Julie Salt

At a university interview for my bachelor’s English degree, still aged seventeen, I declared, ‘I want to write a book’. ‘Everyone says that’ one of the profs scoffed. I was dismayed. I’d been writing since I was eight. Eventually, I went into journalism and wrote news stories instead. 

It took thirty years to finally achieve my ambition. During a mid-life crisis, poems started spilling out of me. The first, “Plane to Santa”, pieced together how my parents had experienced the death of my older brother, when I was a tiny baby. These poems were soon followed by an entire feminist noir novel about guilt, after becoming a mum myself.

In 2018, I applied for Bournemouth University’s Creative Writing and Publishing MA course. This time, no one scoffed when I said, ‘I want to publish a novel’. The lecturers were super supportive.

For my final dissertation project, however, I focussed on my poetry. My supervisor, Tom Masters, encouraged me to dig deeply into my inner self. ‘Your work,’ he said, ‘deals with ‘the inarticulate experience.’ At my look of incomprehension, he explained I’d written about emotions from a time when I was too young to have words to express them. It was a eureka moment. I realised grief had not only been ricocheting through my parents’ lives, but also my own. My poetry had embodied this and connected up many confusing events, feelings and choices in my life.

Finally, in 2020, I self-published seventy-six of my poems in a book entitled, I Breathe In. The poetic narrative weaves a story revealing the universal effects of hidden trauma. Moving between anguish, guilt and anger to relationship issues, it ultimately finds solace in the beauties of human connection, meditation, and the physical world.

Just as I’d published my book, my father became terminally ill in the peak of the pandemic. At a time when fear of death hung over so many, I found ushering dad to his death a transformative experience and one that connected us both back to my brother. 

Afterwards, I embarked on a transformational memoir to tell this story. My intention was to create a jigsaw of texts, diary entries, social media posts, descriptions of photos and videos, and poems, all woven together by narration.  

It took me on a profound journey, enabling me to explore such themes as our fear of death, the physical and spiritual aspects of dying, as well as family love and unresolved grief. Unexpectedly, great beauty, comfort and strength rise out of its weeping pages.

When complete, in 2023, the book totalled 200,000 words, which was too long, so I employed an editor. Two years on, it’s morphed into a more novelistic form which I’m still experimenting with. I hope to publish soon, but I’ve learnt that some books demand more time than others. Meanwhile, my feminist noir novel still patiently awaits both my pen’s return, and hopefully one day, its own publication.