Photo by Doug Lilly
Sue Wootton was born in Wellington in 1961 and grew up there and in Whanganui. Her work has been widely anthologised and published, and her several awards include winning the Caselberg International Prize for Poetry and the NZ Poetry Society Competition, and placing second in the 2013 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Sue’s debut novel, Strip, was longlisted for the Acorn Fiction Prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her fifth poetry collection, The Yield, was a finalist in the poetry category of those awards in 2018. She was the recipient of the 2018 NZSA Beatson Fellowship.
Sue lives in Dunedin where she is a PhD candidate in English and Medicine at the University of Otago. She edits the medical humanities e-zine Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life.
Wootton comments: ‘I’m a former physiotherapist, and it was in that work that I first began to understand the real and powerful connections between language, the imagination and recovery. This poem started from thinking about that, and then gradually became more of a meditation on chance – chance both in the sense of “luck” and the sense of “opportunity”. It’s about the luck of being born into a loving environment – or the bad luck of not – and the awesome, overwhelming, terrifying responsibilities of parenting. It’s an optimistic poem though, I think, hanging on tenaciously to the idea that it is always possible to improve on whatever cards we deal or are dealt. Heart, hater, earth: same letters, different words.’
Links
Sue’s website
Corpus e-zine