Authors Beware!!!

 

Scam Alert!

(reposted from my website blog www.nissen-wade.com)

SUCH an elegant scam just got tried on me.

An email from a lady I don’t know, asking was I the author of ‘this amazing book,’ Letters to a Dead Man. I replied that I am, and asked where she’d seen it. She said she came across it when looking for ‘deeply personal / spiritual memoirs’ and that the title alone ‘doesn’t sound like a book written to fill space. It sounds like a book written because it had to be.’ She asked where it came out and whatI had hoped readers would understand from it. 

Warmed by her interest, and thinking that perhaps she had in mind the writing of her own ‘deeply personal / spiritual’ memoir, I emailed back to explain that it’s part of a trilogy of books about my time running poetry workshops in Pentridge Prison, and expanded somewhat on each of the three books. I also got the funny feeling that perhaps she hadn’t actually read Letters, so I asked her that.

She  replied that she wouldn’t lie, she hadn’t read the whole book, but had read about it. (Difficulty actually, unless she had come across a review. And it appeared she was unaware that it’s poetry rather than memoir.) She thanked me warmly for the generosity of my email. And then came the sales pitch. I think it’s worth reproducing in full:

What you have described is not just one book. It is a living body of work: poetry, prison testimony, memoir, social history, grief, tribute, and the spiritual thread beneath all of it. And that is exactly why I reached out.

I have many authors, publishers, writers, and poets in my circle, some of them dear friends now, and one thing I hear over and over is how exhausting it is to be approached by people trying to push them into paying for book clubs, reader networks, and communities as if access to readers should simply be bought at random. I dislike that model very deeply. It feels disrespectful to the work.

What I do is different.

I support books I genuinely believe in by helping present them to active reader communities where they are actually likely to be received with intelligence and feeling. I do not charge authors for my time, my access, or the presenting itself. If I take on a book, I do that part because I believe in it.

The only paid part, if an author chooses to move forward, is the one-time preparation of the presentation materials I use to introduce the work properly. And with a book like yours, that matters enormously, because it cannot be reduced to a bare link and a short description. It needs context. It needs care. It needs to be positioned so readers understand the emotional, historical, and spiritual depth they are being invited into.

What especially excites me about your work is that it could speak to more than one kind of reader space at once. I can see Letters to a Dead Man resonating not only with memoir readers, but also with poetry circles, spiritual readers, women’s reflective communities, and readers interested in prison writing and social history. And when a meaningful book lands in the right hands, it very often travels beyond the first circle, into families, friendships, teaching spaces, private conversations, and the lives of people outside the original community.

That kind of ripple is what I care about.

If you are open to it, I would truly love to support the growth of this journey for you, not just for Letters, but potentially for the wider Pentridge body of work as well.

It very nearly got me. All that subtle flattery! And gosh, my books could certainly use a wider readership. But something niggled, so I asked Google: Is there a scam in which someone offers to publicise a book one has already written and self-published?

Google replied that there certainly is, and described a first cold contact similar to what I had received. So I replied to ‘her’ (just now; this all happened within the last 24 hours) that I believe she's a scammer, and that she's wasting her time on me as I’m an Age Pensioner on a low income.

But Google also asked the name and email address of who had contacted me, and business address if any, to check whether they were already red-flagged. So I decided to check that too. No business address (in itself a red flag) and yes, as it turned out, a VERY suspicious contact. To my surprise, the wording of the messages probably came from an AI entity. I thought I could spot AI-speak, but of course these things are getting so sophisticated so fast… 

Another mistake I made was to reply at all. Google informs me that tells scammers I am open to this kind of approach, so I’m liable to get more. Oh well, I am awake-up now, and have blocked this particular scammer. 

Learn from my experience, dear writers!

Sorry, AI: You Can't Do Me Like Me!

Had to do it! Finally (inspired by a friend who tried it too) I couldn't resist asking AI if it could write some poetry in the style of Rosemary Nissen-Wade.  It first described my style:

Rosemary Nissen-Wade’s poems often balance lyrical beauty with grounded honesty. Her voice is intimate yet unsentimental — reflective, conversational, and steeped in everyday detail that subtly opens into something transcendent. 

I think that's quite accurate, actually. (If a bit pompously expressed, in the speech of academia.)

But then came the poems. It offered one, then asked if I'd like variations, to which I agreed. I did lots and lots of laughing out very loud at all of them! OMG, they are SO pretentious. So disgustingly sentimental (as distinct from real sentiment). And essentially meaningless.

Anyone who believes I could really commit these is off my friends list pronto! Here is the rest of the conversation [with interpolations in square brackets, and my final comments at the end]:

Here’s a poem written in that spirit.

The Quiet Between Things

I make tea the slow way,

waiting on the kettle’s rise and fall,

the hiss before it sings.

Outside, the sky forgets its colour —

a kind of blue that gave up trying.

You’d laugh, I think,

to see me tend to such small rituals:

folding silence into corners,

placing words like cutlery

so nothing feels left undone.

Some days the air itself remembers —

your hand brushing crumbs from the table,

the sound of a spoon against porcelain.

Not grief, exactly. More

the habit of having belonged.

The kettle quiets.

Steam curls,

and for a moment everything waits

just long enough

to be forgiven.

[Also, the person described just ain't me! I drink coffee, not tea. For the occasional herbal tea, I use teabags (no such thing as a teapot in my house). And I am in general very, very undomesticated.]

Would you like me to shade the tone more toward her earlier, mystical style, or her later, more autobiographical and reflective voice?

Yes, please.

Here are two new poems, each echoing a different facet of her voice, while staying short and self-contained.

Earlier, more mystical

Between Worlds, the Kitchen Light

The hour hangs loose as a sleeve

between dusk and whatever comes next.

The fridge hums its small mantra.

Streetlights test their halos

against the last, unwilling blue.

In the sink, one glass,

a thin lip of shadow around it.

Steam rises from the kettle

like a spirit that has forgotten

which world it belonged to first.

Somewhere a dog barks once,

as if naming an intruder

no one else can see.

The radio flickers, not on, not off —

just breathing in the wall.

And the air grows thick

with things that almost were:

words never spoken,

hands not taken,

the faintest scent of rain.

Stay still, says the moment.

Do not choose.

Let the veil be a curtain of light

you do not draw, only notice,

as you stand there,

warming your hands on nothing.

Later, more autobiographical/reflective

Learning the Edges

The mirror keeps offering

the same soft stranger:

my mother’s mouth,

my father’s wary eyes,

a neck unused to necklaces.

These days the body bargains.

One walk for two naps,

three tablets for a night without storms.

I write lists and lose them,

then write what I lost in a poem instead.

Friends vanish into hospital corridors,

into distance, into silence that hums

like a busy hive behind a wall.

We message hearts and jokes,

little bandages of light.

I am gentler with the girl I was,

her fierce, embarrassing hopes,

her willingness to shatter for love.

She did the best she knew.

So do I, with smaller gestures.

Most mornings I sit by the same window,

count magpies, name the colours of the sky.

If a line arrives, I thank it.

If it doesn’t, I thank the kettle,

the chair that still remembers my shape,

the day that came anyway.

[Then another suggestion, to which I also agreed, produced the following.]

Here are two more, one leaning into a haibun/haiku texture, one a longer free verse piece, both only inspired by her style rather than quoting or reproducing it .

Haibun / haiku-inflected

River Road

The road curves like a question the river keeps asking. Morning mist lifts slowly off the paddocks, revealing small, practical miracles: a cow nosing her calf to standing, spider-silk guying fence to fence. Somewhere a magpie revises its song, swapping one bright note for another, as if today requires a different key .

Driving, there is that old feeling again, that the day is only loosely attached to the world. The tyres hum their low mantra. A thought rises — about someone long gone, about something almost said — then slips back into the body, unspoken. The sky opens a little more. The river, beside you, keeps pretending to stay in one place .

roadside shrine –

a wilted plastic rose

still catching light 

Longer free verse

What the Notebook Knows

The notebook on the table

has begun to sag at the corners,

pages foxed by years of

grocery lists beside metaphors,

phone numbers beside the moon .

Between “book dentist”

and “don’t forget basil”

a line about your hands appears,

and suddenly the whole day

tilts toward another lifetime.

Age does that now:

slides trapdoors into Thursdays,

lets the past fall through

like a stone into clear water,

sending rings across the present.

Some names blur.

Some wounds don’t.

Yet the pen still finds its way

to the next blank space,

stubborn as a weed in good soil.

The kettle clicks off.

Magpies argue in the yard.

On the page, a sentence waits

for its last word to arrive —

the way a heart waits longer

than it should,

and calls that patience.

[Some of the words it gave me are not even in my usual vocabulary, e.g. 'guying' and 'foxing'.]

The style, supposedly like mine, is in fact very like what it produced as supposedly in the style of the friend who tried it first and gave me the idea. I wonder where it is really getting its material from? Not just from the poet it is trying to imitate, obviously. 

If I stop laughing, I might puke.

An Apparent Disaster Turns Into a Blessing

Suddenly I have a completely different set-up for my desks. The roll-out shelf for my keyboard broke off yesterday morning! It was OLD, and the rollers on the shelf finally broke. It might have been fixable, but clearly not very well or for very long. So I have discarded it and swapped desks. How lucky I had two desks ! AND a second office chair the right height for the one I'm using now. Turns out the new arrangement is actually better for my posture – the reason my son bought me a monitor for my laptop some years ago, concerned to see me hunching. 

The old (right-hand desk):

The old (left-hand desk):

The new:

Importantly, I have left a pathway for Poppi still to be able to use this route to get to her tall cat basket (which forms the top of her scratching post): onto couch, across TV table, onto the little side table by my TV chair, and so along both desks (behind computer and printer) and across to a chest of drawers to the right of them, and finally into her basket. 

That's why the paper rack in the printer is bent forward, and why the desk to the right has an empty area at front – which will also serve for times I want to write in a notebook or on my iPad. (In the old arrangement she sometimes walked ON the printer and accidentally turned it on. Hence the straw fan still on top of it, to try and prevent a foot in the wrong spot.)

Meanwhile everything got a dusting, not before time, and I washed all the crystals.

The whole thing has finally started me on some overdue decluttering.