Join us for an intimate evening with Soren Tae Smith as she and her daughter Aaliyah discuss Soren's new book about single motherhood and child bereavement.

About the book:

There is no way to ‘come to terms’ with parental grief: it is like being killed while still standing, being born in mid-life and having to learn to exist again, becoming a hybrid creature, partly buried.

For Soren Tae Smith, the dead have always been mentors. Their deeds have ended but their influence continues. But what does it mean when your child, who had just begun to talk with you about Kafka and Camus, is suddenly closer to them than to you? What does it mean to be able to write or work when a young person didn’t get the chance?

Written as a means of survival, Honey from the Ground upends genre and resists explanation. It follows the rhythms of lived time and memory, accepting illness and limitation. Through glimpses of a personal past, it rummages for what can be saved and known even in the absence of answers.

Those who die before us are not left behind but are a step ahead. It is for us to navigate the path toward them.

About the author:

Soren Tae Smith is a writer and a teacher in the Creative Writing program at the University of Melbourne. She has written for Southerly, TEXT, Antipodes, Antithesis and Written Off, and her creative non-fiction has been longlisted by The Lifted Brow. Honey from the Ground won the Barrow Street Press prize for an unpublished non-fiction manuscript in 2023, judged by Mary Cappello.

Ticket proceeds go to a homelessness charity chosen by Soren. A portion of tickets have been reserved for those doing it tough at the moment — please get in touch if that’s you.