About
Wilderness
Nineteen was my next Year of Great Change. I won the FAW Young Writers Award for a poem called ‘Queen of the Provinces’. (The Queen came home with her cardboard throne, her westerly feet worn to the bone …) I showed it to a boy I liked who passed it back, saying, “I can’t -” but he didn’t finish the sentence and I was too embarrassed to ask.
For a long time all my stories were about leaving Ringwood, the suburb where I grew up. In 1991 I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. I went to San Francisco and read the Beats and got a tattoo on my foot. I finally moved out of home and wrote bad poetry about bad boyfriends. I practised the fine art of brain cell assassination. There was pub-life, share-house politics and crap-work, mostly retail. (Work Song #1 I can’t win, as soon as one goes out, another one comes in.) Eventually I cleaned up my act and had my third try at University – Professional writing at RMIT. On my application I wrote that Ken Kesey had workshopped One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest at Stanford and I had the same aspirations (hilarious!)