Q&A with SR Ekstein

SR Ekstein is an Australian writer, with work longlisted in the Grieve Project 2025 Anthology with the Hunter Writers Centre, and work forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine. She has been previously published in Cordite Poetry, Stone of Madness, Baby Teeth Journal, Fawn Press, and elsewhere. She can be found in her local library or @SREwrites on Instagram.

The title of your piece claims that it’s ‘a real story’, but the speaker quickly admits ‘I am lying about everything all the time’. In your practice, how do you see the relationship between poetry and truth? I’m curious to hear what draws you to write in the rich, murky intersection of confessional poetry with an (admittedly) unreliable narrator—the effect is quite stunning.

Firstly, thank you so much! It’s a great question.

I think this came from a place of being interested in the way everyone has to construct a narrative of their own life to understand it, and how little control you do or don’t have over that. How the thing you use to understand the story of your life is not always initially defined by you, and if it’s not, how do you regain that? And I think that conflates with mental illness, and how your own knowledge and truth, and then to an extent, your own narrative, is constantly recontextualised because the things happening in your own brain are inherently unreliable. In my practice, often my writing is trying to get around or onto the other side of this solipsistic mirror. You don’t want the only narrative of your life to be about staying on this side of the glass, so to speak, and of course it isn’t, but it is. There’s obviously a lot of references in the poem to philosophies and writers that have grappled with this, but the late great Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik, has been a big influence in my relationship with all of this, and with my practice.

Pizarnik famously wrote, ‘like love, humour, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth’.¹ The poem, once you’ve begun to write it, has its own truth outside of you, and there’s freedom in that. I also think a lot about how Pizarnik describes that writing poetry, for her, is the opposite feeling of exile. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot this year, and how the act of writing itself is isolating, and that’s multiplied when you add in cognitive dysfunction, which sets up this kind of diabolical mirror maze that you both did and didn’t buy a ticket to enter. As Pizarnik so aptly puts it, it has its own freedom, but you do have to both enter into and release this sense of exile all at once. And that’s another duplicity all on its own, just within the practice itself.

This poem also comes from the way your brain so actively lies to you when you’re experiencing cognitive illnesses, and this kind of culturally fractured conversation around mental health. I think we’re in a particular moment when our culture is very invested in saying how so totally fine it is about addressing mental health and how normal it is in the 2020s, that everyone has something wrong with their brain, and I don’t think this is the great point of connection it’s sometimes made out to be. Especially since so much of our way of life has become so removed from community itself or deliberately distanced from commitments outside of the known. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but there is a lot of inorganic infrastructure that is barricading us from each other, and an authentic connection or truth, especially in relationships and with community, sometimes feels further away than ever. I think the truth of the poem is somewhere in that exiled land, but the writing of it gives it that truth, which in turn does and doesn’t free the narrator.

From what I’ve read of your work in journals like Cordite, your poems tend to be quite structurally experimental. How do you decide where words should be placed on the page?

All my writing, even my prose, doesn’t usually start with a chronological beginning. I think this comes back to this idea of how everyone needs a narrative to understand themselves. I don’t always see or feel this narrative of myself as linear, and I think this is especially true when part of your brain is so unreliable. Part of that means your brain finds it difficult but also deeply uninteresting to recorrect any kind of linear chronology.

But in general, all my poems that circle mental health tend to fall out of structure. I think there are things society, and myself as an individual, can’t quite shape out because there’s a pain in holding onto a certain idea of yourself, especially when you’re experiencing a mental, emotional or spiritual depression, and there’s a pain in letting go. I think our culture is definitely going through this at the moment, and a result, so is the individual. It leaves you without a familiar form, and specifically for this poem in dog years, I wanted to evoke that. There’s a lot of things that aren’t being said as well, and I wanted those gaps to stand out—there are things the narrator just will not admit to you or themselves, at least not directly, but something might reflect back at you in those gaps.

I also wanted it to almost feel like reading someone’s diary. To be totally honest, I always have a lot to say about everything all the time, and that’s true even in poetry. Sometimes I have to find ways to pull all those ideas back, or in the case of in dog years, how can I structure all these fragmented ideas of this non-linear narrative effectively? I wanted it to feel close to almost a fractured journal or stream of consciousness, because the central struggle for the narrator is so incredibly intimate.

As a writer in the early years of their professional practice, it must be exciting to have recently been longlisted for the Grieve project by the Hunter Writers’ Centre. Congratulations! What can we expect to see from you next, in terms of subject matter or forthcoming poems? Is there anything you’re currently working on?

Thank you so much! It was exciting, and that poem in the Grieve project was actually the first poem I ever sat down to write, almost exactly ten years ago. I’d held onto it for a long time until I found the right project to place it with. I have two poems forthcoming very soon in publications I’ve admired for years—one in Uncanny Magazine, and one in the tenth anniversary edition of Wildness Journal.

I am always overly ambitious. I’m also a prose writer, so I’m currently working on two different novellas, both leaning into literary horror, the social and environmental radicalisation of climate change, strange and insidious supernatural creatures, and some very sad but mostly angry young women.

I’m also slowly amassing a few different poetry collections. I have a suite of horror poems, a suite of some speculative fairytale retelling poems, and a suite of less strange, more zeitgeisty contemporary poems. If we’re getting more conceptual, themes I can’t seem to get away from are eternal recurrence, possession (supernaturally, romantically, and economically), and that big howling wolf that wrote in dog years with me.

Alisha Brown

Alisha Brown is a writer, editor, and musician born on Kamilaroi land with ties to Wonnarua, Yuin, and Gadigal Country. She won the 2025 Finding Beauty Poetry Prize and the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize, placed second in the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has also appeared in many SCWC anthologies and was Highly Commended for the 2024 and 2025 SCWC Poetry Prizes. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and Meanjin, among others. Her website is alishabrown.com.au

1. Pizarnik, Alejandra. A Tradition of Rupture. Translated by Cole Heinowitz, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019. ↩︎