Adrian Caesar is a poet and prose writer as well as a fellow hand waver (here we are in action).
During our interview Adrian said a great many things that struck me. For instance: ‘The great thing to me about poems is that you can, in a sense, write them in the margins of your life.’ I love that: writing in the margins.
I also found his writing process fascinating, the way he incubates a poem in his head before it emerges. ‘I do quite a lot of writing in my head,’ he said. ‘And I can carry poems for a long time…before they actually arrive on the page.’ If I don’t write phrases down they evaporate, so I find this way of working so interesting.
Adrian was on the Advisory Committee that read through the work of over 150 writers and made recommendations about those to be included in The Invisible Thread. In this interview he reflects on the selection process, the gems of writing he discovered, and his overall impression of the region’s literature. He revealed that through the reading process he became much more aware of how rich the region is in historians. This was one of my great realisations, too. I found the works of historians like Bill Gammage, Peter Stanley, CEW Bean, Tom Griffiths and Ken Inglis (I could go on) so compelling.
Do watch the interview right through to the end or you’ll miss seeing Adrian read ‘A Valediction’, his poem included in The Invisible Thread.
