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Wending: A Verse Novella
‘ 'Bel Hawley’ Wending plumbs waters that are both unnervingly still and unfathomably deep. With clean spare lyricism, this meditative tale of widowhood and isolation drew me along its indistinct paths, lured me into its chasms, floated me on its watery rhythms – before returning me to the hard ungiving terrain that is grief. ‘
– Edwina Preston, author of Bad Art Mother
– Susan Francis, author of The Love that Remains
‘Writing with a tangible physicality about the isolating experience of grief, Bel Hawley creates a rich and evocative frontline of wilderness to reflect a woman working and journeying through an abandoned landscape. The verse is extraordinarily visceral and profoundly moving. I discovered myself shedding tears.’
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Coming 2025
Wending
Synopsis
WENDING is a story of widowhood, a novella in verse, a metaphoric shedding of skin.
a bend of my back
where the rapids, discoloured from the scrum
look
like lengths of mourning lace
where the echoing canyon is
equal amounts windswept
and wanting
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Wending follows a newly widowed woman who is sent to a river so remote it has no official name. In the mostly uninhabitable terrain, she survives, through her work and in her hope of returning home, but as time moves on, her erratic behaviour pushes her to further extremes.
In a text where form reflects the single focus of a woman as she casts away her old life to follow a path to its bitter end, the outcast female accepts ostracisation and challenges narrative and social norms.