whichever comes first.

Here’s Rustum’s poster:

Here are the pictures (a little different):

This is what society thinks I do:

This is what my friends think I do:

This is what my mother thinks I do:

(What my mother, my friends and society all think I do is pretty interchangeable, I should add.)

This is what publishers think I do:

This is what my authors think I do:*

This is what I think I do:

This is what I really do:

When I’m not doing this:

* True confessions: I put together this entire post just so that I could publish this picture.

I wish it was a day with a total embargo on rape, a day when not one woman got hit or hurt or trafficked or enslaved, not anywhere in the world.

I wish it was a day when huge posters of paintings by Georgia O Keefe would be plastered all over billboards, and people would plant flowers instead of flying cargoes of limp, scentless forced roses all over the world.

I wish it was a day when businesses would donate truckloads of pads and tampons to women in poor communities, a year’s supply. Along with lots of clean undies. Oh, and painkillers for cramps, too.

I wish it was a day when the government would launch a huge fleet of mobile family planning clinics into the rural areas, staffed by motivated and enthusiastic health workers.

I wish it was a day when every single doctor, nurse or midwife who provides reproductive care (including caring for HIV-Aids patients) in the public health sector could get a free slap-up dinner in a fancy restaurant, with champagne or strawberry juice according to preference.

I wish it was a day when every medical facility, including the posh, private ones, would offer free, safe sterilizations to anyone who wanted them. And free Pap smears, too, administered with care and gently heated speculums.

I wish it was a day when every rape survivor testifying in court could do so with a hot-water bottle on her lap, or a lovely friendly dog at her feet in the witness box, and a box of chocolates for afterwards.

I wish it was a day when companies who manufacture cosmetics would invest in making affordable biodegradable pads and tampons, along with safe re-usable sponges and mooncups.

I wish it was a day when businesses would open shops selling only locally made fair-traded V-day gifts, lovely indigenous beadwork and pretty Proudly South African lingerie, instead of a flood of tacky, job-destroying Chinese tat.

And because Vagina Day shouldn’t just be about women, I wish V-day could also be Vasectomy Day. With legislation that gave every man who got the snip the choice of either five grand in cash, or a small tax rebate for life.

I digress. Contemplating the gift conundrum (phone calls to one’s nearest and dearest: “Do NOT get me a present because no ways am I getting you one – unless you want a book?” *last phrase uttered in hopeful tones*) leads to thoughts of gifts and gratitude in general. And this year, the most astonishing cornucopia of gifts and opportunities kept showering down my chimney.

I am truly, deeply grateful for them all, and I thought I’d share two of the best – or rather, the two that made me cry the most (in a good way).

First of all, golden girl Lauren Beukes went and won the Arthur C. Clarke award for her second novel, Zoo City, a bravura tale of dystopia and magic in a Jozi that’s alarmingly familiar. I all but did somersaults of joy; having worked on both Zoo City and Moxyland, I know Lauren is an editor’s dream: hard-working, committed, feisty, humble, utterly without ego.

As if that wasn’t enough, this is what Tom Eaton said to me after Lauren’s triumph: after pointing out that she was writing in a genre read by hundreds of thousands, he noted that her work would inspire imitations, riffs, responses, innovations (of course he was right: check here for the tip of the iceberg). “And what this means, Helen, is that you’re not just a writing mother. You’re going to be a grandmother.”

It still makes me tear up.

Second of all, I was lucky enough to edit a lot of fiction – good fiction – this year, and what a joy it was. I really should write at length about how special it was: and I would like to thank Thando Mgqolozana, Siphiwo Mahala, Terry Westby-Nunn, Mark Thornton and Richard de Nooy (collectively known as “the Lambs”) for teaching me so much, and writing such beautiful books. You made this year magical for me. But it was the dedication that Thando (also known as “Youngest Child”) wrote that undid me completely. Here it is, unadorned:

“Siphiwo Mahala, Zukiswa Wanner, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Angela Makholwa, Zakes Mda, Cheryl Potgieter, Ndumiso Ngcobo and Helen Moffett: this book would be dedicated to you, for reasons known to me – if it were not dedicated to your children and kitties, whom I shall name on another day.”

I blamed the sleep deprivation at the time, but it made me sob audibly. It still has me reaching for the tissues.

So there you have it: this sentimental cynic is deeply grateful for all the wonders and gifts I get on a daily basis simply because I am lucky enough to work in the booky business and with booky people. Hats off to you all.

PS: These are the fabulous novels I edited this year: go stuff them into some stockings. And enjoy.

Hear Me Alone by Thando Mgqolozana

African Delights by Siphiwo Mahala

The Sea of Wise Insects by Terry Westby-Nunn

Kid Moses by Mark Thornton

The Big Stick by Richard de Nooy.

The three reasons:

1) Remember, I have only 50% hearing. (I am not going into why the usual options — hearing aids, surgery, etc — haven’t worked so far.) I keep having to remind people of this because I’m good at lip-reading.* Those with normal hearing don’t realise it, but there’s a huge difference in sound quality and clarity between fixed-line phones and cellphones. I’m mostly able to manage on a landline, but on a cellphone, I can rarely hear more than one word in ten.

2) Aggravating my hearing situation: I live on the side of a mountain with notoriously bad reception. Every time my cellphone rings (that’s if I can hear it), I have to run round in circles in search of that elusive single bar indicating (extremely limited) reception. Followed by several headless chicken minutes of crackle, hiss, and gnat-like buzzings from my phone as I bellow “WHO IS THIS I CANNOT HEAR YOU.” It is hard to come across as either professional or friendly while bellowing.

3) My parents, who are in their late seventies, live alone on a remote smallholding in the rural Free State. I shouldn’t have to spell out why I can never, ever switch my cellphone off for more than an hour or two, or why I keep it on all night. Or why, when I see a number I don’t recognise (police? neighbour? hospital?) at peculiar times of day and night, I HAVE to take the call. Which means that every time I see a strange number or “unknown caller” indicating an incoming call, especially outside working hours, I experience a tiny stab of pure terror.

I’ve been asking folk, with varying degrees of politeness, not to ring me on my cellphone for YEARS. I don’t mind close friends and family, who are used to the situation, calling me (usually after trying my landline), but for any professional discussion, it’s impossible. I’m terribly self-conscious about coming across as rude, crazy and far more disabled than I actually am.

My cellphone exists for purposes of sending/receiving TEXTS and calling the AA when I break down. That’s it, good people. And it should be crystal-clear by now: giving my cellphone number out to anyone, especially for professional purposes, is a hanging offence. There are absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Not even if George Clooney offers you money for it. Not even (breaks into sweat) Daniel Day-Lewis.

What’s that, you say? How to contact me to offer me a plum job? Social media is an absolute Goddess-send to folk like me, and I’m almost constantly online, so you can always post a comment on my blog here, or send me a Facebook message. And I haven’t changed my email address in 14 years — please ask your booky contact for that, rather than my cellphone number.

*An aside on lip-reading: contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, this is not some mystic and infallible ability, a bit like being able to play Chopin’s Fantasias by ear or spin twenty-two plates at once — although I’m good at the latter as well. Lip-reading takes practice, and it’s tiring, as it takes absolute focus. The faces of strangers are far harder to read than friends; the closer the friend, the easier it is to lip-read them. Moustaches/beards and botox are death; folk who put their hands over their mouths as they talk (more common than you might guess) and mumblers make my smacking hand itch. Folk with foreign accents are murder: their mouths form words slightly differently, even if English is one of their mother tongues. To my HUGE chagrin, homogeneity rules — I find my own racial, national and linguistic group the easiest to lip-read; white South Africans who speak English at home. I wish this wasn’t so, but it is, although this applies only to strangers. Friends of all stripes, hues and accents are the easiest by far — the most NB criteria then, for being a good read, is willingness to spend a bit of facetime with me.

1. The cover is intriguing. I thought the main image was a piece of intricately worked and fragile lace. I was wrong. See if you can guess correctly.

2. I read it in one sitting. All the time I was reading it, I was trying (unsuccessfully) to slow down, wanting the experience to last.

3. I cried twice, first at the fragment “Noluthando”, then at the fragment “A Place of Hope”. I defy anyone not to weep at “A Place of Hope”.

4. It is exquisitely written, with grace and austerity. It takes the form of a series of short fragments, some of which read like prose poems.

5. It is also exquisitely edited, as close to perfection as I have seen. I don’t know how much this is due to Karen herself, or input from early readers. But I salute Nella Freund, the editor thanked in the Acknowledgements. I did not see one excess or awkward word, not one misplaced comma. Brava.

6. The page design is subtly quirky, appropriately off-balance. It forced me to rethink the structural, physical process of reading. See if you can spot the anomaly…

7. There is no trace of self-pity. This might have something to do with a reality that underpins this memoir without being directly addressed, except at the beginning, where Karen dedicates her account to those she has met facing greater physical challenges, but with scant resources. That reality is the apparent absence of any financial anxiety — after Karen’s paralysing stroke, there is private health care and rehab — also trips abroad, wheelchairs and a zippy scooter. There is also a large, loving and supportive family. Throughout, I got the sense that Karen considered herself exceptionally fortunate, rather than unfairly afflicted.

8. It made me think very hard about how people with disabilities are perceived (or not perceived), especially in South Africa, where so many “categories” of human being have been or still are despised, degraded, ignored, discriminated against. There was a slight flicker of progress during the 1990s: bathrooms that could be accessed by wheelchair, ramps, braille buttons outside lifts, the banning of smoking in public places (enabling hundreds of thousands of asthmatics to re-enter the world beyond their homes). Precious little since. Those with mental illnesses and devastatingly traumatic pasts are sometimes given a platform by the book and media industry. But while we read accounts by brave souls fighting their way back from drug addiction and child abuse, we don’t see titles like “My Life in a Wheelchair” on the shelves, much less flying off them. Physical affliction still embarrasses us. This slim book challenges our squeamishmess, but not in the form of a reproach — it comes as a gift.

9. It closes with the most lovely, intuitive and literally poetic anecdote: talking to a doctor about how she might recover French, a language lost to her after her stroke, Karen gets this advice: “Read French poetry.”

This first World Cup since his death has brought him back to me countless times, and I find that the oddest things trigger tears. The other day, it was the news that England player Steve Davies had declared openly that he was gay, the first international cricketer to do so. Immediately, I heard the voices of Bob and Prof Tim Noakes, co-collaborator on The Art and Science of Cricket, in my head:

Bob: Makes absolutely no difference, no difference at all. It’s how he plays that matters. All that matters. Course we didn’t talk about these things when I was playing, but the game has to keep adapting and moving forward, that’s the important thing.

Tim: But this is very important. We must put this issue in the book. There must be other gay professional cricketers and athletes, I wonder if there is any research on how they cope? Helen, can you try and find out, and write something up?

I cannot claim to miss Bob the way his family and friends do, a steady ache in the bone, a step constantly missed in the dark. But once I was part of something big, and it wasn’t just as junior partner in the writing of the mammoth and magisterial Art and Science of Cricket, which now bears Bob’s name. It was getting to be a fly on the wall of the friendship between two geniuses – both the best in the world at what they did. I miss being in the presence of giants who had the freshness of children. Their open-mindedness, their constant curiosity blew a heady breeze through the stuffy halls of cricketing tradition, and I miss that too, but most of all I miss the way they sparked fresh enthusiasm in each other, and those around them – including myself. There was always a bit of magic trailing in the air behind them.

Little has been said about Bob at the 2011 World Cup so far, although he is doubtlessly not far from the thoughts of many: Inzamam ul-Haq, the former Pakistan team captain, said “Pakistan should try to do well in this ICC Cricket World Cup not only for the country, but also for our late coach Bob Woolmer, who always believed we had the potential to be the number one side in the world” (ESPN Star).

As I follow the World Cup via television, I wonder why there is so little commemoration of Bob, or mention by the commentators. After all, Bob’s legacy is everywhere I look – Gary Kirsten, who probably more than any other elite coach today practices his trade in Bob’s mould, is steering the Indian team to what might well be a win on home soil; the flashes of brilliance, the heartening improvement in the performance of the “minnow” teams remind us of Bob’s years as the ICC High Performance manager; the reverse sweep pioneered by Bob is taken for granted as a response to the spinning ball.

Some of the most senior players on and off the field are pure graduates of the Woolmer Way: most obviously, Jacques Kallis and Younus Khan (who in the last few years has dedicated almost every victory or man-of-the-match award to the memory of Bob, whom he loved like a father). But there are plenty of others – Shahid Afridi, Shoaib Akthar, Kamran Akmal and Abdul Razzak all benefited from Bob’s tutelage. In Bob’s great book, we featured various players demonstrating their skills in the technical photographs: Jacques Kallis (batting), Allan Donald (bowling), and Jonty Rhodes (fielding). In the 2011 World Cup, Kallis is wielding the willow as one of the world’s undisputed greats, Donald is doing a creditable job as the Blackcaps bowling coach, and Rhodes is tweaking the Kenyan side’s fielding.

I know they all remember Bob, for whom the subcontinent was familiar territory (he was born in India), and who must be a lingering presence at many of the grounds. Perhaps those who loved Bob don’t talk much about him in public because, like me, they are still outraged at the bungling that followed his death, the media vulture storm, and are saddened that unanswered questions about this tragedy still darken their memories. They prefer to remember the man they knew, not the mess after his death.

Last year, I vehemently opposed proposed new legislation to curb the media and restrict freedom of information in South Africa. But even as I did so, I remembered the horror of watching rumours and frank fabrication bloom like algae in the wake of Bob’s death. Stranded at the time in the American South, whose inhabitants ignore the phenomenon of cricket, my only way to track the breaking story was via the internet and phone-calls home across a jarring time-lag. I remember the wilder rumours that Bob’s other co-authors (including myself) were to be targeted by his alleged assassins, the 3am call from a journalist hunting dirt, reading online that our book had been snatched away by a British publisher (a bald lie). I realised, for the first time, the extent to which tabloids lead the broadsheets by their noses.

I can’t help wondering if shame isn’t part of the reason for the muted voices on Bob and his legacy to the game, and particularly the World Cup. Many members of the Pakistan team at the time suffered enormous guilt over their humiliating loss to Ireland at the knock-out stage, wondering if their shock defeat was a precipitating factor in Bob’s death later than night (a fundi later told me “I think they broke his heart – literally”).

But the press behaved worst of all during those long months in which we all believed that Bob had been murdered, and everyone was hunting for a motive. I like to think that with hindsight, some of those news broadcasters realised that speculating to the point of slander about a man who died doing his job thousands of miles from home, and whose family needed concrete answers, wasn’t quite the same as reporting on whether a starlet was cheating on her latest squeeze. It’s possible that they don’t wish to be reminded of the depths to which they sank four years ago.

Everyone who knew or met Bob remarked on the transparent decency of the man, his affable nature, his passion for coaching, and his enthusiasm for the future. He was by no means starry-eyed about his work – in the unpublished memoir he had started writing just before his death, his exasperation with the various cricket administration bodies he had worked with is clear. But other than his perhaps controversial view that disgraced former captain Hansie Cronje should have been rehabilitated back into the game (a view that was no secret), there is nothing scandalous or murky in his unfinished writings. Like everything else he wrote, and did, they reveal that he loved, and lived for, two things: his family, and the game of cricket.

The world of cricket moves fast, but I hope that tomorrow, it stops for a minute to salute a man whose coaching style is imprinted on the way the game is played, and who, quite literally, gave his life to cricket.

My preferred method is to ask what local authors the Sidler reads, and which local publishers they see as a good fit for their MS. Nine times out of ten I get either the blank look or a frank demurral – “Oh, I don’t read local stuff!”, at which I become very stern, and the unfortunate Sidler scuttles away.

Then there is the Sidler who hasn’t written a book – yet. They have an amazing story to tell, they confide. Child abuse. Travels with the lost tribes of Patagonia. Their battles with cancer/divorce/bereavement/addiction. A children’s book. A novel that will outsell Harry Potter. A book of religious inspiration. (Some of their tales sound truly fascinating: one octogenarian regaled me with her adventures smuggling herself and four children across Spain and Portugal during World War II. Apparently she seduced a sea-captain into sailing them back to Blighty. I really hope she wrote that story.)

But how and where should they start? these would-be writers ask. And it takes courage to sidle, and I don’t want to be discouraging. Stomping on ambition and hope is the adult version of pulling wings off flies, after all. So the answer seems blindingly obvious – if you want to dance the flamenco, or sail a boat, or play the flute, you need to take lessons – and setting out to write is no different. But until recently it was extremely difficult for Joe or Josephine Bloggs to enrol in a writing course – at least, one that was affordable, helpful, sans stringent entry criteria, and left time for shopping, cooking and taking the dog to the vet.

Now ads offering fame and fortune via writing courses pop up all over the Internet (in some cases, the costs are stratospheric). The trouble is telling the good from the bad from the ugly rip-off merchants. So, for the benefit of all hopeful Sidlers in the Cape Town area, here are some writing courses I can recommend. All these folk know their onions; they combine skill with integrity, they won’t rip you off, and I can guarantee that you will learn something about the craft of writing from all or any of them. Above all, none of them are intimidating. They will not mock or peer down their noses at you. They are kind people.

So before the gloss wears off the new year, go on and do it. If you attend any of the courses or workshops I list here, not only will you have a great deal of fun, but you will get a glimmering of what’s involved in setting out to write something. If you’re already got something in a drawer, a course will give you a good idea of how to go about reworking and editing your manuscript.

First, if it’s poetry you have on your mind, Finuala Dowling’s immensely popular monthly Saturday afternoon gatherings in Kalk Bay get rave reviews and have even led to a publication, Difficult to Explain – itself an extended and delightful poetry tutorial of sorts. (Before you send a poem off into the universe in the hopes of publication, read this book.) Nuala tells me her poetry class is currently fully subscribed, but spaces open up all the time – bookmark her blog and keep a beady eye out for announcements there. Years ago I took one of her writing classes at UCT’s Winter School, and loved every minute. I find fragments that I wrote for class exercises surfacing in my work, or triggering new work to this day.

Memoir is definitely the genre du jour, and one of my personal reading favourites: it’s also an accessible and relatively unthreatening starting point for would-be writers. You’re in luck, because Dawn Garisch is about to run a memoir workshop in Kalk Bay — here are the details. As a bonus, you’ll be able to pick up croissants at the Olympia Bakery before, or drink coffee on the terrace at the Annex afterwards.

If you’d like to ease into memoir-writing more slowly, Hugh Hodge, editor of New Contrast, has a course, As You Write It, every Saturday morning starting 5 March from 9.30 – 12.30 at his home in Kommetjie. He writes “The course runs for 7 Saturdays, then repeats. It’s aimed at the new writer with creative exercises lateral thinking – some of the usual things, others less so. Work is critted in the session. I’m trying to build up mutually supportive groups of writers so that people can send their work to a “trusted” friend for feedback. Cost – R250 per session or R1000 if you pay up front for all 7 sessions. Quorum is 3 people, maximum is 8.” To book, or for enquiries, write to hahodge@gmail.com.

Not all local courses are in the South Peninsula. If you live in the city, and your yen is for fiction writing, or simply the nuts and bolts of crafting sentences together to construct a story, then try Tom Eaton’s four-week creative writing course in the cozy surrounds of the Book Lounge: course outline here. If you’re tempted, but the idea makes you feel skinless with nerves, that’s okay: Tom understands.

While I am on the subject of the sensible route of doing a little training if you want to write, I have another suggestion. At the party celebrating 50 years of literary journal New Contrast, Hugh Hodge said that if only ten per cent of those submitting poems, stories and essays to NC also subscribed to it, its future would be assured. I was shaken: this means that 90% of those who submit pieces for publication don’t support the journal they are hoping will support THEM. Even excluding those who genuinely can’t afford the modest cost of an annual subscription, that’s a lot of folk with a lot of chutzpah. If you don’t regularly read the journals (online and print) in which you hope to publish, how can you gauge whether your work is a “fit” with their content? It’s like auditioning for a part without first reading the script.

Here’s a starter list of some local print literary/poetry journals. Read before mailing your latest opus to the editor. New Contrast; Timbila; New Coin; Carapace; Chimurenga Magazine; WordsEtc.

In a nutshell: if you’d like to write a book, or you HAVE written one and would like to publish it, run through this checklist and make sure the answer to all queries is “yes” before you do the Sidle.

1) Do I read voraciously? (corollary: do I use I my local library?)
2) Do I read local books voraciously, to the extent that I have a clear idea of what sort of manuscripts the various local publishers and imprints are looking for?
3) Do I subscribe to local literary and poetry journals? (if you’re a scholar or student, note corollary to No 1.)
4) Have I attended at least one writing course? (The more the merrier.)

The list above is by no means exhaustive. Although he’s not currently offering any courses, I once did a course on non-fiction writing with Mike Nicol (also through UCT’s Winter School), which was superb. Keep your ears pricked for ongoing courses: what you’re looking for is something not too costly, a smallish group, a kindly trainer with experience (not just in writing, but training and publishing too), and plenty of exercises. The best advertisements are word of mouth. If you’ve had a good experience, please share.

I trip into the Nellie decked out in my best India finery to find myself in highly intimidating company. There are many Nieman alumni present, including Lizeka Mda, Allister Sparks, Tony Heard, Joe Thloloe, Pippa Green, Melanie Gosling, Moeletsi Mbeki and others who are household names. The first person to whom I am introduced is the august Mr Sparks himself. My tongue promptly ties itself in knots, but he is extremely kind. I can report that the great man is considering a memoir, although he feels deeply reluctant to place himself at the centre of his writing. I try, much hampered by the knots, to convey just what an NB, nay, absolutely VITAL work such a memoir would be.

Next, I get to chat to Peter Harris. He is one of those superb writers who is also such a lovely human being that I am temporarily smitten at every meeting (Ivan Vladislavic has a similar effect on me). Elinor sums Peter up as follows: “Brilliant lawyer, exceptional writer, devoted family man, and not the slightest idea how attractive he is”. Trying not to babble, I tell him that In A Different Time blew me away with its pitch-perfect narrative voice, its gripping pace, its fidelity to people and events far too easily forgotten. Okay, I babble. But it’s hard to explain why his book means so much to me. Perhaps because I remember that different time so acutely and always with an ache. Perhaps because of the journey of the cricket book that became a eulogy – the love and sincerity with which Peter commemorates his murdered friend is a comfort to me.

Into the ballroom for dinner, and the Mail & Guardian’s Nic Dawes is sitting next to me. Also at our table are Moegsien Williams, editor of the The Star and Jovial (Jojo) Rantao, editor of the Sunday Independent. Clearly ours is the editors’ table, me being the editor with a very small “e”. Elinor promptly tells Nic that I want a word with him on certain gender matters. That word is “cufflinks”, and Nic sinks his head into his hands. (The M&G is offering free cufflinks to subscribers, a deal Nic says he first read about in the paper itself.) He ripostes by pointing out that the publisher who organised the give-away is a woman.

Nic tells me that he himself wears cufflinks several times a week, as camouflage: “It’s often useful not to look like a newspaper editor.” I ask Nic, Jojo and Moegsien for the latest scoop on Mubarak. They exchange looks, and Nic says that US Ambassador Donald Gips (the keynote speaker for the evening) will be saying something about Egypt shortly. Meanwhile Elinor upbraids Nic over the sexism of the M&G’s review of the cricket book (yes, THAT one), and the whole matter is rehashed, which is a bit unfair given that it didn’t happen on Nic’s watch. So it seems churlish to tackle him about the oestrogen shortage at the M&G’s 2010 literary festival. I’ve always admired the guy, and by the end of the evening, I like him even more.

The Ambassador begins his speech by announcing that Mubarak has stepped down. I hiss, “You already knew, didn’t you?” at Nic, who grins and shows me his BlackBerry with the breaking news already in his Inbox. His book critics may have a beef with social media and its chatter, but for journalists, the toys that make interconnectivity a 24-hour briefing session are now the lifeblood of their trade. It’s an electric sensation, being in a room of newshounds as history is being made.

After the Ambassador’s speech, a paean to the glories and challenges of democracy in the light of revolution flaming across North Africa, he takes questions from the floor. Allister Sparks asks about the US government’s penchant for supporting dictators, and someone else asks if the official American line on democracy is a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” The Ambassador says “Ah” about seventeen times in each answer, but as it isn’t a press conference and everyone is in party bib and tucker, he gets away with claiming that the “issues are complex”. Which they are. Can there be a more thankless task than being a US Ambassador?

Conversational snippets at our table are fascinating, and I wish I could hear better, especially when the discussion turns to whether Obama will win a second term. The feeling from the fourth estate is yes, especially since the Phoenix shootings. Nic says he hopes a raving lunatic like Palin gets the Republican nomination so that Obama wins by a landslide, but I contend that this will be too nerve-wracking. Later, I hear him and Sue Valentine describing Carmel Rickard as the best legal journalist in the country, which is nice. I caught a glimpse of her Thank you, Judge Mostert in MS form, and it deserves all the carrots it’s been getting. Carmel herself is sparkling in a very elegant LBD.

Joe Thloloe, a courtly presence, reminds everyone about the conference the Nieman alumni will attend the next day, and the party breaks up at a fairly reasonable hour. A footnote on the food: four out of ten, and 3,5 of that is for the Death by Chocolate Brownie served for dessert. The “Caesar salad” is lettuce and croutons drowned in salad cream, and my veggie burger tastes like lawn clippings. Come on Nellie, you can do better. The Christina van Loveren Sauvignon Blanc, however, is superb, but I don’t drink enough of it to explain my symptoms the next morning, which indicate either food poisoning or a tummy bug. Ironic given that not so long ago, I ate my way freely through India’s Northwest triangle with nary a hiccup.

Nevertheless, the evening is, in the spirit of a famous Punch cartoon, “worf getting sick for”, and Elinor and I also get to do some planning for taking the Puku project – a children’s literature website well worth a visit – forward. It’s good to be back in my jade tower with the kitties, but I’m keeping an eye open for the next whoosh of that carpet.