With Geoff Whyte, I’m writing a book to help you write engagingly, economically and powerfully, perhaps even truthfully at work.

The book, due out in October 2009 (UNSW Press) is called The Little Black Book of Business Writing; it’s like The Little Red Writing Book, but it’s aimed at the needs, constraints and challenges—and it targets the characteristic documents—of business writing in all sectors.

We want to fill the book with examples (good, bad and ugly,…

I pick up a rock on the lakeshore,
a riverstone the glacier left,
now cleft perfectly down the middle,
a notch at one end.
This is how one feels,
half a self,
bereft.
We are here, perhaps, to look for the rest of who we are,
and that could be anything—
a lake, a range, a woman,
a pink robin,…

ONE

If a week is a long time in politics, how long is eleven-and-a half years?

Long enough, I’d say.

Long enough, almost, to forget there is another way of governing; that holding sway is not the same thing as leading a people; that without a vision, the people—not to mention the rivers—diminish, no matter how flush.

And it’s long enough to start to forget, under the anodyne influence of a lucky…

I—Too much summer too close to home

Warm days in mid September.
Each year summer comes early
and each year we forget and
say what happened to the spring?
as though we ever had spring
on the sandstone coast of this
dry-eyed island, inching its
way north to the equator.

And then whatever we’re call-
ing the season goes and…

You have to be careful with paintings and painters.

You have to be careful in bookshops. You might find a book that unmakes you completely for $29.95. You might leave with a book that leaves you cold for fifty dollars flat. You might buy a book that breaks your heart for less than it costs you to travel to work. You might find the answer you weren’t looking for or you might leave with more questions than you…