The Monthly interviews Australian and New Zealand poet Joanna Preston – Part 1 – Always a writer

Do you have any early memories of being attracted to literature, writing or poetry?

Absolutely. I grew up in a family that loved books and reading, and from as early as I can remember I was making up poems and plays and songs and stories. Me, my brother and youngest cousin used to spend school holidays at my grandparents farm, so we would often put on shows to (forcibly) entertain the adults, as well as just mucking about together. And apparently when I was about four years old, grandma heard me saying goodbye to the river, and told everyone else in the family that I was going to be a poet.

Can you remember when you first started writing – generally – or writing poetry specifically?

No – I can’t ever remember not writing. I used got get what my family called my “writing fits”, when I would madly run around trying to find a pencil and some paper to write on, and would need to be left alone until I’d written it out of my system. Those were the days …

Did you get support at home?

Absolutely. All the pens and paper I wanted! Plus books bought for us, read to us, shared with us. No-one else in my immediate family was a writer, so that part I had to largely work out on my own. But it was my grandma who told me that yes, why not try to write poetry seriously? And then arranged to have some of my poems sent to a cousin who taught English at a University for an unvarnished opinion.

Did you get support at school?

Wildly variable. I had a couple a great teachers at primary school who encouraged me. Then some awful English teachers at High School who strongly discouraged me; before finally having a truly brilliant teacher for my last three years who knew poetry, understood it, loved it, and pushed me to go into it deeply too. That’s what reignited my love of poetry.

Did you go on study literature or poetry at tertiary level?

Sort of. At undergraduate level I scraped through English 101, and got too distracted by other things. (Literary theory is very much not my thing.) Then I picked up a unit on Creative Writing with Hazel Smith in my final year, and really loved it. She thought it was something I should pursue seriously, but by then I’d met my (now) husband, and was heading off to create a new life for myself in New Zealand.

I ended up living in the UK for three years – my husband was seconded to head up the European branch of a NZ textiles research company, so we lived in Ilkley in West Yorkshire. I managed to get myself into the MPhil in Creative Writing course at the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales), with Gillian Clarke as my mentor. So that was two years immersing myself in UK poetry. Along with Gillian, I was working with Tony Curtis, Sheenagh Pugh, Christopher Meredith and later on Philip Gross.