February 2018: The beginning of All of us

Last year I started writing a collection of poems. I was influenced by the translations of some Chinese poems I’d been reading, particularly the fact that they were so simple but often about big issues – loss, journeys, grief – as well as small moments of happiness and observation. I decided that I’d write these poems around the themes of migration and refugee experience. Now Carina Gallegos has joined me, and we’re combining to produce a collection of poems around these themes. We’re not making up much of it – basically we’re just retelling, as poems, lots of stories we’ve been told. How are we going to knit together our two different styles of writing? Well that’s one of the interesting challenges of writing together.