MA: That is so beautiful – a nuanced dialogue between the poet, memory, oral traditions, Country and imagination. I wonder how much of your poetry is pulled from imagination and imaginative practice? Does imagination anchor your poems as much as memory?

SA: Well, yes, but mainly in the sense that we need our imagination to fill in the outlines of memory. Along with ‘lake people,’ there is the poem, ‘authority figures,’ that stemmed from dreams, an imaginative place, and the poetic language filled in the rest of what felt like a memory of the dreams. It’s funny, though, as I am currently trying to write more in the space of pure imagination, with fiction and playwriting (as you might be able to tell from my influences response above!), and I find it doesn’t come as naturally. It freaks me out to think of saying something ‘wrong’ – don’t worry, I’ve been having a word to that internal committee of perfectionists and critics – instead of feeling the freedom of complete imagination. Instead, I’ve actually found that fiction is easier to write when some detail, whether it’s a line of dialogue or an object, is borrowed from real life. Memory – is very helpful. And I have full confidence that, as with poetry, these memories or the realness is simply the initial spark, and the final product goes a fair distance from where you begin.

MA: I’ve always thought that dreams and poetry go hand-in-hand. They both engage mystical processes within us, by bringing forth images in our minds instead of our eyes. Speaking of things we can’t see – many poets, myself included wrestle with the ‘internal committee of perfectionists and critics’ you mention. How do you engage in dialogue with them? Do you have practices, whether with writing or otherwise, that help you to silence the inner critic?

SA: Well, it’s interesting, this notion of the committee members came from a book I’m listening to called Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer. It’s well-researched, if a little ‘bro-ey,’ and looks at anxiety from a neurological and habit-based perspective. Say we have a moment of creative doubt, the committee takes that as a cue to pop up with something unhelpful. Brewer suggested going so far as to give your inner critics names and roles on this committee so you can address them like if your thought is, ‘You can’t write about that,’ you counter with, ‘Okay, that’s what you think, unhelpful Alan’ and apparently this naming practice gives you space from them – like it’s not directly you. I don’t necessarily go that far, but I’ve borrowed techniques from him and some other people in that therapy/mindfulness orbit to turn the volume down on them. The crux is that feelings are not facts.

Any garden-variety therapeutic work will suggest that your inner critic voice typically stretches back to someone in your childhood telling you to stop making up stories, that being an artist won’t make you money, that you’re singing too loud, someone in the year 11 art room sneering at your photography, or something similarly dismissive.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a great resource specifically targeted towards creativity, and it’s a program I’ve done end-to-end in the past, and now I use as a resource to dip into when I’m in a bind. A lot of that work is about encouraging your child/artist self and letting them know it’s safe to play. I borrow parts from it when I remember.

I also regularly listen to Tara Brach – who once said in a podcast: ‘What if there was nothing wrong with you? What would you do then?’, which is like a tripwire for those critics – and lately, have been dabbling with some Zen kōans which offer their own incredible spin on the world.

But your question held the answer, really, in that this is all practice, and it must continue. To use a sports metaphor, it’s just like constantly being in training for something. Sometimes, I get exhausted and frustrated, thinking why do I have to keep going with all this? Not that I’m expecting to be ‘fixed’ but why does it feel endless? Ultimately, I accept this as part of the creative life, strength training for a life of inquiry into the inner and outer worlds that I experience. I’m happy to have developed a therapeutic toolkit that offers me enough equilibrium to write, the wisdom to know when to loosen the grip on the techniques and just blob through it for a bit, as well as friends who can help give me a reality check when my head’s stuck in the sand.

MA: You mention in the afterward of the body country, that poetry and art-making for you is never fully completed but resolved up to a point. How was your journey with this manuscript, from its beginnings to structural development and a resolved text?

SA: It’s so interesting! The writing process was so long. I wanted to write a book of poems so badly, and this manuscript took me a long time to finish, to edit with the fantastic Bianca Valentino at State Library Queensland, then through a secondary edit with Jeanine Leane when it was going through the motions at Hachette. Now it’s been a year since the book is out, and I can’t quite believe it.

I’ve talked to a few other poets who feel a similar way about their first projects. You sort of muddle through, not necessarily knowing what it is, what shape it’ll take or how to write the book you’re writing. I think now, having finished one, there’s this tension of wanting to take the learnings from that process and apply them to the next project. For instance, mine might be that I think more thematically through the writing process in order to have more throughlines within the collection from the get-go, rather than finding the thread later in the project. But I also have this sense that any planning you do, as a creative, needs to be solid enough to light the way but loose enough to be let go at any moment.