But I found myself drawn to the boy, and returned to write more and more poems about him, over three hundred in the end. )Īt the time, I was concentrating on standalone poems, those I could conveniently complete during the daytime while my children were at school.

(This poem, and several others from the story, may be found on my website. And then the sixteen-year-old heads into the snow in his turn, where he meets a dragon and becomes the new king. His older brothers head into the snow, one after another, and vanish. In the poem, a sixteen-year-old boy is sent to a mountain with his older brothers after their father, the king, dies. It began with one poem, a poem written without forethought or planning, at a time when I was returning to fantasy after a decade wandering in the land of mainstream poetry. It’s also the single thing I’ve written that matters most to me. The project, The Sign of the Dragon, is unquestionably a hodgepodge work. And the secondary-world setting mixes together Chinese and Celtic elements as filtered through the lens of someone who is more of a Londoner than she is either Chinese or Irish. For mainstream poetry audiences, it doesn’t help that the story features dragons, demons, monsters, and a form of horse magic. Those poems are mostly free verse, lacking rhyme and meter, the kind of poems that aren’t always considered “real” poetry. It’s not a conventional novel, because it is rendered in poems. The longest project I’ve completed to date is an epic fantasy, approximately one hundred thousand words long, told in poems.

I struggle to describe the backdrop for some of my work: do I say it is Asian-inspired, that it contains Asian elements, or that it draws upon Asian culture? It might be more accurate to say that – like me – it’s halfway there. Alas, I have yet to find a unicorn story written by a unicorn, lesbian or otherwise.Īs an author who is half-Asian, half-European, a person who grew up in London, but whose parents grew up in Penang (Malaysia) and Dublin (Ireland), I’m not that sure what my own voice is. Along with this has come a discussion of own voices, and the extent to which it matters whether a story about, for instance, a lesbian unicorn, is written by a lesbian. In recent years, there’s been an increasing awareness of the importance of diversity in fiction, including diversity in gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, wealth, and age.

The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee