The award-winning poet on writing in the voice of a convicted killer, her excavation of the masculine psyche and why she wants to read less
t 52, award-winning Scottish poet Em Strang is publishing her debut novel.is narrated by a convicted murderer who gets a shot at redemption when the mother of his victim makes a gesture of what appears to be radical forgiveness. Visceral, incantatory and startlingly beautiful in places, it’s a book whose power is accentuated by its brevity.
I actually did a lot of dance practice around it, feeling my way into the impulse to write something longer. For me, writing isn’t just an intellectual process – it’s very much a whole-body process, an emotional process, a spiritual process.He just landed, and that’s how he had to speak, in quite a formal, pedantic kind of way, and with a Polish accent because his mother’s Polish. When I read it out loud, I can’t read it in my own voice, it just doesn’t sound right.
When I’m lying on my deathbed, I bet I won’t be there going: 'Thank God I read 20,000 books in my life'I tend to use poetry as a vehicle for exploring love, in particular spiritual love, and my novels – this one and the next – are to do with evil and excavating the masculine psyche in relation to violence. It’s not something I’ve set out to do, but that certainly seems to be the way of it.I think the fascination is actually more to do with healing.
’s work with the Forgiveness Project. There are some stories of profound healing and transformation that are incredibly rich, almost religious, to me.I’ve no idea why this has happened to me but I’ve become fascinated by Christian mysticism. I don’t even know how to describe it; it’s inarticulable. I believe in God but I don’t know how on earth I would say what that is. God is not some kind of guy in the sky.
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