a poet finds his voice…

I was thirteen years old when I wrote my first short story. It was an assignment given to my English class. My tale of an Inuit girl who saw a bird (for the first time) then had followed it onto the arctic ice, got lost and died spoke hugely of my life experience up to that point.My father had been in the cross hairs of genetic alcoholism and the subsequent abuse and trauma my family suffered had left me ungrounded and fragile. Adding to my trauma, my neighbour, a teenage boy, also molested me until my parents divorced and my mother and I moved out of the family home. I grew up confused, scared and projected into the world around me a victim mentality. I was ceaselessly bullied at school, abused at home, and next door.

I had looked for solace in several distractions, sports, friends, girls, music but here when pen met paper I had found a cathartic means to express my deepest and most authentic feelings and emotions. When I had gotten out of the way of myself, the language, the poetry, the visuals, and the narrative had congealed into a bittersweet story that had brought my teacher to tears when she had read it. She unbeknown to me had entered this story into a short story competition for students my age, which I won. I reluctantly took my prize at school assembly then quelled this strong, emotive and sincere voice for ten years as my distractions took precedence over my creativity. It would be an incident in the 1990s in Dunedin which would expand my perception of the possibility to reignite the need to write. My sanity depended upon it…