Stephanie Powell, poet in the spotlight

Launch of Invisible Wasp with Emilie Collyer
Watch the launch here

In my mid-zine phase

With Bone in the attic in 2021

And now with Freya

Stephanie reads 'Invisible Moths'

Stephanie Powell is a poet based in Naarm / Melbourne with three published collections of poems: Bone (Halas Press, 2021), Gentle Creatures (Vagabond Press, 2023) and Invisible Wasp (Liquid Amber Press, 2024). She is a recipient of the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize in 2021 and the 2024 Ada Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Woorilla Poetry Prize.

Her website is: https://atticpoet.com/

Stephanine Powell… not too verbose!

I’m the author of Invisible Wasp and a couple of other collections of poetry. I live and work on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country.

In High School, a teacher marked me down repeatedly for being too verbose, this killed all my confidence in writing. For the next ten years I drifted in and out of circles with artists in Melbourne, Sydney and London, and could never claim I did anything creative. Though I always loved to read. I grew up in a house full of books. The first ones I clearly remember reading were a collection of short stories by Chekhov, The Lord of the Rings and Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho (probably too much for a twelve-year-old… but I’m grateful no-one ever tried to stop me).

In my twenties I had two brilliant friends, one a poet and one a singer-songwriter. They inspired me to try poetry around 2015. I started short and sharp, as far away from any accusation of being too verbose. The flavour in my writing came later. I eventually turned my poems and collage-art into zines: Girls Own: Satanic Tea Party (a collaborative zine with the two friends above), Tales of love and loss in North London, Lucky Dip (another collaborative zine) and Strange Seasons.

I did most of the printing on the work photocopier on the weekend and would staple the books together in my spare time. We left them in cafes, bookstores, public toilets, music venues, on the shelves of libraries, on tables at pubs, vintage furniture stores and as many places as possible during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2016.

In 2020, living in an outer suburb of London, and my now-husband and I spent Easter clearing out the attic, sweeping, beating a decade worth of dust out of some ratty carpets and decorating the space with a desk, chair and other arty accoutrements (typewriter, candles with the virgin Mary on them, piles of books, Mexican-themed bunting, old reading chair etc etc).

Here I started again, as The Attic Poet, (hence @theatticpoet on IG, if you’ve ever wondered). Most days I’d open the trapdoor, pull down the ladder and disappear for a few hours. It’s just continued from there. I try and write every day, sadly no longer in an attic, hoping my work offers a surreal and visceral lens to the body through motherhood, girlhood and mental health.

If you’re interested in more thoughts on writing and what inspires and influences my poetry, please check out my Substack newsletter, Poet Mail:
https://theatticpoet.substack.com