I'm Australia by birth, with Welsh and Scottish parents, but I was born and raised as a writer in Canada. And 95% of my poetry was written across the homelands of the WSÁNEĆ and the Lekwungen, in the city known as Victoria (from its coffee shops and libraries, to its beaches and grasslands). My primary influences are Canadian poets: Dione Brand, John Thomspon, Tim Lilburn, Anne Simpson, Patrick Lane, and academic mentor/advisor, Lorna Crozier to name a small few. I enjoy being challenged and expanded by the work of writers from around the world, but the (mostly) Canadian poets I absorbed during my university years largely shaped my internal poetic landscape. I'm deeply grateful to Canadian poetry.

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Writing is a way that I can process my inner world, or respond to the outer world. If you've read Cult Life, you may have noticed that it's largely memoir, and I do see much of my work as a record of my life. But I also use writing as a way to explore art and nature, myth and spirituality, and my relationship to these things. It seems to me that poetry is a blueprint of the consciousness, or a distillation of human thinking and experience at any given time in history. And nowadays, with the planet in crisis, and social media eating up large portions of our lives, it feels more important than ever to write--writers (and may I say poets, in particular) are the record keepers of the human world, the visionaries and radicals, the close and careful watchers of the natural world... I think all artists are, but I like talking about poets and writers.

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In Disassembling A Dancer, I dive into the dark side of the ballet world, the body as art, and art as identity. But at its heart, this small book is a story; a story in poetry, prose, self-reflexive monologue and dialogue. It might also be seen as fictionalized memoir. (I seem not to be able to write in only one genre.) While I find a sense of release and much needed mental reconfiguration in anti-narrative forms like ghazals, I'm probably a story-teller before anything else, and thus my projects are usually narrative.

 

WHAT I'M PRESENTLY WORKING ON:
For decades I’ve been fascinated with Scottish/Welsh folklore and myth, particularly Arthurian mythology. Back in 2011, my poem "Merlin's Rip" was longlisted for CBC and then shortlisted for The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize, and afterwards made into a chapbook. Several related pieces were published in journals and shortlisted in other contests, and then I dropped the project to write Cult Life.

When my grandfather’s hundred-acre land in the Scottish Highlands was sold by the state, it fueled a search for belonging and for tangible connection to my own ancestry, and this project based on Arthurian myth became important again. Having lived in three colonized countries, I’m acutely aware that none of the histories are mine, nor the traditions, nor the stories—I’ve longed for connection to land and culture, and yet the land I live on is not mine. It became vital to connect with the cultural and spiritual traditions of the Scottish and Welsh cultures, and I’ve since begun reclaiming traditional land-based practices.

In my ancestral culture, story and myth is used as a container to seek both personal and community understanding—myth allows people to place themselves in a larger setting and see an underlying pattern to things. Myth offers connection, ritual, magic, meaning. Humans are meaning-makers—we narrate our lives, we make art from them, and then draw meaning from the art.  This work has become a kind of poetic time-traveling, a weaving of myself into a mythology adjacent to the legends, as well as a circling back to ancestral beginnings: the symbolic dreamscape of my childhood, my family’s heritage and stories, as well as deeper cultural mythologies.