There is a concept in writers circles known as ‘voice’. This is an almost ethereal, hard to pin down sound that established writers seem to have. Pick a random paragraph from one of the greats and you can just tell that they wrote it without ever knowing it was from them. Perhaps their poetry all has as similar feel, or maybe their pieces have a consistent style. You know how each song from your favourite musician is unique but somehow still sounds like them in a way that you cannot quite explain, yet you nonetheless know when another artist is desperately trying, and failing, to emulate it?…

Throughout my entire schooling career, I was a left-brain thinker. Math made sense. It had a right and a wrong. It felt like the only solid base in a chaotic world, spawned by a tumultuous home life. This was combined with incompetent and out of touch teachers and terrible examples of poetry that I simply couldn’t relate to. I was left feeling that at best the entire artform was beyond me, and at worst that it was a refuge for pomposity and prose, written by people who have experienced less than they would ever write.…