Why did you start writing?

When I most recently started to write, which was about 12 years ago, when I really started to write in a disciplined way, where I am writing something, you know every week, working on some writing. I had tried to write poems before and lasted for a little bit of time but given up and gone and done something else, you know like when start on a diet and it lasts for three weeks, and then you are off eating junk food again. Well it was like that, and then I was in medical school and a lecturer….a heart surgeon was talking to us about the anatomy and structure of the heart, and at the end of the lecture, and I hadn’t written for years, at the end of the lecture he put up an overhead, and it had a poem on it, and medical students were quite uptight, and we had all written down the poem because we thought it was notes or something, we were halfway through the poem, and someone says “Is this going to be in the exam sir?”. And he said, “No, no, put your pens down. This has got nothing to do with medicine. This is a poem, and it’s to remind you that there is more to life than studying medicine, or sport, or working hard”.

And I remember sitting back and reading the poem and I can’t even remember what poem it was, but I guess it was….I heard that voice in my head say, if you really want to write poems you’d better do it, because otherwise you are going to end up doing something else when your heart lies with this. And it was from that point that I started to write, and I kept going. For some reason I’ve kept writing since then. So I often think what would have happened if I missed that lecture and gone to the movies?