Rebecca Copley is an Adelaide freelance writer and editor with an interesting writing blog.

About a month ago she approached me for an interview which has just been published.

” The cathartic stuff we pour out when a relationship disintegrates or we lose someone we love might be therapeutic to us but can still be crap writing. It’s all a part of the challenge to write something which is personal and local, but simultaneously universal and global. I wrote reams of stuff when my younger brother died, but probably only two of the poems were any good. Similarly when my dad died in 2009 I tried to put everything into written words. It’s an impossible task. The only good poem I wrote was called Transcendence and it took six months to write. I suspect that it went down well with others because it dealt with universal themes of loss and that especially poignant moment when we begin to grieve for the person even before their death. In my case it was my dad was losing his memories – and his very humanity really – before his body was dead. We talk about the zen ideal of living in the Here and Now. But when we are completely in the here, now, we have no shared history.” (MORE)

 

Others  in Rebecca’s ‘Writers’ Q & A’ feature include Carol LeFevre, Sean Williams, Mike Ladd, Janeen Brian, Katrina Germein, Andy Scott and Tim Sinclair.

Thanks for the interview, Rebecca. Good luck with the blog.

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Amelia Walker and Max_Mo with “Not getting on that bike” – a live version of her performance poem at COMA Festival Fringe, Adelaide Feb 27,2012. The poem also appears in her latest poetry book Sound and Bundy.

Max_Mo with our amazing Amelia Walker performing Judge Judy. Brilliant. Just watch it.

Writing of any kind is a bipolar business at best. Despondent that a few of my poems and a short story had been rejected, I was lifted back into an upper this morning to hear that my poem Mitchell Park 2000 had been selected by Les Murray in his 2001-2010 anthology The Quadrant Book of Poetry. This secret was kept from me long enough for the book to have already been printed, delivered to my Adelaide Hills address and been selected by the National Library as its Book of The Week.

Budding poets take note: this poem itself was rejected by Social Alternatives, Island and Overland before I sent it to Les when he edited Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems. He accepted speech of parts for the 2005 anthology but couldn’t find room for Mitchell Park and asked if he could use it in Quadrant. So it was accepted for that prestigious journal without ever being submitted!

It seems that once a poem is successful, it may have a long tail…

I’ve uploaded a selection of poems written over the last fifteen years. Just click on the button above (coincidentally named “poems.”)