Claire Lacey

Hooray! My creative-critical PhD thesis is now open access. That means you, and er, well, anyone really, can download it and read it. I hope you will.  The first half is the critical stuff: it looks at how brain injury is represented through language in both medical and literary settings. The second half is my poetry manuscript, which represents the disorienting experience my life-altering brain injury. Download Concussion Episodes: a creative-critical project on poetry and brain injury , at the University of Otago's online archive: https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/12826  

My article on tramping, backcountry huts, invisible disability, and the accessibility of nature is now available online for free, thanks to 1964 Magazine. Link below.  --- A BACKCOUNTRY TRAMP TAKES CAREFUL PLANNING. EVEN MORESO IF, LIKE ME, YOU ARE DISABLED. I HAVE AN ACQUIRED BRAIN INJURY, SUSTAINED IN MY LATE 20s. It’s not just the headaches, or the brain fog, the memory loss, or the fatigue; it’s the way I feel like I have to justify my presence. When I move through spaces with very active people, I feel the loss of what my body used to be able to do. I am wary of the way other people judge and respond to me and my disability. Sometimes that judgement takes the form of pity. Sometimes, disgust or anger. I have experienced being excluded from spaces, being disbelieved because I don’t “look” disabled, and being expected to do things I don’t have the capacity to achieve. We won’t get into the slurs, though I’ve heard those too. This is a bummer of a way to start a story. Let’s try ...

 I was asked to contribute a video for Brain Week by the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand. I appreciate the opportunity to chat about my work writing and thinking about concussion. This video is also hosted on the Otago Museum's Brain Week page  alongside some really fascinating talks about neurological research around Aotearoa New Zealand

 Concussion Episode 7: There's A Body All Right is a new chapbook of my brain injury poems. Many thanks to Model Press / Ryan Fitzpatrick for publishing this excerpt of my thesis manuscript. You can download the pdf for free here: https://ryanfitzpatrickca.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/model-press-011-claire-lacey-concussion.pdf

Impact: Women Writing After Concussion features 21 writers reflecting on their experience with traumatic brain injury. It is now available to pre-order, so ask your local bookseller or check your preferred online retailer. I am so grateful to be included in this collection, and especially want to thank the editors E. D. Morin and Jane Cawthorne for their hard work throughout the process.

Erin Mouré's poem "What, me, guard sheep?" from Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person  is my favourite poem. I know I wrote about it several times before back when this was a blog I kept regularly. I have been spending a lot of time with sheep during the Covid-19 lockdown, since I am lucky enough to live in a house with a paddock out back. I have taken to visiting the sheep daily and, often, recite lines of Mouré to them. So when I wanted to make a video for the Octagon Poetry Collective's virtual reading series, it seemed obvious that I needed to include the sheep. I wrote a poem about a lot of things, but with Bossy, the cuddliest ewe, and Lambikins who comes galloping over for pets, in mind. Of course, when it came time to film, the four white sheep were in an unreachable corner down a steep hill. But Cassius the Grumpy Grey Ram came to see what I was doing, and so he features in the video where I talk about the sweet ewes. What a good sport. He isn't always,...

With cancellations of live events, I have made some videos of recent poems I have produced as part of my PhD project which uses poetry to explore brain injury. In the first video I give a character to the brain structure of the amygdala, which is involved in both fear and pleasure responses. In the second, I swaddle myself in a blanket to read about brain injuries and moths.

I have a new article published on the Corpus blog about my experience with brain injury, and why I am working to represent that experience through poetry. https://corpus.nz/headcase-on-representing-concussion-in-poetry/