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Lorraine Mariner

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Jessica Elton on Lorraine Mariner

Lorraine Mariner is right; I do think she worries too much what other people think of her. I know for a fact she is hoping this is going to be brief because she is worried what I might reveal.

For example, I could tell you about the time in her first library job when one of her managers asked her about her future career plans and she had an overwhelming urge to say, “The thing is, I’m actually a poet” (and she hadn’t even published anything at this point or finished a poem since she’d left Huddersfield University. And why not “writer” why “poet”?). Or, I could tell you about the time when, in a moment of foolhardiness (high on her first magazine publication), she gave someone a poem she’d written about them only to find they didn’t want it or her. You would think, having subjected herself to this sort of humiliation, she would be able to handle a few negative comments written in a review by a stranger (I also know that she secretly hopes that this person has been following her poetry career and will one day think, in an incredulous way, “Lorraine Mariner wrote me a poem and I rejected it!”).

And yes, she is self-obsessed but most people are a lot of the time, and if your “near-constant self-reflection” is well written, I don’t see what the problem is.

 

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