Author: Tarella Spirituality

There’s something about a book launch reminds me of the kind of after-the-funeral gatherings familiar to many Australians – an eclectic mix of family and friends swapping news and matching faces to shared times and places.

The launch of A Gentle Unfolding was something like that. A Sunday afternoon, and a time-line of women and men who at one time or another had been part of my life story, braved the late afternoon winter chill to help me celebrate my first book. There was a happy buzz in the room as people mingled and cousins swapped family news. The children were well behaved and the publisher, David Lovell and Dr Bernadette Miles said nice things about me and the book. And so A Gentle Unfolding: circling and spiraling into meaning was released into the world of books. 

My brother Mike filmed the occasion and you can see and hear Bernadette’s launch and my response on the links below.

A Gentle Unfolding book launch by author Judith Scully https://youtu.be/oHVbXoWo61A

A Gentle Unfolding book launch by Dr Bernadette Miles https://youtu.be/JBlUK8xO6hk

 

Some of you may be familiar with Michael Morwood (Tomorrow’s Catholic and From Sand to Solid Ground are among his books.)

A month ago I asked him to read my book. This was his response:
” The flow and easy style will surely lead readers into a desire to share their own stories within their life-story. Let there be more story telling like this.”

I wonder if you will agree with him? Do let me know how my book fits into your life: judith@judithscully.com.au

A Gentle Unfolding: circling and spiraling into meaning is available from publisher@davidlovellpublishing.com, Amazon, Book Depository and http://www.garrattpublishing.com.au

Till next time,  when Words from the Edge will return to normal,

Judith

Publication date for A Gentle Unfolding is now only two weeks away and I’m both excited and apprehensive. It’s one thing to know that words and sentences I wrote, deleted, rewrote, despaired of getting just right and eventually accepted as the best I could do, have now made it into a book with my name on it. It’s something entirely different to write 50,000 words about me, and not feel vulnerable. Memories are so personal, but the minute they are written in black and white for anyone to read, they seem to lose something of their original specialness. Unless of course they touch into something of the reader’s experience. If that happens, then all the re-writes will have not been in vain.

The life I lead might be almost unrecognisable to them, but I walk in the footsteps of the women who came before me, and A Gentle Unfolding is dedicated to four of them:
My great-grandmothers Maria Warren (1834 – 1917) and Elizabeth Ann Tonkin (1853 – 1931), My father’s mother who I never knew, Elizabeth Maria Gilligan (1876 – 1930) and Florence Anstice Helyar (1887 – 1957), my maternal grandmother who left me a memory I call Tarella.

    

(L to R: Maria Scully, Florence Helyar, Elizabeth Gilligan)

Tarella was the name of my maternal grandparent’s farm in the Victorian Mallee country where they brought up ten children. The house, named Tarella, was set in an oasis of scrubby gum trees, opening out into vast paddocks that drew a line across the horizon. That landscape seems to have merged into my DNA, urging me to move beyond everyday horizons and into the vastness and silence of a Mallee horizon. I’ve tried to bring the spiritual dimensions of that landscape into everything I write, first on my original website, Tarella Spirituality, followed by Words from the Edge, and now a book.

A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning
To be launched by Dr Bernadette Miles a director of Kardia Formation, Hawthorn
Sunday 26th August
at Heart of Life Spirituality Centre, 96 Albion Road Box Hill (Victoria)
4.00 for 4.30 pm

The book, published by David Lovell Publishing, will be available for purchase.

I’d be delighted to have your company