Claire Lacey

An epic weekend of writing workshops in Wānaka! I'm stoked to be running a workshop alongside writers Liz Breslin, Rushi Vyas, Eliana Gray and Laura Williamson. October 28th and 29th 2023. Click here to book tickets for the whole weekend or for individual workshops.

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, forming ‘a thick blanket of fine-grained siliceous ooze that over time built up to become diatomite’

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 agai