Will Harris: A Brother, and One Big Lie

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 Introduction00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America00:06:14 When notes give you too much information00:07:56 How you can tell when someone writes from a photograph00:12:12 Publishing a first collection00:13:32 RENDANG, identity and being marketed00:14:54 "Am I British? Am I mixed?"00:16:30 Invented worlds and invented selves00:18:58 Poetry as a form of truth telling00:21:41 The one big lie behind Brother Poem00:24:14 The family stories that shape us00:27:46 Children arrive already formed00:30:43 The fiction project that became a poem00:35:55 The White Jumper00:40:39 Poems that change form when read aloud🎥 WATCH the full episode📘 Buy Brother Poem, RENDANG and Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.