The Foal in the Wire by Robbie Coburn

The Foal in the Wire by Robbie Coburn

Hachette, Australia

Finding a Wounded Foal by Robbie Coburn

I have often read that the first novel an author writes is largely autobiographical; in our lives, we have arrived at a point where we can explore our history through the lens of our characters. I have been thinking about the reasons for my own work, why I write and where my writing comes from. Through this, it has been comforting to realise I could not have written The Foal in the Wire if my life had happened any other way. As much as the past is filled with pain, trauma and regret, I believe these things all allowed me to find my way to The Foal in the Wire and I am beyond thankful for that. I have never been prouder of anything I have written in my life and if anyone only reads one single piece of my writing, I want it to be this.

I have always viewed poetry as a space without boundaries, as far as subject goes. There is almost nothing too dark to be written if the writer ensures the confessional aspects are not prioritised over the craft.

I was fourteen years old when my life changed, and I fell in love with poetry. My mother worked at a primary school and brought home a slim volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry that had been deemed ‘too dark’ for the library. There was an introduction by Philip Pullman and when I read the title poem “The Raven”, it completely shot through me and awakened something that had been lying dormant and waiting. Something made sense that hadn’t before, and I had finally found the medium to explore the difficult things I was experiencing psychologically. In that moment, I decided I wanted to be a poet and that is all I have ever wanted to be since. I became obsessed with poetry, raiding every library and bookshop for any books of poems I could find. One of the most fascinating things about this to me, is that I knew who I was at fourteen and I am still that person today. I am still always chasing the excitement of reading that poem for the first time and that unparalleled feeling of writing a poem and knowing you have created something beautiful.

After having some poems published in OzKids Magazine, my first professionally published poem appeared in a literary journal when I was seventeen and my first full-length collection of poems was published at eighteen. I had a hard time growing up and this manifested in poems of great darkness and suffering, but there were always many things related to my childhood and youth, particularly around bullying and mental illness, that I hadn’t been able to express and explore in my work. I never felt single poems were the right avenue to do them justice. If the poem will suffer because you are attempting to fit a subject inside it, I believe it must be abandoned. The work comes first.

The Foal in the Wire filled that void. My agent had been reading my poems and suggested I write a young adult verse novel. She described my poems as almost containing stories and wanted to see them expanded into a longer form. At this moment something inside me was ignited. I had always loved young adult literature and dreamed of writing it. It was as if this story had been inside me all along waiting to be pulled out and I was so excited at the prospect that I began writing immediately. Everything had been leading me towards this story of love between two people, centred around the discovery of a foal tangled in barbed wire.

The story came to me very quickly after that, and soon there was Sam (named after my hero, Sam Shepard) a character who was largely based on me and my emotional difficulties as a young adult.
The setting for the book is the farm where I grew up, surrounded by paddocks and horses. The fence where Sam and Julia find the foal is directly based on the back fence that separated our property from the next one. As a child I would climb through the fence into the next paddock, past the cows and into its centre. There was a dried-out creek in the paddock I would climb down into, and there was the shell of an old car and car parts inside it.
The weatherboard house, the horse track in the back paddock, and climbing through my bedroom window, are all recounting very real things. If someone was to visit our family farm (sadly sold years ago now) they would immediately recognise the landscape of The Foal in the Wire. It seems in my case the fabled autobiographical elements of the first novel apply. I think this is why the voice in my story is so authentic and raw, and the imagery so vivid.
But I must be clear, the story itself is fictional. Although I had been surrounded by the setting for this novel for my entire childhood and experienced much of the anguish Sam does, I could not write this story until now because I wasn’t ready. I needed to live and understand my own life in retrospect to be able to explore the themes that ended up becoming the crux of the book.

Writing The Foal in the Wire healed me in more ways than I can say. It helped me make peace with the past and see the light emerging through the darkness. I hope those who read it can find something bright waiting for them at the end, no matter how dark and bleak things may seem. My first novel could only ever have been this one. I see now, clearly, this wasn’t just the book I wanted to write, but the book I needed to write.

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The Foal in the Wire is published by Lothian Children’s Books, Hachette Australia.

https://www.hachette.com.au/robbie-coburn/the-foal-in-the-wire

Robbie Coburn’s website http://www.robbiecoburn.com