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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