$35.00 Retail. SHOP HERE.
To Heal a Lyrebird is a bold venture into the subconscious to produce art of hope and promise, proving that there is a better way forward through this war-torn, indifferent and climate changed world. This is the blueprint.
Its beating heart is the unique bond between a mother and her son ... Can they survive a broken world when all the odds are against them, and nothing is as it was before?
Due to ethical concerns surrounding AI and other digital corruptions this book is regarded as a piece of artwork and will not at any point be available to read electronically. Book sales are encouraged through this website and through selected art retailers, such as Art Essence Gallery in Pambula and Red Cafe and Catering in Bega. The author of this book believes in storytelling as an artform and is committed to preserving this artistic project by keeping it as personal as possible.
For sales and library enquiries please email: kate@katelistonmills.com
REVIEWS
A heartbreakingly poignant journey of courage, strength and love in the face of the unfathomable. A must-read for young and old, so that we may all be part of changing the course of the future. A tale of hope and resilience, of finding slivers of beauty amid the darkness. I’m forever changed. — Amy Grealy, Artist
It really is one of the most original books I have ever read. [It] mixes the urgency of what our world is facing with the familiar so well. I was totally there in the floating house with the anxiety and deep love of parenting, no matter what the situation and the new people arriving and the wonder of connection being so vital … The ever present water, the falling apart home, the brutality of war and death, the dying planet, and the stupidity of the society we have built … The journey was one of surprise and small delights, in amongst the despair. The birds! The birds!! So much in one book … extraordinary … Many writers are afraid to face such darkness and come out with hope and light but you have done an incredible balancing act with this book. Thank you. — Sarah Fearnley, Librarian
This book. This world. This ever-thrashing soul of yours that refuses to be numbed or deadened or contained. The way this book overlapped so many breathless moments — Bondi shooting, Epstein Files, ceasefires that barely ceased … So many Minotaurs in my news cycles, so many fading moons and falling skies. I read this book in nuggets, coming up for air the way I come up from a deep dream, short bursts of breaks before melting back into it even deeper than before, hungry to float in that house again. The way I cried over a shot blow-up ibis … the sacrifices of a moon, quiet jars of pickles and a young boy’s determination to save the bees. Guns thrown overboard and magical piano anchors and hearing your voice again, calling into the void and demanding us to witness our world … After years of my writing being trimmed to oblivion into bite-sized, marketable, corporate-friendly, attention-spanned, inoffensive, palatable digestible scalable adaptable algorithm-fellating nothing-nothing, your war cry to wake up left me near inconsolable. What a dream, what a dream. Thank god you did not let this be tethered and caged. I can only imagine what it took to birth this beast, horns and all. — Evelyn Kandris, poet.
This book swept me through dark places, sparkling and buzzing with hope. I was so hooked and compelled by the time the astronaut landed. So many lines I read over, stopping to look up and think about … ‘My brain is a silo. It’s my body that receives the world.’ Yes! And ‘Love is a doing word’ is something I learned in India, as it is there … it’s not an abstract concept. I thought about it a lot at the time, and your story brought it back to me. Just as the kids threw the guns over the Bondi shooting happened, and our news filled up with the same old arguments. I love how you used the children’s perspective and reasoning to show the absurdity of it all. The language! Swoon! The grubs remind me of the witches from Macbeth, with their own secret language and wisdom. Their disorientating vocabulary and logic made them threatening but revered, like an ugly Oracle. This book reminds me of Doris Lessing’s ‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ and the ‘inner space fiction’ movement of the 70s. Ursula le Guin was one of the leaders of it as well … stories from the subconscious, with intricate extended metaphors of worlds that describe other worlds. This is singing ‘inner space’ to me. We need a cup of tea to talk about your book more! — Rebecca McCrory, English and art high school teacher
| I’ve finally found the time to sit down and read To Heal a Lyrebird! Oh Kate! What an epic harrowing emotional journey of motherhood, life, guilt, resilience, despair and survival in an increasingly precarious world. Yet also a deeply personal, autobiographical memory that I hope was as cathartic for you to write as it was for me to read. The beast/the Minotaur, a metaphor for bushfires, climate emergencies, war, the fragility of the political landscape et al. Where instability, oligarchy, insularity, destruction, hate, greed and uncertainty have become a part of our daily lives, where we humans constantly grapple to connect, trying to make sense of the world. What a shock and honour to read my name in this book not once but three times! My name forever intertwined with the Lyrebird Project. With the incredible Gee, comb jellies, Pambula, lyrebirds, Toallo Street, blow up white swans, flamingos and rainbow unicorns, school libraries, My Heart Will Go On, bees, beasts and Theo’s voracious appetite for books & facts! Theo’s “Miss Tarpey would be able to tell me what is going on” brought me to tears because what would I have said to Theo? Would I have made something up to shield him from reality? Damn frigging right I would have! Isn’t that why we became teachers “to care about little people”? Oh my heart! Never stop being a dreamer Kate! Keep pushing literary boundaries in a world where authors are censored, boxed in, labelled and contained. We need outliers like you and books like this more than ever! To Heal a Lyrebird is a gift! This book is about hope amid darkness and despondency – at times only tincy glimmers – but hope nonetheless. Because what’s the alternative? And as long as sea cucumbers breathe through their anuses, hope will always prevail! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! – Karen Tarpey (as in Miss Tarpey and Mrs Bones), Teacher-librarian |
BOOK LAUNCH/EXHIBITION/PARTY: This is a ticketed event and tickets can be purchased here. Follow @authorkatelistonmills on Insta.
Come, sit on this cliff edge with me. There’s nowhere else to sit now …
The third instalment to the trilogy … This multidisciplinary art project crosses genre, form, traditional boundaries and is unlike anything you’ve consumed before. Working again with Sydney artist and designer Bettina Kaiser, editor and project manager Matilda Gould, structural and poetry editor Dr Josh Dubrau, and theatre director and musician Eva Mills, this project centres around a book that is a play, that is an artwork, as much as it is a poem, a manifesto, a call to arms, a flurry into fashion and decor, and a stage musical that dances around the periphery of becoming James Joyce fan fiction.
BOOK LAUNCH AND EXHIBITION -SOLD OUT. But follow @lyrebirdproject to follow on from home.
Or visit Navigate Arts to find out more.
