Show Notes
Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.
A warm, thoughtful conversation between two writers about invention, memory and what gets lost the moment your first book comes out.
00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write 00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America 00:06:14 When notes give you too much information 00:07:56 How you can tell when someone writes from a photograph 00:12:12 Publishing a first collection 00:13:32 RENDANG, identity and being marketed 00:14:54 "Am I British? Am I mixed?" 00:16:30 Invented worlds and invented selves 00:18:58 Poetry as a form of truth telling 00:21:41 The one big lie behind Brother Poem 00:24:14 The family stories that shape us 00:27:46 Children arrive already formed 00:30:43 The fiction project that became a poem 00:35:55 The White Jumper 00:40:39 Poems that change form when read aloud
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