Looking back and forward...

May, 2024

​May has been productive and busy.
 
The month opened with a decision to gather a host of poems I wrote many years ago, some as early as the 1970s and university years.
 
I wrote poems prolifically from around age eight, most of them Australian bush-themed and some naively political. A handful were published in school magazines. They were modelled heavily on the rhythmic and rhyming patterns of Australian bush ballads.
 
At university I was introduced to the Liverpool Poets and US Beat poetry, and I modified my style accordingly. And then later came Bruce Dawe and similar poets whose subject matter was contemporary politics and suburban life. There was a point in my life when I dreamt that I would be a poet and Keats-like I would live a brief but inspirational life, and die tragically, leaving wise words behind for the ages. I was nineteen.

By twenty-one, I had a solitary poem published in a BHP/Fellowship of Australian Writers anthology, Neon Signs to the Mutes, and a wall of rejection slips from poetry magazines. I was alive, but the poet was dying.
 
After I graduated as an English teacher, writing poetry became an activity when I was showing students a variety of ways to construct poems so that they could create and perform poetry and publish their own anthologies. The writing was fun. The outcome for the students was sensational.
 
In my late thirties, the poet metamorphosed into a fantasy and young adult novelist. The legacy of writing poetry was that it taught me to listen to the rhythm of language, spoken and written, and to search for the right word in the right moment.
 
The anthology, Rearview Mirror, is available on Amazon in print and ebook versions.

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I am also developing a new novel, currently 40,000 words, based on the concept of a day in a character’s life – think Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as the model. The character and his nature are requiring significant background research, but the project is taking solid shape. What will be difficult to market and may not be palatable to most readers are the type of character and some of the necessary language in the tale. So be it. I need to tell the story. The same need drove me to write Joy Ride back in the 1990s, a story of a teenager who rebels against norms and doesn’t apologise for doing so.
 
Still struggling to find an agent, so I’m going to try direct approaches to publishers.