Emerging Writers Series: Scott-Patrick Mitchell
“The creative process was very much about trust and instinct. I listened to what the poems wanted, what else they needed. This is very much a collection about trusting yourself to be and do better, so I made sure that was an implicit part of the creative process.”
For the first time in our Emerging Writers series, we managed to nab a poet to sit down and have a chat with us - and what a poet to nab!
Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a non-binary creative, poet and writer, whose work has been published widely. In 2019 they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award and The Wollongong Short Story Prize. Their first full-length collection, Clean (2022), explores addiction and recovery, becoming lost and finding your way back home.
Scott-Patrick lets us in on their creative process, who’s dominating and influencing their bookshelves, as well as some fantastic lessons they’ve learned on their writing journey.
Tell us a bit more about you and your background. How did you come to be a poet and writer, and when did you decide this was something you wanted to pursue seriously?
Growing up, I always wanted to be a writer. As a child and a teenager, language fascinated me more than art.
With art, I realised you could draw and paint something and make it look as realistic as you wanted. But with poetry, I discovered I could use images that spoke around or through or over what it was I wanted to say. There was a playfulness in language that really appealed to me.
When I went to uni, I did three years of a BA in Criminal Psychology before I decided to pursue writing. When I started studying poetry, something ignited in me, particularly when I performed poetry: there was an agency to the experience of writing and performing that I still feel to this day.
Your debut poetry collection, Clean, takes the reader on an emotional journey, and it’s clear a lot of care and time has been poured into it. How did the collection come together, and what’s your general creative process?
Clean includes poems from over a decade and a half of writing. The collection itself is split into three parts: Dirty, The Sleep Deprivation Diaries and Clean.
A large percentage of the poems in Dirty were written while I was an addict and were then rigorously edited. However, poems such as This Town and Night Orchids were written after the fact and written in response to photographs taken while I was using. Then of course a poem like whipping boy, which is a brutal poem, was written during therapy as a way to recover from the violence of that situation.
In the middle part, the poem The Sleep Deprivation Diaries (except for Day 4 and Day 7) was written entirely from journal entries I had written during my time as an addict. But I compiled these poems much later when I recovered.
In 2019 I was lucky to receive a First Edition Fellowship Residency at Katherine Susannah Writers Centre here in WA and it was during this time that I played a lot with creating new work from my journals. The result is really evident in the middle section, where most of the language and images are lifted directly from these journals yet crafted together with clarity and intent.
The poems in the final section are the most recent poems I’ve written and all came about as a result of counselling and therapy. As the final manuscript began to take shape, I developed an instinct as to what needed to be included, or rather, what wanted to be written. Poems such as The Wilderness Steals My Mothers Voice and The Morning Star were ones that insisted that I write them. Others in this section are results of commissions, such as Marri and Red Flowering Gum, which I wrote as part of Red Room Poetry’s New Shoots project.
Overall, the creative process was very much about trust and instinct. I listened to what the poems wanted, what else they needed. This is very much a collection about trusting yourself to be and do better, so I made sure that was an implicit part of the creative process.
Despite the overall subject matter you explore in Clean, I found there to be a lot of tenderness, both for others and towards yourself, and your journey of self is really evident in the pages. How cathartic a process was this for you, and what are some of your hopes for the collection overall for readers?
I wrote this collection in the hope that it would reach somebody out there struggling with meth addiction themselves, and show them that there is hope beyond using. I’ve already received a message from somebody in the midst of addiction telling me that my book has helped show them a way through, a road map to a life of recovery. This brings me so much joy.
But more than anything I wanted to write a story about recovery from meth because I hadn’t read any by Australian authors. The media has a tendency to overplay the situation, focus on the horrors – after all, Boorloo / Perth itself was dubbed Meth City on the front cover of The West Australian back in October 2016. The one thing I noticed was missing from the majority of media coverage was tenderness.
That’s why it became a big focus of the book: for all the horror of addiction, I experienced a surprising amount of tenderness both while I was using and in recovery.
I actually saw your spoken-word performance for TEDxUWA in 2018 (which was brilliant). Is there a significant creative difference for you between developing a poem for spoken word versus the page?
Oh wow, thank you.
So for context, the TEDxUWA piece was a work called The 12 Minute Monomyth, which was written in response to my one-person show The 24 Hour Performance Poem (T24HPP) which I performed at Crack Theatre Festival in 2015. T24HPP honestly changed my life and how I perform poetry – the show was thematically based on The Tarot, each hour a new card over 24 hours, returning to The Fool at the end. I would literally improvise poems for 50 or 55 minutes, have a short break, then move on to the next card/batch of improvised poems. This was an endurance art piece that changed the way I now write performance poems. It also changed my relationship with audiences – I remember at the 6-8 am mark, strangers would come in and leave offerings of fruit and coffee as I was performing. I still get a little emotional remembering how magical those moments were.
Now, the process for stage poems largely takes place in my head, building the poem up line by line. I can hold a poem up there and write it in this manner over the course of a couple of weeks. It allows me to improvise in my mind but also memorise and embody the poem fully. Once I have it all figured out, then I write it down.
Page poems start in a similar way but I typically write them down after I have the first few lines and then work from there. I access the same embodiment process by taking a walk after I write a few lines, so as to jog more of the poem into being. I really enjoy the writing/editing process of page poems because it’s rarely a static thing – I frequently get up and stride out the lines.
Who have been some of the biggest influences on your writing - tell us a bit about who’s on your own bookshelves that we should be reading?
I always return to H.D., Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian. They were the three biggest influences on my work when I first began, and I always find sanctuary in their words still to this day.
While I was editing Clean, there were two particular influences. The first was Victoria Chang’s Obit. A majority of the love poems in Clean borrow their form from Chang’s use of the obituary as a poetic form. It was a form that rang true not only to the content of my love poems but the words my drug counsellor gave me in our first meeting, that “recovery is a form of grief”. And it is because you have to let go of so much, so Chang’s obituary shaped poems made so much sense. The other influence was Kayleb Rae Candrilli, who writes a lot about their family members' experiences with addiction. Candrilli’s poems kind of gave me permission to be more honest and authentic in what I wrote about.
Otherwise, my influences are many and varied. Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Danez Smith and Kate Tempest always inspire me. John Kinsella’s work shaped my early years, particularly Syzygy and Genre. I always find myself at home / at peace inside Kirli Saunders poems. Dakota Feirer’s work has a similar effect. There’s a fair bit of David Stavanger’s grit that has influenced my writing. Maddie Godfrey’s poems, and their celebration of tenderness, have also been constant reminders to be soft or softer with myself. Then of course there are books coming out that people should be aware of: Alan Fyfe’s T explores meth addiction with an authentic poetic voice while Andrew Sutherland’s debut Paradise (Point of Transmission) promises to be a masterpiece.
What are three of the biggest lessons you’ve learned as a writer that you would pass on to others just starting their writing journeys?
Only three? Haha. Okay:
Lean in to your passion. Remember, poetry has a multitude of forms and you can explore as many as you want. But find the ones you really love and lean into them. Read about them. Experiment with them. Play. Explore. At all times, remind yourself that this is rooted in passion and, as such, allow yourself to sing, be present, embrace the wonder of the moment, of the process. Create for the sake of necessity, beauty, urgency and voice. And remember, every new project is an opportunity to reinvent yourself.
Keep a journal and carry it with your always. But not like a lined journal – boo! Instead, write in a blank paged journal and give yourself permission to take up space. Collage, sketch, draw, write. Play on the page. Keep a glossary of unusual words you find at the back. Fill it with thoughts, dreams, anything. Once you finish a journal, give it a title and move on to a new one.
When submitting work, start off small. By this I mean, send your work to small publications and work your way up. Make friends with rejection. Each refusal shows that at least you tried. The same can be said for literary competitions – hone your skills in small regional comps first. If you’re submitting work that feels “safe”, push it to uncover something new and surprising. Work your way up to the big comps. And remember to have fun, remind yourself that there is joy in the process. Understand that this is the longest game you might play, so be prepared for the ebb and flow. You will have your time in the spotlight if you follow your passion.
As an aside, if anyone knows of the cure for Impostor Syndrome, please let me know – I still can’t shake it after 20 years.
And lastly, what’s next for you? Are you working on anything at the moment you could share with us?
I have some events coming up. There’s an online Q&A with Dr Tamryn Bennett from Red Room Poetry happening on Wednesday, March 23. For Perth audiences, I am appearing at Perth Library alongside my publisher, Terri-Ann White, on Tuesday, March 29 for another Q&A. I’m also making appearances at Margaret River’s Readers & Writers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival and Perth Poetry Festival.
As far as creative work, I have new poems appearing in Debris Magazine and Wonderground. I’m also completing a suite of poems for Westerly as part of a Mid-Career Fellowship I’ve been awarded. The poems appearing in all these journals are for my next collection The Rainbow House, which explores my queer identity in relation to LGBTIQA+ activism, celebration and suburbia.
But to be honest, I feel that for me, personally, 2022 is going to be a year full of surprises, so I have no doubt other wonderful things will happen. Follow me on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook to find out if my spidey senses are accurate!
Scott-Patrick Mitchell lives as a guest on Whadjuk Noongar County. SPM’s work appears in Contemporary Australian Poetry, The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, Solid Air, Stories of Perth, Going Postal and the award-winning chapbook songs for the ordinary mass (PressPress, 2009). In 2019, they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award and The Wollongong Short Story Prize. SPM was recently shortlisted for the 2020 / 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowships. Their first full-length collection, Clean, explores addiction and recovery, becoming lost and finding your way back home. It is available now from Upswell Publishing.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
