Do You Still Have Time for Chaos?

Did I disturb ye good people? I hopes I disturb ye, I hopes I disturb ye enough to want to see this, your house, in ruins all around ye! Have you had enough yet? Or do you still have time for chaos? —Words spoken in court by Temperance Lloyd when she was tried for witchcraft in Devon in 1682 Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? tells the story of poet and teacher Lynn Davidson’s late-life decision to leave Aotearoa New Zealand, with scant resources, to build a life in Scotland. In 2020, in the frightening quiet of a Covid-emptied Edinburgh, she begins her memoir; temporarily at home at the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington, she completes it. Lynn Davidson’s long look back at what made and fractured her includes an account of single parenting with its shadows of poverty and stigma, and is interwoven with the ghostly presence of her uncontainable and courageous great aunt, and the long reach of witch hunts. Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? is a love letter to the literature of Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand. It has an ear to the land and its stories. It is a celebration of choice. It is an act of resistance to the persistent idea that women are safer to stay at home.