‘Solitarily uniting’: Crossing creative thresholds with Syd Harrex

Writing, so the story goes, relies on inspiration: waiting for it, finding it, and inevitably, losing it—as if ‘it’ was something more than an abstraction, a feeling. Just as Jack London famously declared ‘You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club’, so too did Toni Morrison opine in 1998: ‘I can’t explain inspiration ... And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn’t really be a writer’. But sometimes inspiration is neither actively nor passively engaged: it just, well, happens. In my paper I meditate on my intense and all too brief creative collaboration of sorts with the Australian poet Associate Professor Syd Harrex during the four-day First Fiji Literary Festival in October 2011. As Harrex becomes ever-more frail, and time inevitably passes, this paper seeks to memorialise this encounter. Here, inspiration, from the Latin inspirare—‘to breathe into’—transcends breath to emerge as a space, a gap, with Harrex as navigator and I the willing itinerant. By meditating on that experience and intersecting the genres of poetry, confession, and prose, my paper draws attention to inspiration as ‘a human practice’ (Harper, 2010, xiv) of crossing, transcending, and perhaps even filling a creative gap.