Where are you from? What have you read?

"I feel at home whenever 

the unknown surrounds me, 

I receive its embrace 

aboard my floating house" -- Björk - Wanderlust (Volta, 2007) 

Being asked 'Where are you from?' can, from me, provide a plethora of different responses. I was born in Salisbury, I grew up in Wiltshire and I live in Northern Ireland. And now I'm studying in Winchester.
"So your English, you're from England?" is a common response. I guess I am. Well, British. Maybe. I'm not so sure. There are many places that I am from that trying to say one or the other leaves somebody unhappy with my reply. But since I moved around England a lot, I guess that is where I am from.

The one thing that has managed to remain consistent throughout the sporadic moves is my reading. I've read lots. I've failed to read, maybe a few books (I vaguely remember as a child trying to read 'Mrs. Dalloway' by Virginia Woolf. What a failure). Looking across at my bookshelf there is Lovecraft, King, Plath, Hans Christian Anderson, Carter... But I think my answer to the question is 'good books'. Actually, scratch that, 'books I enjoyed'. I don't think I can ever really pigeon hole myself into only reading books from a particular genre, time period etc. without feeling too familiar.

When we become familiar with things we become comfortable and when we become comfortable, we can often become lazy. So even though I have favourites I usually read multiple books at a time. Its just like phoning a friend back and continuing a conversation from earlier; it keeps the furnace in my mind blazing, no matter what the fuel.

The constant change of environment in my childhood and the multiple narratives I was often engrossed in have had a massive impact on my writing life. Unlike Emily Dickinson who confined herself to her house and let her writing take influence from her introversion ("What she saw from her window, what she read in her books, were her only external stimuli." - Amy Lowell), I want my work to embody the journey that my life has taken me on; the impulsive wanderlust that keeps my heart beating and my pen on the page.

How Is It That I Became A Writer?

The question of how I became a writer can probably be answered rather succinctly; since I can remember I've always been stashing my thoughts away in notebooks, tracing words in the air with my finger or feeling plagued by fictional characters in my head that feel as if they are furiously struggling to be free. But I guess the turning point was when, like Margaret Atwood, my work began to take on a personal significance that I wanted to share with the world.

In our first class of the year for Author Study, we were asked to consider how we became writers and also to write a timeline of important events that had happened to us. As I rifled through them, some of them including 'being diagnosed with depression' and 'getting suspended from primary/secondary school', I realised that these events had affected the way I write. When my moods were at an all time low it was mirrored in my writing and when I left school it started to become more visceral and experimental. Only I can write about these from my own point of view with authority, but they have shaped my perceptions and voice in my work. Like a carpenter shaving a block of wood, I guess I want to carve something too.

I want to leave this post with a quote by artist Banksy because if they have taught me anything, its that in writing I'll somehow always be remembered and with those words, there's a sense of comfort that I won't be forgotten.

“But maybe all art is about just trying to live on for a bit. I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”