In my mid-thirties I found myself confronting a horrible silence. I felt it in my throat and my whole body. It was suffocating, paralysing.
I was a poet, but I couldn’t write. When I did write, silent women, stones and heavy weights appeared again and again in my work.
I imagined the silence as a stone, something inanimate. If there was any dialogue, I was cut off from it.
Now, many years later, I know that silence was an expression of the visceral memory of an early childhood trauma that I dared not look at or speak of. My journey has been, in part, to give voice to and make space for that ...
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