PaperbarkTales

Hello very neglected Paperbark Tales followers!

Very sorry for not keeping this page active. "What happened?" you might be wondering.

Well, below is the tale of Paperbark Tales to dat from my perspective. It's a longish tale so if you want to skip straight to the crux of this post... Beth has had a book of her fantastic poems published!!🥳 If you would like buy, and who wouldn't! Follow this link...

https://www.calanthepress.com.au/books-and.../beth-clapton

Now to the longer tale...

Beth and I had the wonderful idea maybe 6 years ago to bring together her fabulous poetry and my photography to see if the sum of the two were greater than its part. For almost two years we collaborated to bring poems, photos and some graphic design together with only giving out a few hints that we were working to put together... a book! 🤩

Finally we brought it together. Nearly 50 top poems over 180 pages illustrated with more that 200 photos. It had been a lot of fun and joy and also a lot of hard work. Amateurs that we were we thought now that now the hard work was over and done with. However then we came up against the world of publishers...

Finding publishers who would even accept book proposals with photography and poetry was an immediate challenge. Once we got a very short list of publishers who 'may' be interested we started to send off samples for them to consider. I have worked in many industries and many large companies and corporations internationally. Never have I encountered a profession where it seems to be standard operation not even acknowledge emails or submissions or, if they do acknowledge, the standard reply is "We may get back to you in 6 months or longer". I thought the job interview process was the most demoralising activity. This was worse.

At the same time this was in process I was moving to live in another country. I didn't have enough energy for everything going on in my life so I started to put the book and this Paperbark Tales page on the back burner intending to pick it up again when I had some more time. Beth did a wonderful job taking the lead and trying to keep Paperbark Tales alive but with the lack of progress with publishers the momentum was hard to maintain.

Roll forward a few years and Beth has won a number of awards for her poetry!! Yay! 🥳 Well deserved! One of the awards included a selection of her works being published!!! Yay again!! If you want buy her book... you know you do!... then click on this link.

https://www.calanthepress.com.au/books-and.../beth-clapton

Perhaps this good news (actually her book was launched about two months ago - I'm a bit slow... like usual 😄) will rejuvenate my enthusiasm to find some way forward with our joint book which had the working title of "Contours". Perhaps we will give up on finding a publisher and go down the road of self-publishing. We'll see.

I have included some sample pages from our book "Contours" in the photos below. Actually they are four spreads being to facing pages you see together when you have a book open. If you know of any wonderful publishers who might be interested, let us know of course! 😊

I have created this post as a little surprise for Beth to help promote book. I have taken the liberty to show a couple of her poems in the attached photos. I'm keeping my fingers crossed she will be okay with that 😊