I Do Not Cede

In Heather McPherson's poetry the everyday is eroticised. The poems collected posthumously in i Do Not Cede are passionate odes to lesbian love, the body and the sensual. i Do Not Cede, a chapbook, offers a taste of poems to be included in Dirty Laundry: New and Selected Poems, a major collection of Heather's work, also edited by Emer Lyons and due 2024. Heather McPherson (1942-2017) was Aotearoa New Zealand's first out lesbian to publish a collection of poems, A Figurehead: A Face (Spiral 1982).
She published three further collections in her lifetime and Spiral published This Joyous Chaotic Place: Garden Poems posthumously in 2018 and her work is widely anthologised, most recently in Manifesto Aotearoa (Otago University Press 2017) and Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA Writers from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press 2021). Heather was also a publisher and editor who played a key role in supporting women artists and writers.
In 1976 she founded the Spiral Collectives with Spiral, a women's arts and literary journal; and in 1980 she was one of the founding members of The Women's Gallery (Wellington 1980-1984). In 2018, This Joyous, Chaotic Place: He Waiata Tangi-a-Tahu, a ground-breaking exhibition celebrating Heather and her peers, was held at  Mokopopaki in Auckland.  Heather was for years the single mother of her son Rick and, later, a loving and enthusiastic grandmother.  Editor Emer Lyons, who is preparing a major collection of Heather's poems, Dirty Laundry, is a lesbian writer from West Cork.
The recipient of the inaugural University of Otago City of Literature PhD scholarship, she now holds a creative/critical PhD in lesbian poetry and the manifestations of shame and is the Irish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Otago's Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. Emer has been shortlisted for the Fish and Bridport poetry prizes. Her play The Green was nominated for Best Narrative in the 2018 Dunedin Theatre Awards, in 2019 she was the Otago Regional Slam Poetry Champion and in 2020 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for fiction. Designer Biz Hayman is an artist and design historian based in Aotearoa New Zealand.
She has taught and researched art and design at six art schools and universities in three countries. The cover for this chapbook combines several concepts pertinent to the project: a rendering of Heather's own handwriting to announce her work (with thanks to Marian Evans and the staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library); the clarity and strength of the 'Geneva' typeface, designed by Susan Kare in 1983 when professional font design was largely a male preserve; plus, the wonderful 1975 photographic series by Jane Zusters, capturing Heather herself working at her kitchen table.