Writing from the middle of both

I was born in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, and I grew up in Western Australia, and I moved to Kuala Lumpur eight years ago and I teach English at a university here. My biography describes a particular kind of rootlessness that I've stopped trying to resolve and started trying to write from. In Australia I was the Malaysian kid, identifiably second-generation, culturally Australian in ways that didn't always match expectations. In KL I'm identifiably Australian, accent and habits and frame of reference, living among people some of whom are distantly my people and some of whom are entirely not. I write poetry from this middle position, which is not a complaint. The middle position is unusually equipped to see both sides clearly, and clarity, in poetry, is a kind of gift. I've published in both countries, most recently in *Meanjin* in Australia and in *Quarterly Literary Review Singapore*. The longer work I'm developing is a collection of poems that moves between the two places, between the suburban Perth of my childhood and the specific textures of Bangsar and Petaling Jaya where I live now. Neither has to win. Both have to be honest. That's the constraint I'm working with.