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ashleigh

@ashleighyoung.bsky.social
591 followers 206 following 78 posts

Writer and editor. SOME FLAILING eyelashroaming.substack.com

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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
This week’s unglamorous writing week open.substack.com/pub/eyelashr...
open.substack.com
Writing week 03
Getting out of the house.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
thespinoff.co.nz/books/20-11-... This take is probably old, but I think this conversation would be less heated if these covers (sorry for cursing the timeline) were somehow good and/or the AI use were imperceptible. The fact that they're heinous makes it much easier and more fun to be outraged.
thespinoff.co.nz
How two AI book covers forced the publishing industry to reckon with its future
A design studio’s use of AI has disqualified two books from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2026.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
My emails, constantly
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
Folly Journal. 🫥
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
Saw the Eno doco last night (one of the many many iterations). Genius!! Highly recommend to anyone who tries to make things.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Phone call with mum: ‘People are driving around the supermarket car park, you know, going 40! Knocking over little old ladies… it’s easy to do once you’ve done it’
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 29/05/2024
Sat my driving test today (passed!). I loved the test guy, an older man with big moustache. He refused all small talk and my efforts for us to be friends. Wouldn't say how his day was going. He sighed once at a red light but was otherwise an enigma. It was very freeing, somehow.
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Te Herenga Waka University Press @thwupbooks.bsky.social · 19/04/2024
We are delighted to have a new James Brown book on the way. July! teherengawakapress.co.nz/slim-volume/
The cover for Slim Volume by James Brown
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 19/04/2024
*crying* Please. Academics. 'The internet' is not a valid source description for your photos.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/03/2024
this was a mistake
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 15/03/2024
:/
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 08/03/2024
Just remembered an essay I have to write for an anthology, in less than a week. Good luck to my future self
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 10/02/2024
Did a short poetry reading last night and it was fun and nice. But in her intro the lovely MC was like: ‘In these times we need poets to uplift and inspire us with their words’ and the poems I had prepared were about death and weed whacking and one was about a bad dream I had about green peas.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 04/02/2024
Significant milestone in my old-person-learning-to-drive journey: drove to the dump and got a new recycling bin
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 27/01/2024
'It’s best to use digital tools to implement these structured task systems because they’re well suited for organizing and modifying large numbers of items grouped into levels and categories ...' I found this article insane www.newyorker.com/culture/offi...
newyorker.com
How to Have a More Productive Year
Knowledge work is always changing, and our approach to it needs to change, too.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/01/2024
Breaking my social media silence to say that earlier I was just walking along carrying many boxes to the mailroom when I saw the work courier guy. He veered towards me and gave me and the boxes a friendly hug! Kind of baffling but nice. The old 'box effect', surely
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 21/12/2023
Best blog :))) newsroom.co.nz/2023/12/21/k...
newsroom.co.nz
Ka pai: the 2023 ReadingRoom awards
ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias celebrates the best things in New Zealand writing this year
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Jane A @cravenjaney.bsky.social · 14/12/2023
I'm good at being terrible at self-promotion. However, my book 'Calamities!' came out earlier this year & then kinda vanished from existence & made no end-of-the-year lists or anything like that but fuck it, I'm quite proud of it. It's angry & a bit funny. Poems: shop.goodbookshop.nz/p/calamities...
shop.goodbookshop.nz
Calamities!
In her second, spine-cracking collection, Jane Arthur wants ‘to get morbid’. Moving with ease between the cerebral and the ethereal she measures her anxieties against a cosmic canvas – taking in...
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 11/12/2023
Have almost surfaced from the busiest part of the year and feel dizzy from the effort of articulating my opinions, some of which are probably bad, and badly articulated – but also feel very lucky to get to read so many great things
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Bill Manhire @pacificraft.bsky.social · 02/12/2023
. How Memory Works Come over here we say to the days that disappear. No, over here. .
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 02/12/2023
Against all odds – Cycling Week is back! This might well be my dullest entry yet (except for the wind sock mystery) but still. The continuing is the thing. eyelashroaming.substack.com/p/cycling-we...
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 02/11/2023
Sadly this event has had to be cancelled due to illness! Sorry everyone. I recommend still having a beer and reading a book though.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 30/10/2023
I am the grumpiest I have ever been.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 28/10/2023
a morning jerry
Jerry the cat looking like a magnificent seal on a pile of blankets in morning sunshine
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 28/10/2023
Jetlag is actually great. Have been up since 3am. Made some leek and potato soup (with an intense focus that means the soup will be good). Multiple loads of washing. Multiple teas. Cleaned out the fridge. I feel like one of those crazed early-morning CEOs. But with no ambition
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/10/2023
Little plug for an event I’m doing with Ya-Wen Ho and Ash Davida Jane next week at Unity. (hm. I really have to get a new author photo) www.eventfinda.co.nz/2023/author-...
eventfinda.co.nz
Author Event: Ya-Wen Ho, Ashleigh Young and Ash Davida Jane
Author Event: Ya-Wen Ho, Ashleigh Young and Ash Davida Jane, Come and join Ya-Wen Ho, ..., Unity Books, Wellington, Wellington Region, 2 November 2023,
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 24/10/2023
Not for the first time, I think Londoners must have bladders of steel. There is just never anywhere proper to go to the loo in this city
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Dorothy, a publishing project @dorothyproject.bsky.social · 20/10/2023
Incredible review of @pipadam.bsky.social's THE NEW ANIMALS by the one and only Joy Williams @bookpostusa.bsky.social! books.substack.com/p/review-joy...
books.substack.com
Review: Joy Williams on Pip Adam
Joy Williams finds a New Zealand writer, now published in the US for the first time, who hit her like a wind of hurricane force. Introducing Pip Adam.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 20/10/2023
I AM HAVING A GOOD TIME AT LAST
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 20/10/2023
The people in the hotel where I am staying have taken away my tea strainer when cleaning my room. It is a fancy tea strainer. I am livid and sad. I think they think I am crazy with my tea ways.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Hey – so if anyone needs anything just blurted out, especially total non-sequiturs, in a time efficient manner, I can do that for you! No audience too large or small
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Have gone awol at the Frankfurt book fair (sorry to my writers, I will bet back to work soon). It’s good
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 17/10/2023
I am loving Germany so far but… please, the water glasses. They are so small
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 10/10/2023
There’s a serious-looking panel discussion at Frankfurt book fair next week called ‘What Is a Book?’ Sign me the hell up. I will report back
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 09/10/2023
Always feel a bit silly when my phone rings and I freeze in terror and don't answer it, then I google the number and see that it was just the tea shop telling me my special tea has arrived
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 06/10/2023
Heard a story yesterday about a couple who are going to rehome their cat because the cat (who is otherwise an excellent, excellent cat, by the sounds) keeps attacking the man’s legs on the stairs.
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Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 25/09/2023
An amazing grief poem by Tim Relf from the new 'Poetry Salzburg Review'.
Tim Relf

After the funeral


I buy a big juicy steak and watch it rot
glug wine glassless
sink smoking between a sofa's frayed arms
days, I blink at phones, lust at shapes on screens, slur at strangers in pubs:
	Do I know you?
nights, I step shoeless on white grass and wet concrete, whisper to the mangled moon:
	Fuck you.
The order of service abandoned in the order of service drawer,
the suit hanging over the stairs,
the ill-fitting-shoe blister burst,
I brush up aginst this never-asked-for thing—
unjust, coincidental—
my own aliveness.
I take its hand,
pull it close to me,
into me.
This could go on for years.


'Poetry Salzburg Review', No. 40, Summer 2023.
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 25/09/2023
the evening workspace awaits
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 23/09/2023
So sick of seeing new articles about this cretin, but am always powerless against them and end up reading them all. This one was pretty good I thought. time.com/6315607/brya...
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 22/09/2023
Got an email that opened with: 'I hope you are super busy.' Look. Let's just agree to hope that each other is well. No one needs your quirky business hopes, get outta here
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 22/09/2023
This was heaps of fun! Thank you to Good Books. And thank you to Bill. And thank you to Goldings for the beers after. (No more public speaking though, now. Only private exclusive-members speaking from now on.)
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ashleigh @ashleighyoung.bsky.social · 20/09/2023
Feeling pressure to invent a whole new personality for a new platform but ...ah the hell with it. Same old nonsense
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