Hello! You have not been forgotten!

It’s late but at last I am packed and ready to leave for my 74th trip to the USA in the morning! I’ll be at the International Reading Conference on Orlando and then at a school in West Palm Beach and then at the new library in Salt Lake City.

When my mother died she took my brain with her and has only just given it back! I couldn’t think or be sensible for weeks. I felt very depressed and couldn’t shake off the blues at all, especially as the war in Iraq began the day after she died and cast an extra pall of gloom over the whole world.

Since my last sad hot news I have become less of a writer and more of a home-maker, cocooning inwards in my sorrow, nesting, pottering, gardening, organising the house, answering all the lovely letters about my mother, and bottling fruit for the winter: peaches, plums and quinces, to hold on to the old skills, to calm myself, and to keep the memory of my mother alive. I absolutely adore everything to do with keeping house – everything that is, except sewing. Oh, the moaning and groaning if I have to sew on a button! I’d rather keep house than write books any day.

Exciting news on the publishing front: three books in the offing and all with a very Australian slant. Judy Horacek is currently illustrating The Green Sheep (due May 2004). She sends me divine pictures every day. Pamela Lofts has done sublime drawings for Hunwick’s Egg (due may 2005). And Julie Vivas and I are working on a spring cleaning of Possum Magic: a new edition will come out next March to commemorate its 21st birthday. For example there’s a question mark that should have there all this time and is now going to be put in, finally!! And the font may change and so on, but the story and pictures will of course remain the same or there’d be a riot.

I have to go to bed. It’s a long journey tomorrow.

All the best!
Mem Fox xxx