I’m honoured to have my winning poem ‘One Of Us’ published in the Grieve Anthology 2024 by the Hunter Writers Centre.
I rarely write about my own life in my fiction. Obviously, here on my website, I have observations and snapshots from real life, but my short stories and novels are all made up.
People often tell me – oh, you’ve done so many interesting things! You should write about them! And while I do include real places, events and people, I’m not into autofiction or putting in elements of my own life in my work. I’ve lived it; I don’t need to live it again.
The exception is in poetry, where the opposite is true. I seem to only draw on the personal. I haven’t yet written a poem that was abstract – about a cat or a tiger, or the collection of buildings I can see on the horizon. I did once write a poem about the sea – but even that was personal, it was about that euphoria you experience when you’re on a boat and humbled by the grand expanse of watery space and sky.
My poem ‘One Of Us’ started as literally as it does in its opening lines. I was telling someone the story of a road trip north I did many years ago with some friends – and as I was telling the story, I became disconnected from time and space. Had this really happened to me? It was another life, not my own. The people in the story became characters and no one was real, not even me. And I knew, in the way I know what must happen when I’m writing fiction, I knew that one of these characters had to die. And knowing that one of them had to die, I knew also that this was already so, that the character was already dead.
But I couldn’t remember which character it was.
It was like observing myself from a distance. I was in myself and of myself and outside of myself all at the same time.
That was how the poem started, in that out-of-body experience, but then it became about the missing character, the person who actually is dead. Not a character at all – a real person who really existed and who is now really gone.
My thanks to Hunter Writers Centre and the family of Manny Arcaro for selecting my prose poem. You can watch a video of me reading the work below, and copies of the Grieve Anthology are available online.
