Published: the now famous The (e)Book of Hat.

 Today's newsletter:

New dance steps: Rosa Mira Books is linking arms with Makaro Press to bring you the digital version of The Book of Hat, named runner-up this week in the Ashton Wylie Book Awards.

"This is the real The Fault In our Stars" — Auckland Libraries

At 17, Harriet Rowland — known as Hat — learned she had osteosarcoma, a rare form of cancer that began in her knee. At the time she was a student at Queen Margaret College in Wellington, New Zealand.

Going through treatment was often a lonely time, as friends — while supportive — didn’t always understand Hat’s new life. This was until she fell in love with the character Hazel Grace from John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars, a girl who talks honestly and openly about living with cancer. Like her, Hat found life changed in ways that were both good and bad: falling in love and hospital stays among them. And she was surprised by how much happiness there was still to find.

Throughout her journey, Hat kept a blog called My Experience of Walking the Dog, and this book is a collection of those posts edited with the author. Why the blog title? Her parents say cancer is like a dog — fine if it stays in its own yard. Hat’s dog got out. This is her unexpected story.

Rosa Mira Books is delighted to join with Mākaro Press in presenting the ebook version of Harriet’s story which, just this week won second place in the Ashton Wylie Book Awards (sandwiched between NZ’s famed Lloyd Geering and Joy Cowley). 

From its sell-out launch in February this year,  The Book of Hat hardcopy went on to become a surprise hit in NZ. With $1 from each sale going to CanTeen, the blue book with a hat made of stars on the cover was bought by students and grandparents alike, and made its way into CanTeen gift packs, hospices, adult book groups, school libraries and classrooms. A surprising burst of internet sales saw it fly off as far as Moscow, Prague and Wisconsin. —Mākaro press release

Along with heartache, an irrepressible joie de vivre and love spill from the pages Harriet wrote and her circle of influence goes on on widening. She would have turned 21 today.

The Book of Hat, the ebook, can be purchased here.

“Her writing is funny and truthful and wise, exactly like the Harriet we got to meet when she visited the set last year.” Peter Jackson, filmmaker

Who's afraid to read about death?

I was talking publishing the other day (a conversation that could go on until the cows some home, go out and come home again) with Mary McCallum who's just published through Mākaro Press the extraordinary journal of Harriet Rowland, who records her last two years, living with osteosarcoma, in The Book of Hat. We touched on the difficulty of 'selling' books in which the author is facing her own death (as Annie also was in co-authoring Fields of Gold). We acknowledged the deep-rooted anxiety that to read about death and think about it is tantamount to inviting our own. All of us and especially those facing their mortality through illness are more inclined to seek stories of healing and second chances.

However, it seems that when we lay aside this natural but primitive fear, the contemplation of death and difficulty can deepen and intensify our experience of life — that's the curiously joyous truth radiating from these two books. One initially reluctant reader of Fields of Gold, told co-author Pam Morrison that through her engagement with the story she was extraordinarily and entirely released from her own (very present and pertinent) fear of death.

That's powerful writing, and it's what comes from writers who have courageously entered the darkness and found there inextinguishable light.

Melissa Green creates a stir

Melissa Green, photo from The Poetry Center at Smith College

News yesterday about the forthcoming memoir by poet Melissa Green has set up a thrum of excitement. For her Tuesday Poem, NZ novelist, poet, bibliophile and teacher of creative writing, Mary McCallum at O Audacious Book, has posted Czesław Miłosz's 'Song on the end of the World', which Melissa once shared on her blog (Mary recalling that it's almost two years since Christchurch was so badly shaken), and delights in news of The Linen Way.

Over at her much-loved blog, Marylinn Kelly (US writer and enquirer/philosopher, art and craft professional, maker of fabulous stamps) also enthuses over this publication, and shares Melissa's heartache of a poem, 'Daphne in Mourning'.