Q&A with Shaine Melrose

Shaine Melrose lives with chronic illness, often writing of this experience. They are an award winning, emerging writer/poet living on Kaurna Yerta, South Australia. Shaine’s first full length poetry collection, The Natural World Somersaults, has just been published by Walleah Press.

‘Creep of dust and water’ is such a moving read. The juxtaposition of these deeply personal experiences with the more universal familiarity of the landscape (wattle, acacia, black cockatoos) makes the poem feel like an expertly-woven tapestry. Is this a conscious balancing act in your writing process, or does it happen naturally?

Thanks, Sarah, for this comment about your reading of my poem. I’m stoked you see it as a tapestry, as this is how I approach the making of much of my writing and garden design. Stitch work has a great significance, anything can be repaired or brought together, if you have the appropriate thread. From the time I was a child reluctantly learning needlecraft, I came to understand the intricate bindings of thread and its importance in all connections of life and death, human and universe, through spending hours observing nature, considering the stitch, the tiny beginnings of things. To write of this duality occurs to a degree naturally after decades of challenging myself to articulate this. It will emerge in the first draft, then I intentionally deepen the relationship of the landscape and the personal. My early poems mostly explored nature, but when my chronic illness became disabling, I searched for the thread of language to understand and express this change in my body and life.

‘Willow tree creaks, willow leaves whisper into my mouth, into lungs. I lie still. My wet cheek against cool pebble.’ This poem explores the very real challenges of chronic illness, while at times playing with expectations of how a chronically ill body moves through the world. In this line, a fall becomes a beautiful, almost ethereal moment. Can you tell us more about how you like to approach chronic illness/disability representation in your writing?

Once again lessons of youth influence my work, looking for the good and beauty in all things to overcome hardship. Even though I know in many ways this could become ‘Pollyanna bullshit’, the art of distraction can be very powerful when the distraction is the wonders of nature. Firsthand experience brings me back to my relationship with plants, soil, creatures. Becoming still and hearing the sounds and voices of the natural world lessen the distress of the suffering body and mind through letting go of my body and just being. This is some kind of communion I constantly try to express. If I am too in the body the poem becomes heavy and difficult for the reader. It is important to define the impact of chronic illness and disability on our lives, but I survive because of the ethereal.

You’ve written about ‘slaying the demon of doubt’ in your work, and through this effort The Natural World Somersaults is now available for readers to enjoy (congratulations!). How would you encourage other poets to slay their own doubt demon?

We all are different in the way we doubt ourselves and why we doubt ourselves. I still face a degree of doubt at the beginning of every new project, some doubt is necessary to give us an edge I think. It’s good to be aware some of the best writers you know also experience doubt. Crippling doubt is not helpful, it needs heavy duty tools to overcome. Completing this collection required much self-affirmation and recognition of where I needed help to achieve goals. If your doubt is a demon, give it a name and regularly tell it to f**k off. If it’s there on my shoulder niggling away at my confidence, I would say ‘f**k off Frank’, take the plunge and press send. I have nothing to lose.

Alison J Barton

Alison J Barton’s poetry is widely published in Australian and international literary journals. Her work has been recognised in numerous prizes and Best of Australian Poems over several years. She was the inaugural winner of the 2023 University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, and was granted places in several other residencies around the world. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Not Telling, was published by Puncher & Wattmann. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Suburban Review.