Writers at Work

People often don’t realise my being non-binary means they need to do some work. You can acknowledge my queerness by shaking my partner’s hand but you have to actually change language to get the trans thing right.

It turns out the answer to the problem of poetry’s secrecy is community. In a poetry community we talk about writing and share our work with each other. We collaborate on chapbooks, read poems out loud to each other occasionally. The secret is that it doesn’t need to be secret.

What some might call selling out may actually be art listening, responding, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environment in which it is produced.

I then attempt to unblock the blocked emails which, it turns out, come with attached sets of proofs marked HIGH PRIORITY as, due to outsourced publishing deadlines, the expected turnaround is prohibitively tight…

But when I’m hungover in the office it feels like every second is being seared into my skin, a line I used many years ago, in a short story about a woman who had suffered a great bereavement.

I write in my journal the list of jobs for the week. Then I read from Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook: ‘The most important point in the line is the end of the line. The second most important point is the beginning of it.’I make a note.

Physical rest is emotional, whether you want it to be or not. Slowing down physically means the insides follow sometime after, though they cannot be rushed.

The Daintree blockade had lasted about eight months all up, and here I was into my eighth year of writing about the damn thing.

My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.