Mermaid Songs
The writings, poems and songs of Sebastian Hales
Saturday 12 March 2022
Saturday 5 October 2019
Monday 26 August 2019
Saturday 17 August 2019
Introductions
My
name is Sebastian Hales. I am a writer, a poet and a performer.
Welcome to my writings and some of the characters and stories I have
created over a lifetime of coaxing meaning from words and actions.
Being
a writer means that I spend a great deal of time walking on the
beach, gardening, talking, eating and sleeping. All those little
daily adventures could be called 'musings' because from them spring
the ideas and words that clutter my brain.
I
have kept a diary much of my life. I started my first one right back
in the 1960s and have continued to the present. In addition I have
filled 82 2B5 exercise books with notes, ideas, diagrams, rough
drafts, letters, lists – anything that I might want to recall in
the future.
This
blog is a new adventure for me, and a bit outside my comfort zone.
You may need to bear with me if I get things a bit mixed up. But on
it I will place a copy of my first novel, called 'I Play the
Mermaid Song'. This book is written as an autobiography of a
violin musician who finds it hard to conform to the norms of his
society.
My
second novel is called 'The Adventures of Henry Farthingale'.
It is currently in production and should be available in December. It
is a story about a town set in the middle of dense jungle and kept
secret from the rest of the world. It is a humorous satire on our
current society, and at the same time a rollicking set of adventures.
My
current project is an autobiography, which I want to tell in
instalments on the blog. I hope this can be interactive. I will write
a few paragraphs each week. They may not be chronological – I start
with my time at school in the 1960s – or sequential. They may not
be entirely accurate, as I'm relying on my memories.
My
poetry? I wrote many terrible poems in the 1960s. I also edited the
Victoria University poetry magazine 'Argot'
and published various
broadsheets and entries in the university newspaper Salient'.
But my poetry writing really
started in the 1990s with a collection of poems, short stories and
mementoes gathered for my mother's 80th
birthday. I wrote several books of poems through that time, but they
were published for special family occasions and not publicly
available. I'm developing a collection at present to be published in
the new year.
Send
me feedback. Join the discussions. Lend me your ears. Give me your
thoughts.
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