What are your earliest memories regarding being attracted to the arts generally or writing in particular?
That’s a great question. We grew up quite poor. My mum was a single mother, a daughter of Greek immigrants, a working class family, but our house was always crammed with books. Any opportunity Mum had, she’d take us to art galleries, the theatre, the opera, the ballet.
She loved the visual arts and she had these big beautiful art books of the masters: Michelangelo, Rafael, Da Vinci; she had a Van Gogh book which I loved because of the intensity and movement and vibrancy of those paintings. I felt as if Van Gogh painted the way I experienced the world.
Mum had this gorgeous book of William Blake’s illuminated prints, which included his poems. She’d read me “The Tyger” poem, and that really set my imagination on fire.
You had a good early grounding in the arts?
I did, but I struggled with language as a young person. I was dyslexic and I had ADHD, and I needed speech therapy. Language felt like a scary, impenetrable fortress. The only place language made sense to me was in poems and poetry. This was especially true of Shakespeare. I know a lot of people think that Shakespeare is inaccessible, but when I went to see Macbeth when I was very young, I was probably too young to see something like Macbeth, the language was doing something so profound, that it felt like an epiphany or a homecoming.
You didn’t need to know the language to understand what was being said. The sonic qualities of the language had meaning in their own right. Shakespeare’s language was like music. I think that’s why Shakespeare was able to speak to me so deeply, when the simpler text in my school books confounded me. Like all good poetry, Shakespeare’s plays mobilise those sonic properties and textures of language that speak to your senses. It was discovering Shakespeare that set me off on my poetry journey.
It took me a long time to work out that it was the poetry and language, rather than the theatre and acting, that I was drawn to and passionate about. I ended up going into acting, even into my tertiary studies, well before I started working on poetry seriously.
It seems as if there was plenty of support at home. Was there support at school?
I was encouraged at home although I was encouraged to veer towards the performing arts and the theatre. My siblings were very smart, very precocious, and I thought that they might be the writers; I didn’t think I was clever enough to be a writer. I thought if I went into acting, I could perform other people’s writing, other people’s poetry.
I didn’t really get any support at school. I was seen as a feral child. People didn’t really understand about ADHD when I was growing up. It felt like I was trying ten times harder than everyone else all the time and getting only a quarter of the way; there was a lot of prejudice, and my teachers often thought I was either lazy or belligerent. There was a lot of misunderstanding at school.
The school system wasn’t really working for you at that point?
I went to a couple of schools, and then I was home-schooled for a while, and I ended up at Bradfield College in North Sydney. They treated you like you were at university, there were no uniforms, you weren’t policed like you were at other schools. It was a school for children who didn’t fit well into the conventional schooling system. It was a school which also had older kids that were going back to school, so it was an interesting melting pot.
I really didn’t get any help at all until I was in Year 11 and 12. I had some amazing English teachers and they could see I was genuinely interested in the material and trying really hard, and so they invested time in teaching me, sat down with me, one on one, showed me how to write an essay, how to break down the concepts; and they encouraged my creative writing as well.
Do you go on to tertiary education?
I did all the auditions for the drama schools, I got into Theatre Nepean which at the time was the alternative in Sydney to NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art). I was only 17 and I decided to take a year off and go travelling. I travelled to Greece, and around Europe, and to New York, and then I returned to go to university.
The degree was a Bachelor of Performance Studies in Acting. I had some wonderful teachers at drama school. I had an incredible voice teacher and a fantastic movement teacher. We did a lot of work on Shakespeare, breaking down the language, we did a lot of work on phonetics, and we worked on a lot of the language plays and the tragedies. I just ate that up. I loved that.
You are still not writing at this point?
I do remember when the seed for writing was sown. In the final year at university, my movement teacher took me into her office and suggested that I had a vivid and imaginative internal life, so I should perhaps try writing.
When I lhttps://youtu.be/yr2KklAnQm8eft University, I was going to auditions, and acting in plays, often not very well-written plays, I found myself very unhappy and unsatisfied. And I realised the passion had always been for those rich, language-based plays, and it wasn’t necessarily acting, in and of itself, that I loved.
I had created a suite of poems at high school, and I had done a similar thing at university, for creative assignments; and finally it dawned on me that it had been writing, and poetry specifically, that I had been passionate about all along. I ended up going to Sydney University and completing a Master in Creative Writing.
