Lucy Van

Hello my dears, I hope this year will be kind to all of us. Here’s a new release from us: permanentdraft.bandcamp.com/album/material-3 MATERIAL, out on the 13th of February 2026 200 copies on black vinyl, with an accompanying 56-page booklet, printed on uncoated paper, paperback Mixed by Aude Van Wyller Mastered by Joe Talia Artwork and photos by Christine Designed by Kyla Arsadjaja Distributed by state51 Enquiries: [email protected] Aude Van Wyller (aka Oï les Ox aka AI les Axes) joins forces with acclaimed poet Lucy Van, author of The Open (2021) and Australian Women’s Historical Photography (2024). This debut collaboration weaves together Aude’s ambient mutations with Lucy’s killer words. Part of the proceeds will go to ACT UP Love and strength to you all. xxx

“There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer 🌾 The Braided Gift, edited by @shari.lynelle and Lucy Van, is now live. Visit the link in our bio to read the full issue and the editors’ braided introduction—a meditation on generosity, practice and poetic kinship. This issue gathers new poems by 38 Australian and international poets, exploring the gift in all its tender, tangled and surprising forms—from practising and making, to mourning, remembering and renewal. 🪶 The braid moves through the collection as both image and method: strands of thought, feeling and practice woven together into something more than their parts. Each poem becomes an act of joining, of holding tension and release, resistance and care, within the same rhythmic gesture. Drawing on Antonia Pont’s philosophy of practising, these poems linger in the small repetitions of attention—those gestures that turn dailiness into devotion. Practising, as Pont writes, is not about performance or perfection but about the slow art of staying with: returning, noticing and letting the ordinary become luminous. Within this issue, practising becomes a kind of ecological ethics, a way of being in time that honours persistence, listening and care. To braid, as Kimmerer writes, is to “remember to remember”: to entwine the living threads of memory, ecology and relationship. The Braided Gift honours that motion—the looping, unspooling and rejoining that marks the making of poetry itself. 🐚 These poems are gifts of attention: to the soil and sea, to the body and its griefs, to the pulse of community and the breath of the more-than-human world. Together, they ask what it means to write and live generously—not in the sense of giving away, but of giving toward: a continual movement of reciprocity and return. Cover image: Kangaroo Grass by Jacob Yugovic, with gratitude. . . . . #TheBraidedGift #PlumwoodMountainJournal #AustralianPoetry #Ecopoetry #PoetryasPractice #GiftEconomy #PoeticKinship #PoetryCommunity

interview #228 / @busey____ in conversation with @eaeolian photographed by @l___j___m___

interview #228 / @busey____ in conversation with @eaeolian photographs by @l___j___m___

interview #228 / @busey____ in conversation with @eaeolian photographs by @l___j___m___

How do writers get their start as critics? Is there a way to balance humility with critical rigour? And does humour have a role to play in criticism? In the latest episode of Fully Lit, we come to you live from @parramattas.lit , where critics Max Easton, Eda Gunaydin @edapresents and Lucy Van @busey____ joined our very own James Jiang for a spirited conversation about the pleasures and rewards of writing criticism. Be inspired by these three critics as they discuss what makes them take to their keyboards – and how they preserve their enthusiasm along with their exactitude. The event, Critics Rejoice, was recorded on September 6 as part of the Parramatta’s Lit and Sydney Fringe Festivals. LINK IN BIO!

Join a supportive community of poets and work on your project under the guidance of award-winning writer and researcher @busey____ ✏️ Register now to secure your spot (link in bio)

🌾 Submissions open: The Braided Gift, edited by Shari Lynelle and Lucy Van. “We have forgotten how to give gifts, Theodor Adorno once suggested, since giving implicates ‘thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness’: a braided thought if ever there was one. The gift braids remembrance of someone, and somewhere, with its something. To forget to give is to forget to remember; to remember this forgetting is itself a braiding with time, making a loop in the weaving practice of memory. This edition of Plumwood Mountain Journal invites poets to respond to the notion of the gift, and gift economies more generally, using the ‘braid’ as a conceptual tool to think and to practice with”, editors Shari Lynelle and Lucy Van, write. 🌿 We invite you to explore the gift as a practice – of memory, resistance, care, and connection. How does your writing braid with other forms of practising – dancing, yoga, sex, sculpture, music? What do you tend, offer, remember, or reimagine through your poetic practice? Whether rooted in daily rituals or ancestral memory, let your poems carry the textures of your other practices – those gestures, rhythms, and devotions that shape how you live beside and with the earth. 📖To read the richly woven call out by @shari.lynelle and @busey____ , visit the link in our bio. Shari Lynelle, also known as Shari Kocher, is a Deaf Australian poet. She is the author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021) and The Non-Sequitur of Snow (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015). Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. She is the author of The Open (Cordite, 2021). With Anne Maxwell, her new book is Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views (Anthem, 2024). . . . . #PoetrySubmissions #OpenCall #AustralianPoets #Ecopoetry #EnvironmentalWriting #WritingAsPractice #PoetryOfPlace #EcoWriters #WritingTheEnvironment #PoetryasPractice #PlumwoodMountainJournal

- the perceiver of the work will also conceptualise - @limechax

Our most tender gratitude to everybody who came and spent time with us in our DRIVEWAY last month 🦋 Biggest love to the artists Autumn Royal and Lucy Van who performed a new iteration of their poem, 'Breaking Lines.' It was a real treat to share space with you all 💙 "My work shall be as obscure as love." @temperate.season & @busey____ 🩵 • In 2025 DRIVEWAY is supported by @cityofmelbourne through their Annual Arts Grants Program. Drinks most kindly sponsored by @littlebrunswickwineco and @heapsnormal

💠 DRIVEWAY THIS SAT 29 MARCH 4PM 💠 Join us this Saturday for an exclusive 2025 iteration of ‘Breaking Lines’, written in a dilating fugue by Autumn Royal and Lucy Van, to be restaged for DRIVEWAY at KINGS. From the artists: ‘What pangs of hope we share for our exchange to turn to something we desire as a form of alleviation. “Fear of breakdown,” writes Donald Winnicott, “is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.” Holding Winnicott’s insight close—unfinished, fragmentary, poetic—we return to our breaking, again-to-be-broken lines. We repeat the breaking of our turns and forms with the hope we might share our pangs again, respecting the proliferation of cycles—remembering all lives are the lives of the mind and need not ever be beautiful.’ @temperate.season @busey____ Autumn Royal creates drama, poetry, and criticism. Lucy Van writes poetry. She is currently translating Li Bai. • This event is free. Register to attend via link in bio 🌟 DRIVEWAY is a new performance program at KINGS Artist-Run of monthly public events such as performances, film screenings, poetry readings, and more. In 2025, this initiative is supported by @cityofmelbourne 🌱 🥂 Drinks kindly sponsored by @littlebrunswickwineco and @heapsnormal • 📸: @temperate.season [ID]: Blue ink and water crossing over one another in stains and lines across a cream page

NEW DRIVEWAY INCOMING 🥳 We're so excited to announce our second DRIVEWAY event of the year 'Breaking Lines' with Autumn Royal and Lucy Van 💠 ✨️ DRIVEWAY PERFORMANCE SAT 29 MARCH, 4PM ✨️ From the artists: ‘What pangs of hope we share for our exchange to turn to something we desire as a form of alleviation. “Fear of breakdown,” writes Donald Winnicott, “is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.” Holding Winnicott’s insight close—unfinished, fragmentary, poetic—we return to our breaking, again-to-be-broken lines. We repeat the breaking of our turns and forms with the hope we might share our pangs again, respecting the proliferation of cycles—remembering all lives are the lives of the mind and need not ever be beautiful.’ An exclusive 2025 iteration of ‘Breaking Lines’, written in a dilating fugue by Autumn Royal and Lucy Van, will be restaged for DRIVEWAY at KINGS. We look forward to seeing you all there 💙 @temperate.season @busey____ - In 2025 DRIVEWAY is supported by @cityofmelbourne 🥂 Drinks kindly sponsored by @littlebrunswickwineco and @heapsnormal - Image: Autumn Royal, Breaking Lines 1 [ID]: Blue water / ink running over cream-coloured paper, at times crossing over one another, overlaying lines