One of the positives of living in these small, isolated, and lightly populated islands is that one has the opportunity of not only being able to become (should one so desire) a big artistic fish in a small sea, but also one comes to know many other artistic fish as friends and regular acquaintances, including many mentioned in this linked article.
In my college and university years I read everything that I could lay my hands on while also attending artist parties, poetry readings, art shows etc. etc. Perhaps I had become a regular culture vulture with literary aspirations of my own without the voice I could yet call my own in the ferment of artistic activity flourishing all around in the ass-end of the world.
By some strange twist in the fabric of the tapestry of fate, I found my voice in the ever-challenging muteness of my first born's autism-born psychic isolation and resistance to human contact.
My literary silence continued for the four decades of my life that I embraced as father and provider for a growing family sailing along the spectrum as refracted by the apparent spectre of autism and its consequences for us a family living at or beyond the fringe of normality.
No longer able to work I have ventured a little out of the silent darkness of a paleolithic cave to rediscover my voice as a small fish in a vast ocean before it falls into timeless silence.
haiku verse
my voice settles within
dreaming room