Q&A with Lily Holloway
“After the roundabout to the left / there are grey herons in the wet park, / far away from the wading water.”
~ Getting Colder by Lily Holloway
The title of your poem Getting Colder implies a sense of distance or dislocation: moving away from the known into the unknown. Can you talk about the inspiration for your piece?
I wrote this poem while coming off of antidepressants for the first time in four years and I was experiencing pretty intense discontinuation symptoms. The world was a different hue and I felt as if I was walking through a wintery dream. There was certainly an element of entering the unknown; my body and brain now unfamiliar territories I was unsure I could remember how to navigate.
The setting of your poem is recognisably suburban and everyday, however it also has a surreal, dreamlike quality. How important is setting when establishing a mood or feeling in your writing?
I am a strong believer in the power of the specific and the personal in creating compelling worlds. I think specificity in setting makes for tangible poetry, even when the reader may not have experienced those spaces. A lot of my writing utilises setting as a focal point, from which the mood or feeling resonates. In this way, setting can be an active entity.
Your poetry has been widely published in literary journals, both locally and internationally. When did you first begin writing (and submitting) poetry and why?
I squealed a little when I read this question as I don't think anybody has ever called me widely published before! I first started writing purposefully about two years ago. One of the first dates I went on with my girlfriend was to a poetry night where she read her work. I thought to myself, “I want to do that!” I really love playing around with form and writing alongside or against pieces of work by other writers that excite me. I started submitting work last year after finishing a portfolio for my university poetry course because, as my aunt says, “You've got to be in it to win it!” Getting rejected from publications is hard but it gets easier the more you submit.
Which great NZ poets should we be adding to the top of our reading list?
I am currently beginning my honours research project on contemporary queer poetry in Aotearoa and am reading works by essa may ranapiri, Chris Tse, and Jackson Nieuwland (all of whom I highly recommend). I am also a big fan of Selina Tusitala Marsh (who I am stoked to have as my research supervisor), Anna Jackson, and Vanessa Mei Crofskey.
Lily Holloway is an English Honours student and teaching assistant at the University of Auckland. In her spare time, she likes to go to second-hand markets with her girlfriend. Her creative writing has been published in Starling, Scum, Poetry Lab Shanghai, The Pantograph Punch, and other various literary nooks and crannies (including her website: lilyholloway.co.nz). This year she has been honoured to receive the Shimon Weinroth Prize in Poetry, the Kendrick Smithyman Scholarship for Poetry and second place in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition.