Taking stock

Regaining balance

I’ve posted nothing new here for a few weeks, because…

(pause while I look for a reason, an excuse even, and realise that none is needed…)

I’m hesitating to waste subscribers’ time with the trivial stuff that fills my life following the sudden plunge into drama in the spring of this year. No soap-opera-style emotional revelations to confide while Dónall and I endure the slow torment of his follow-up treatment with chemotherapy — physical discomfort for him, and for me the emotional pain of watching him undergoing the discomfort with no hope of alleviating it.

But here I am again, with an upbeat update on our situation…

Dónall has regained a healthy weight, lost much of his beautiful hair, and discovered that he can largely control the Type-3c diabetes that his cancer has inflicted upon him. He’s built up his physical strength with daily three-mile walks. His body has regained the sturdiness that I first fell in love with.

He has regained his ability to create poems and stories (which only briefly left him, in fact, and then only when his conscious mind was wiped for a few weeks in the Intensive Care Unit where his life was caught up in a net of drips, drugs and monitor screens in Southampton General Hospital.)

He’s creating new versions of past poems with prose commentaries that reinvigorate the memories that inspired them in the first place. His personal archive of images and poems has grown to well over 2000, posted on Instagram and Facebook, as well as on his own Substack profile. He’s buoyed up by the encouragement of audiences and readers, despite his being largely deprived of face-to-face interaction as a performer.

As for me…

I’ve regained my sense of myself as a creator. And I feel closer to Dónall than ever in our 17 years together.

We’re necessarily restrained from travelling far from home by a routine of hospital appointments for chemo and by the need to avoid crowded public places. London is a dangerous place to us now. Public transport is a risk to be taken sparingly.

I know that Dónall misses the opportunities he had, to perform his poetry in live London venues. Paradoxically, (but selfishly) I feel freed by this narrowing of our geographical range. I’ve found alternative satisfaction in nurturing my small garden, daily enhancing it and developing its possibilities — limited in size but always open to more intensity as everything grows and dies with the seasons.

The aspirations I had as a publisher have dissipated as my priorities have shifted — my partnership with Dónall as lover and husband has absolute priority over administrative or business activities. I’ve given myself permission to use my ‘spare’ time in play, which, however, I call ‘work’.

But what about the decade spent establishing Dempsey & Windle/VOLE as a small publishing house?

It hasn’t been easy to let go. Even before this year, I was trying to scale down the work we took on, because my eyesight, my wrists and my back were beginning to show signs of serious wear and tear through hours spent at the computer. But I was addicted to the fun of reading, designing and meeting the authors of the poetry collections that were presented to us for publication.

Our aim to cover all our costs was mostly achieved, except for the hours I spent creating the books, administering and tending the website, fulfilling orders and following up emails, as well as keeping our accounts and submitting tax returns. A lot of that activity I classed as ‘play’ (but not the book-keeping!)

Annual competitions helped us to balance the costs and to find new authors. And I enjoyed editing the competition Anthologies. But each competition was a huge task.

We added the Mailchimp account and sent out the weekly newsletter from it when it was free of fees (we now pay monthly for it.) Originally we intended the newsletter simply to promote our publications and competitions, but it developed into a regular online magazine, with articles on poets and poetry, largely researched and written by Dónall.

When Covid came, we learned to use zoom.us (which again was then free, but is no longer) and began ‘Zooming with The 1000 Monkeys’ to replace the monthly free face-to-face performance events we’d been hosting locally since 2011. When Covid died down, we had made friends all over Britain and continued to zoom with them. (By then, we couldn’t find a free venue to return to hosting face-to face locally and we were too occupied with publishing print books to add another activity, anyway.)

So which of these ‘strings to our bow’ can we maintain, while we attend to our current priority of keeping well and relatively sane?

That heading was not intended to rhyme, sorry.

Publishing printed books?
This still presents to me as ‘fun’ and may be taken up again at some future point — we still have a cache of ISBNs that we can’t pass on to anyone else to use. If we decided to publish collections again, marketing the books would be totally in the hands of the author and we would agree to publish no more than three books in twelve months, to avoid burn-out.

Competitions?
Not for at least a year from now (perhaps Autumn 2026?)

Zooming with The 1000 Monkeys?
Yes, we love these online events and will continue them monthly for the foreseeable future.

Weekly Newsletters?
As we won’t be selling books or inviting competition entries, the future of the newsletters is still undecided. But we still have our Mailchimp account and Dónall enjoys researching and writing articles, so we shall probably reinstate a regular mailing, perhaps less often than once a week.

What else is new?

I’ve taken up my paintbrushes after a decade during which I imagined words to be my principal medium for expression. Painting is more than therapy (though in this context it certainly does work like that.) It’s part of my identity. I’ve spent ten weeks of a wonderful summer, painting images from our garden, with Dónall my audience, benevolent critic and supporter, as always.

Below are some of my paintings from this summer. I’m waiting in some trepidation for the Thames Water bill that will show how much effort and watering went into creating the flowers that inspired them.

It’s been a summer of love for me, and not only love of my garden.

© Janice Dempsey Paintings June-August 2025