Category Archives: Lee Rourke

I was beginning to realise that I had lost control – what little of it I had had in the first place, that is. No – that I had never had control. Boredom had left me behind, I had succumbed to its weight, its unheard-of centre within me. I had embraced it and it had completely consumed me and now I was bored of it. I was bored of boredom. There was nothing I could really do about this. I was like everyone else: I needed something to fill the gap, the time that dragged us, and it, along with it, to return me to the ground beneath my feet and hide away from our gaping hole like everyone else.

— Lee Rourke, The Canal

I have a difficult relationship with writing. […] I find the whole thing very tiring. I am at my happiest when the writing is finished. Though, there is something in the build-up to writing: when it springs from the depths, the darkness, up into the conscious mind, where it remains, swimming around there day in day out, at night in my dreams, when I awake, sitting on the bus, or walking down the street . . . and that beautiful urge to write it all down consumes me. Because if I don’t I might lose this urge, these things might sink back down, never to resurface. And it’s that which compels me, the fear of losing this explosion within me. I feel I need to try and capture it as best I can. I like that part. But the physical act, this, the typing, the stringing the words together, moving the black lines across the page, fills me with a kind of terror that is hard to describe. The terror induced by the slide, the fear of things slipping back down to where they came from.
   All this, of course, means that I have to write, that writing is me, more than just part of me. I suppose I write because I have been given a system, a method of doing this, something that isn’t mine and never will be: language. So, from wherever this all springs from these given words have to be written.
   But, this doesn’t mean that writing is the most important thing in my life. It’s not. It couldn’t be. How can it be? There is so much more to life than this.

— Lee Rourke, Scarecrow Comment