Will Harris: A Brother, and One Big Lie

Re-reading lots of your work, I was reading Cuttlefish, which is a fantastic poem.

And I really liked that line where you're talking about, what is it about being young and wanting to write? And I just had these images of you with a friend going across America on these Greyhound buses, notepads in your pocket.

Tell me some of your early memories of being young and writing and why you wanted to write and what that trip was like.

that's um a poem i was trying to write for years that line about being young willing to write i can like place that line um it was one night at university with other english students we stayed up for all souls night you know all souls night it's like the i don't know the official distinction between that and Halloween, but basically it's when the portal between the land of the living and the land of the dead opens and you can communicate with the world beyond.

And there's a famous WB Yeats poem called All Souls Night.

So we tried to recreate it and stayed up and wrote these poems to to the dead.

And when I think of being young and wanting to write, I kind of think of that state of wanting to access this other world.

And I think in writing about that, it then made me remember the trip I'd done the summer before in the same kind of spirit of earnest setting out into the unknown where me and a friend took Greyhound buses across the US from the Midwest to the South.

It's like a completely different country.

back then.

That was when people were railing against Obama.

I mean, people were still showing us their guns.

And I remember Ted Kennedy died and someone cracked open a bottle of champagne.

We were completely throwing ourselves on the kindness of strangers because we couch-surfed.

So we stayed with around 16 different hosts between Chicago and New Orleans.

And I kept copious notes.

I think I listed the price of every single coffee or meal we had.

So yeah, that's one reason also why that journey looms really large in my mind, because I kept such a precise record of it.

And when I did write that poem, I went back to the notes.

And in particular, this meeting I'd had with this person in the Midwest who was incredibly characterful and made a really big impression on me, me and my friend.

The reason it's called Cuddlefish is because we got to know her.

She was hosting us for a few days.

She was a bit older than us, but still really young.

She was probably in her early mid-twenties and we were 20.

And one time, well, the last time we saw her, a friend of hers was driving us somewhere and she just asked to be let out of the car.