Jeremy Roake
My mother was a Kiwi and my father was English. I spent two formative childhood years on the south coast of England. Shortly before he died, my father requested that his ashes return to England – which is where they now lie. There was something inescapably ‘Eurocentric’ about my Kiwi upbringing. My education has been mainly experiential with some formal tuition; trial & error accompanied by survivable failure.
Words have been my constant, consistent and trustworthy companions. My grandmother Rosa taught me ‘sanctuary’ as a six year old and I learned the word ‘ricochet’ on a rabbit hunting trip a couple of years later. This word was then reinforced when I was fourteen by the Deep Purple song Child In Time .
‘Luminous’, ‘ersatz’, ‘quaff’, ‘vandal’, ‘cistern’, ‘frisson’, ‘androgynous’, announced the ever-renewing flow of characterful words amongst which I continue to live, breathe and make my way today. This relationship with language led to the production of my first play, The Drydock , in 1987. My writing for theatre continues to inform everything that I do.
When I write, my aim is to communicate as effectively as I possibly can and to be somebody the audience can trust.
email: jeremy@cyanotypes.co.nz
Dream Interpretation: a book of poems, dreams, images and an essay