Claire Lacey

  Odes to bad exes, scathing sonnets about nemeses, compositions against corporate holidays...you get the idea. We all need a bit of revenge in our lives. Join Claire Lacey at Indigo Room to celebrate catharsis with some tongue-in-cheek writing exercises. Get poetically petty, you know you want to. And after, stay to enjoy the Heartbreak and Bad Romance live music at Indigo Room, or go have a romantic date with your current beau because you really can have it all. Koha entry. Devilishly indulgent drinks and foods available to purchase from Indigo Room.

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  

A longpoem response to the mining at Foulden Maar, generated at a workshop led by writers Iona Winter and Kirstie McKinnon and produced by Kate Dawson and Sophie Briggs on behalf of the Mining for Meaning: the Geoethics of Extracted Industries  project. The workshop occured in Middlemarch, Otago in October 2022. More writing and art from the workshop can be found at  https://www.rareearth-art.com/foulden-maar-writing-group   Claire Lacey · Ensemble: Foulden Maar — a poem by Claire Lacey, performed with Dane Oates Ensemble: Foulden Maar Dramatis personae: Mined Text  — the reportage The Soil  — as described The Poet  — always puts themselves into the poem The Fossil Beetle  — found at Foulden Maar The Diagram  — found in the New Zealand Listener The Corporate Entity  — our villain The Underfunded Locals  — the chorus     Fossil: Foulden Maar               The diatoms sank to the bottom, formin...

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 ...

Join me Thursday, September 29th from 1-3pm at Te Whare o Rukutia, Ōtepoti for a free workshop that explores sound, movement, and collaboration.  

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,...

Rob McLennan asked me to contribute to his ongoing series "On Writing." I wrote about pain, process, my first book, my current project, & being publicly political. Check it out:  http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2020/03/on-writing-171-claire-lacey.html

The Mapping Issue of Dandelion Magazine is something special. It doesn't currently exist online, but I believe it should. It is a thematic issue that includes poetry, prose, visual work, and originally had an audio CD accompaniment.

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/

23 August 2019 @ Dunedin Public Library 5:30pm Free, booking required I will be performing a new piece of work about Digital Dunedin, inspired by the recent visit of Wikipedian at Large Mike Dickison. How does our digital landscape interact with the physical world around us and vice versa?