Roy William Gotaas Biography

I started writing at the age of 11: poetry mostly. Published in my late teenage years: stopped submitting when I realised how much was hormonal breast-beating and how little was from experience... but continued to write.
Over the years variously visited/ worked in some 25+ countries.
An unhappy and creatively barren marriage (except for two lovely children) took out another 10 years. Currently 18 years as a single father have absorbed much time and energy too.

Finally fell wholely in love for the first time in my life a very few years ago. Ironic that by that time I'd written 2 romantic novels and much on the theme of love: but only then came to understand what it really means. Lost the lady tragically: the result of drug-addiction (hers, not mine) . Unable to help and having to watch the deterioration of the only woman one's ever truly loved (& one with a potentially brilliant mind at that) is a deeply scarring experience.
In recent times have focussed more on my prose-writing and poetry has become something of a cathartic means for trying to heal myself.

However, it does seem to me that the function of any creative artist is to place 'glow-worms' along their path through an often dark landscape: to say to other people who may come to that same place that they are not alone, that someone else has been there too and has been able to move on to some other place. Heading, in however stumbling, meandering a course, towards the light on the horizon, which presages, gives hope of, a dawn of something better?
So, in that way, I write for my readers as well as myself. The suffering of personal pain may be turned to something positive if sharing that journey can help alleviate someone else's grief or difficulty.

A question I'm often asked, though I doubt its relevance, is what other poets have influenced me. The answer, of course, is every one I've read, heard or met, in one way or another. In poetry though, the most memorable for me are Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Hilaire Belloc, Henry Lawson, Robinson Jeffers, James Elroy Flecker, T S Eliot.
In line with my 'glow-worm' theory, I try to make my poetry as accessible to the reader as the depth of emotion will allow. One way to achieve this, for me, is to be as unadorned as possible: to write as near to the bone as I can. As a young man, having been a fluent reader from the age of 4, I was, as Dylan Thomas put it, 'in love with the sight and sound of words'. That love led me to use too much adjectival and adverbial decoration and it was only after some years living in the desert (and reading Dante & Eliot) that I made the breakthrough to a leaner style. (See my poem 'I have words'.)
Currently I earn my crust partly through ownership of a Coaching College, where I enjoy very much teaching English to senior students, which is invigorating to my own writing.
And still, bloody but unbowed, I look for love.