Rosemary Nissen-Wade — poet, author, memoirist

Don’t worry, I’m impatient to get it out there into the world. But I also want it as good as I can get it.  So this is what's been happening: Editing I’ve expanded it a bit, including some things I didn’t at first. It’s a bit of a hybrid, both social history and personal story, so it’s tricky getting the right balance between the two, while taking care of readers’ expectations so they know from the beginning it will be both. I think I was a little too cautious at first. Now it’s having a really final proofread and edit … hoping there won’t turn out to be another ‘really truly final’ one and so on. But no, I think this is it. I put it aside for a few weeks and didn’t look at it, trying not to even think about it, so as to come back with a fresh eye. It was a good decision; I’m picking up stuff now that I might not have seen without the break. Cover I think I’ve found my cover designer! Which is very exciting. It’s an area in which I have no expertise, so I needed someone. She’s n

(Decisions, decisions …) ‘Why did you decide that you should self-publish the works in question?’ asked a friend — meaning the Pentridge memoir and related volumes I have planned.   ‘Did you send out manuscripts and get rejections?’ [No.] ‘Or was it more to do with not wanting to be edited by others? Or something else?’ Another expressed the opinion that self-publishing is, in practical terms, no more useful than vanity publishing these days and that my memoir (which she has read) ‘deserves better’. Well, it’s like this – One reason I decided to self-publish the Pentridge memoir and the spin-off chapbook is that I realised quite belatedly that I had prepared them that way — because I’m used to doing that. In recent years I’ve mostly self-published. Well, sort of.   I had a great collaboration with a small publishing and design firm in America, run by online friends with whom I first connected through poetry. I was employed to do some editing work for them, and when I wanted to create b