The Braided Gift

Edited by Shari Lynelle and Lucy Van

“I composed myself, accepted her generous offer, and with an emotional return to the archives, I cranked the volume on dad’s “Heart of Gold” and continued to weave.” – Natalie Harkin

“As the beater…strikes the threads into place, the song enters the space between the threads and the spoken becomes written.” – Kathryn Sullivan Kruger

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” (Adorno 42): 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.  

Of braiding sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer loops the observation of its practice into the generous physicality of its doings: to braid sweetgrass is to “[b]reathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’” (Kimmerer 5). The gift operates within a dialectics that also tenders the wound, since, in the gift economies Kimmerer evokes, cultural response-ability is part of what brokers the braid. 

Of weaving with physical letters written by her family to state authorities, retrieved from the colonial archive, Natalie Harkin writes, 

I can hear their tone in these letters and bear witness to their resilience and strength. I recognise my nanna’s ‘husky voice,’ described by inspectors or ‘State Ladies.’ I touch her handwriting to weave with her words and feel her fingertips and breath in every letter that reveals so much more than what was filed and recorded. (Harkin 165)

‘Detectives in a colonial crime scene’, Harkin and other First Nations scholars and poets locate the loaded gifts of their archival-poetics with a firm eye on futurity: 

Armed with critical-creative, literary and visual tools for transformation, we locate the archives, trace the evidence and change its shape and structure with rupturing intent: a loving repatriation through blood- memory, haunting, situated knowledge and imaginings. […] We follow our ancestors’ gaze towards future generations where their dignity shines, and this is their lasting impression. (Harkin 166)

With Kimmerer and Harkin, we observe the dignity of the braiding: its reclamation, its persistence, and its futurities are not forgotten, particularly within First Nations communities, who steadfastly hold the line. As Harkin writes, “[t]he archive is both a site of lost origins where memory is dispossessed and a site for hopeful and just futures where ‘acts of remembering and regeneration occur’” (Harkin 165). Where gifts are tended, nourished, and respected, communities thrive, memories survive. Gift economies, as Kimmerer suggests, embody powerful sites of resistance and shelter from the barbarous forces of market economies, whose colonised narratives invoke scarcity, competition and accumulation.

The gift as a braided tool to think with may also call forth aspects of what Antonia Pont recently upholds as ‘practising’ in all its nuanced modes. In her recent book A Philosophy of Practising, Pont posits a capacious list that we at Plumwood Mountain Journal would love to call attention to:

Activities or practices available to practising’s mode would include: […] knitting, yoga, cooking, writing, close listening to music, reading/studying (which would include learning a new language, human or computer), walking, learning and playing a musical instrument, woodwork, sex, meditation, golf, swimming, calligraphy, fencing, prayer, gardening, dancing, rowing, sculpture, running, flower arrangement, teamaking, bonsai, cleaning, lithography, birdwatching and countless others. Practicing is best suited to activities that are, in their contents, benign. This is because practising requires repetition, over long periods of time, and if the activity is too harsh, even a little damaging (to self or others), then we are less likely to be able to sustain it. (On the other hand, practicing’s mechanisms do not strictly guarantee any straightforward pursuit of ‘the good’…) (Pont 22)

Pont intentionally grounds the verb ‘to practice’ in its gerund form. Practising meets certain well-observed criteria in her argument and is differentiated from any given ‘practice’. Practising is drift-work, is surplus, is discovery, is surprise. ‘Practice’, the book’s jacket declares “involves an interweaving of differences expressing themselves among intentional repetitions. By engaging in practice, we open times other than our habitual presents, we slip the binds of identity and we thin out our relations with behaviours that shut out the future.”

We want to know: how do you drift and discover in practising’s modes? Do you dance? Meditate? Keep a diary? Do you tend a garden, or the earth? Do you belong to a community that practices certain forms of gift economy, such as Kimmerer describes in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants? What is the object of practising if its object is objectless? 

“An object is not an object; it is a witness to a relationship” writes Chilean born poet Cecilia Vicuña; so, how does practising witness the intensities of relationships, your attentions, the feelings of your time? If you play music, if you move, how does sound and movement braid with, or against, your writing? Do you do something regularly that you might not call a practice at all? What is the role of habit in whatever special, particular thing you do? Who is its subject? We at Plumwood Mountain Journal want to hear from you. 

Plumwood Mountain Journal is calling on poets with any given practice other than writing, for whom the being-and-breathing of ‘practising’ might operate, however mysteriously or transitively, within, between, alongside, beneath, or in parallax with your writing life. What, if anything, might a gift look like through the lens of your practising’s modes? Be bold, be ambitious. Or be as humble or modest as you choose. Send us poems that attempt or approach this nexus: writing, and that other thing you do wordlessly. 

We welcome spacious and capacious curiosity, tenderness and tension in whatever poetic matter you feel moved to braid in the offering. What prevails in a gift economy for you? 

– Shari Lynelle and Lucy Van

Shari Lynelle

Shari Lynelle, also known as Shari Kocher, is a Deaf Australian poet, fiction writer, mentor, arts-based researcher and therapist. She is the author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021) which was Highly Commended in the NSW Premier’s Literature Awards (2022) and The Non-Sequitur of Snow (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015) which was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Awards. Widely published and anthologised in Australia and elsewhere, including Best Australian Poems, Cordite, Meanjin, The Newcastle Poetry Prize and Harvard’s Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image and Sound in 2025, Shari’s work has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards. These include the Peter Steele Poetry Prize, the Blue Knot Foundation Award, the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize, and the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award. Shari holds a PhD. from Melbourne University and lives and works on Dj Dja Wurrung Country where she pays respect to Elders and custodians past and present. www.sharilynelle.com

Lucy Van

Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. Her poetry collection, The Open (Cordite, 2021), was listed for the Stella prize and Mary Gilmore award, and highly commended by the Anne Elder award. With Anne Maxwell, her new book is Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views (Anthem, 2024). She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches literary studies.

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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Fragment 21, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. Verso, 1985.

Harkin, Natalie. “Weaving the Colonial Archive: A Basket to Lighten the Load.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 154-66.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2015.

Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. Weaving the Word: the Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production. Associated University Press, 2001.

Vicuña, Cecilia. Arte Precario. See https://www.ceciliavicuna.com/introduction