WENDING is a story of widowhood, a novella in verse, a metaphoric shedding of skin.

a bend of my back 

where the rapids, discoloured from the scrum 

look 

like lengths of mourning lace 

where the echoing canyon is 

equal amounts windswept 

and wanting 

Wending follows a newly widowed woman who is sent to a river so remote it has no official name. In the mostly uninhabitable terrain, she survives, through her work and in her hope of returning home, but as time moves on, her erratic behaviour pushes her to further extremes. 

She begins to see a woman in her peripheral. In a text where form reflects the single focus of a woman as she casts away her old life to follow a path to its bitter end, the outcast female accepts ostracisation and challenges narrative and social norms.

Praise for Wending

‘Writing with a tangible physicality about the isolating experience of grief, Bel Hawley creates a rich and evocative frontline of wilderness to reflect a woman working and journeying through an abandoned landscape. The verse is extraordinarily visceral and profoundly moving. I discovered myself shedding tears.’ – Susan Francis, author of The Love that Remains 

‘Combining elements of the modern and medieval, archaic and contemporary, magical and scientific, Hawley hints and elides, gives without giving away, suggests darkness without ever digesting it for us. This is a book in which continuity and brokenness exist on the same plane.’ – Edwina Preston, author of Bad Art Mother