Q&A with Robbie Coburn

What was the inspiration behind The Foal in the Wire?

The Foal in the Wire is a book I feel I couldn’t have written if my life had happened any other way. It was like everything I had experienced and lived through all fell together to create this story. It is largely inspired by my teenage years growing up on a farm around horses. The setting, the landscape and the emotional turmoil Sam navigates is very much drawn from how I felt as a teen and how I live my life now. That said, the story itself and characters are fictional, but it is very much inspired by growing up around horses, poetry, and living with mental illness and trauma while dealing with the difficulties of growing up.

What’s special for you about writing poetry?

Poetry is everything to me. It is like breath. I don’t know how to live without poetry. When writing, it is a process of entering a space where nothing, yet everything, exists, and assembling it in a way that makes sense. It is my way of navigating being human. I measure my life and moments in my life through poems I was writing and reading at the time. Every memory has poetry connected to it and defining it.

All I have ever wanted to be is a poet, and to have become one and be a small part of that conversation, is an honour and a responsibility I don’t take lightly. It will always be the most special thing in the world to me.

Is there a book that was especially meaningful for you growing up?

So many. But one that immediately stands out is Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden. And so many of John’s novels, especially the early ones like So Much to Tell You, Dear Miffy, Letters from the Inside and Checkers. I still revisit his work often. He was huge for me in understanding what was possible in YA, especially in approaching dark and difficult topics. His work contains so much genuine feeling and insight. He understood writing the troubled teenage mind authentically better than almost any other author I’ve come across. When I was a teenager, John Marsden came to my high school as a visiting author, and I got to talk to him in the library. I consider that experience one of the most formative moments of my life.

What's one poem you think everyone should read and why?

Again, so many. I’d have to say “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats. It was so inspiring to me as a teenager when I found poetry. Using rhyme, the poem describes faeries taking a child away from the human world, preserving innocence before life can become difficult and complicated. The refrain “Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping/than you can understand.” is one of the most beautiful and affecting things to have ever been written, in my opinion. It may not seem an uplifting or inspiring poem, but I think it is steeped in the joy and magic of childhood innocence, existing in a fantasy world filled with wonder and free of all darkness.

What do you hope readers take away from The Foal in the Wire?

My great hope is for people to come away from reading the book with a sense of hope and possibility, knowing darkness cannot last and the light is coming back. Healing is always possible. I want this work to help and comfort people the way poetry, and literature generally, always did for me when I was growing up. It still does and always will. I wish for all young people to discover the joy and potential of poetry.