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About My WorkI’m inspired by lost voices and driven to celebrate lives that may otherwise be overlooked or go unheard. My fiction often draws on historical ‘truths’, to imagine the life within that experienced them: to explore unsaid-ness that surrounds us all. As Adrienne Rich wrote: ‘Lying is done with words, and also with silence.’ This insight has shaped my motivation to retrieve life writing that may be misrepresented, misunderstood or deliberately obscured – especially lives that aren’t admitted to determining orthodoxies of gender, sexuality or religion. I’m interested in collective as well as individual testimony: how we witness community as well as solitude, and those thin spaces in between. I’m also interested in cultural representations of death, dying and disability. As Robert Lowell wrote: ‘it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes’. |
