Sweet Spots is a book for the curious. And for the wonder of what words can do.

Is the San Jiao both a space and a place? Do concepts have bodies?
Our local American-Australian acupuncturist, Mattie Sempert, wonders about these and many other questions in this collection of lyric essays. Drawing on three decades of clinical experience, applying mostly Japanese pragmatic and palpatory approaches to treatment, this new title is a seriously playful reflection on her principle practices: acupuncturing/moxibustioning, writing, and thinking with philosophies that put relation before all else.

Collectively, these essays think of themselves as a body that is actively essaying words, where text and tissue—language and body—are entwined, and become one and the same. Its words aim to inspire, soothe, nudge and engage playfully, as a way to think the body differently. The practice of acupuncture—and its relational thinking—often makes its presence felt to twirl the text-tissue of the bodying essays.

Sweet Spots offers a reading experience. To feel the spread of an acupuncture needle’s gentle word-twirl, through your reading body, and through the book’s text body, one and the same. Always, a more-than quality lingers in the spaces between. Lyric helps to make this possible.

Entangled in the text-tissue are an assortment of entities, such as bickering body parts, quivering jellyfish, heart pacemaker cells, a narwhal tooth, Taoist parables, always with ubiquitous, stretchy connective tissue responding to ensure that the essaying bodies become, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the one-which-includes-the-many-includes-the-one.

The essaying bodies orient towards the sweetest sweet spot which is found, not in the center, but slightly askew, felt in the reverbing more-than that carries their potential. Crucially, this produces a shift in perspective away from self-enclosed bodies and experts toward a care for the connective tissue of relation.

About the author Mattie-Martha Sempert is a practicing acupuncturist and writer and has a creative practice-led PhD from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She is loosely planted in the bushland hills outside of Melbourne, where she attempts to make a daily habit of living in William James’s World of Pure Experience.

Reviews I love these essays by Mattie Sempert. Some of them – such as the Scottish herring fishermen using a plumb line, their bodies and the boat a finely-tuned instrument – resemble nothing so much as Zhuang Zi: praise which I do not bestow lightly. Do yourself a favor and sit down with this book, and savor it. Steve Clavey, Author of Fluid Physiology and Pathology in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Far from another How-To book on acupuncture, or another book on theory, Sweet Spots is very much a reading experience. Reading more like long-form poetry, Sempert’s razor-sharp observations combine with hands that listen and talk to bodies, reveal the potent intimacy that occurs when practitioner attunes to their clients ‘whole-being’. Equally important is her position as co-creator in the therapeutic process rather than an all-knowing expert in her field. In taking that position her expertise is clear. The more I read these cleverly crafted essays, I felt altered and attuned to more than I was beforehand, just as I do when I leave my acupuncturist. Forget telehealth, grab yourself a copy and let Sweet Spots do its work.
Lisa McPherson (Chinese Medicine practitioner and educator)

Sweet Spots is beautifully written and original. I’m very excited that the feeling-thinking practice of the Sempert School of Radical Acupuncture (and ‘acu-writing’) is now available to the world.
Lone Bertelsen, co-editor of Fibreculture Journal

Sweet Spots is a brilliant meditation on practice and it will find receptive readers in and out of the university.
Anna Gibbs, Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University Western Sydney

It’s a delight to find the action—what essays do—achieve those goals so explicitly. Sempert creates new knowledge while making a hybrid, in-between, space-for-play, body-centric text. It's a gift to the reading world that this book has arrived.
Nicole Walker, co-author of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

Newly Published!

264pp

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