My thanks to Words & Women for blog space in which to share news of
my debut pamphlet Like Other Animals (HappenStance 2017).
First things: I’m a slow writer. Like Other Animals was written over ten
years. The poems took shape alongside my life as a teacher in the US and my
return to Britain some years later. The pamphlet is a celebration of encounters
with the natural world. It’s also a reckoning with childlessness and a reconciliation
with my body.
Writing the pamphlet was a lesson in the art
of the long haul. I kept leaving things out of the poems. I kept leaving myself
out of my body. It was only when I came back to Britain and began to reunite
with landscapes I’d known from childhood that I was able to write about the
experience of reproductive illness and accept its realities. I’m still learning
the influence and solace of these formative places. Returning here allowed me
to complete the manuscript – a psychological completion, really, more than a
page count.
I’m indebted to the kind directness of my
editor (lovely Nell at HappenStance) in telling me to include the more
difficult and cantankerous of these body poems in the pamphlet – I’d been
afraid of having written them, for what they revealed about my own physicality.
The poems seemed more embodied, less cautious about life, than I was. But
they’re also poems about how we name what happens to us, and about whose words we
fight with along the way, and it was this rationale that persuaded me to let
them in.
 |
| The wind drops us a pile of clouds - Footpath near Ringstead, Norfolk |
While I was living in Pittsburgh – a city I’d
felt adopted by and in which some of the poems are set – often, at my desk or
before sleep, my mind would flood with images from home: the Wash and its
expanses. Cut fields and a line of trees. Sixteen hours of daylight at the end
of May. The birds and insects that belong with those long days. Like Other Animals is, I think, the
outcome of a decision to return here. Begun in one country and revised by
another. For anyone reading it, especially if she is an East Anglian writer, I
hope its visual geography will resonate and that the lines will be good
company.
If you’d like to hear more in 2018, Lois will
be reading at Saltmarsh Poets on 2 April and in Ipswich on 3 May. Like Other Animals is available from HappenStancePress.
Lois Williams grew up on Britain's Wash coast and spent
many years abroad teaching as a university lecturer and visiting poet in the
USA. Like Other Animals, her debut poetry pamphlet from
HappenStance Press, was published in 2017. Lois's poems and essays have
appeared in Words and Women: One, Verse Daily, New England Review, The
Rotary Dial, Antiphon, Mslexia and Granta. Her
work has been recognised with residencies from the Charles Pick Fellowship and
Vermont Studio Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment