Kathy Parker, a writer from a small seaside village in rural South Australia, has a remarkable gift for touching hearts through her words. Known for her deeply personal poems and texts, she explores themes of healing, self-discovery, and the complexities of human relationships. In this exclusive interview, Kathy shares an intimate look into her journey as a writer, her sources of inspiration, and the challenges she faces in bringing her words to life. Enjoy!

@abylovesblogging: First of all, thank you for confirming my interview request. I am very glad.
Before we start, please introduce yourself to my followers…

KP: _{Hi, and thanks for having me here My name is Kathy Parker and I am a writer from a little seaside village in rural South Australia. I am a lover of beautiful words, the ocean, mountains, rivers, camping, hiking – actually, pretty much anything to do with being outdoors in nature! I drink cheap red wine so I can afford expensive gin, am a trumpet player by trade but these days spend more time with the guitar, am a total empath, wannabe yogi, paleo chick who loves to grow her own veggies, and I have dreams to one day travel my beautiful country with nothing but a van, guitar and surfboard. And all of that sounds weirdly like a dating profile!! Ha!! It is not, I promise!!}

@abylovesblogging: Kathy, the reason I have chosen you to be my interview partner is because you inspire me through your poems and texts. Tell us more about your job as a writer …

KP: ^{Firstly, the fact that you are inspired through my writing is the exact reason I write. I don not write because I have dreams of being rich and famous, I write because the passion of my heart is to bring connection, understanding, healing and hope to women all around the world. To make them feel less alone. To empower women to know their worth, and go forth and change the world. It sounds glamorous. The reality is, it is not. It is hard work, lonely work. It is forcing myself to uncover the places in my own heart I would rather keep buried. It can be brutal at times, unforgiving. It’s many hours of solitude, of being alone with nothing but my own mind. It can make me impossible to live with when I’m in the throes of the creative process. I mostly never get paid, and nobody will ever see the hours of work that go into each piece I write. However, I wouldn’t change a thing. This is my passion, the desire of my heart, the thing that matters most to me. Even on the worst days, there is still nothing else in this world I would rather be doing.
The beauty of writing for me is the ability to work around my family and the demands of life that come with that. I don not necessarily have set writing hours, it’s something I fit in as best I can – some weeks that can look like days where there are no other priorities and I can write during normal working hours, other weeks it can look like cramming time into 5am starts or late nights when everyone else is asleep. Lifestyle matters to me and I would always rather write less and have time with my family, time for walks on the beach and morning surfs and yoga and to enjoy a cup of tea in the afternoon sunshine with a book and be available for my family when they need me, and I’m extremely thankful to be able to do what I love around the simplicity of the lifestyle I love.}

@abylovesblogging: When did you start writing and what was the reason for that ?

KP: _{I have always been a writer, and have written on and off since high school, but it took me decades to give myself permission to own it and to find the courage to step into it. However, I officially started writing in 2015 when I began my own blog, This Girl Unraveled. I had just been through some extremely difficult years of my life that culminated in emotional breakdown and physical breakdown as I suffered through ME/CFS. It was about the time I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD, and was forced to deal with a traumatic past I had been covering up with many layers of perfectionism. Those layers soon began to unravel, hence the name of my blog, and as I began to work through my pain and journey toward healing, I began to write as a way of processing all I was thinking and feeling in the hope my words would bring healing to other women who were going through similar issues.}

@abylovesblogging: Most of your texts are about breakups, why did you chose to write about this issue ?

KP: _{More of my recent texts centre around this theme but I tend to write about anything and everything to do with relationships as I feel they are core to the human condition. What I write about at any given time is often what I am thinking about – either from my own experience or from books I am reading or conversations I have with people which trigger themes in me that I ponder and explore more in my writing. Also, much of what I write is with the intention of facing pain square in the eye, and breakups are certainly one universal pain we have all suffered through at one time or another in our lives.}

@abylovesblogging: Where do you get your inspiration from ?

KP: _{Much of my inspiration comes from experience, as I believe the best writing comes from the deepest places within us, and so I try not to shy away from the things that are hard to write about as I believe they will be the things that impact the hearts of others the most. However, author Dani Shapiro talks about having the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others – and so being an empathetic person allows me to listen to the hearts of other people and put their pain into words that bring justice to how they feel, so much of what I write comes from the hearts of others who share their pain with me. But I also find inspiration in beautiful poetry, books that rip my heart wide open, and I’m a quote fanatic and spend far too many hours scrolling Insta and Tumblr and taking screen shots of quotes to go back and read again and again – my phone is full of them!! But I’m definitely most inspired to write when alone in nature – the more wild and rugged, the better, it definitely brings out the best creativity in me.}

@abylovesblogging: Some of your texts have been published on “The Elephant Journal”, that means a lot of people are reading your poems, what exactly does it mean to ?

KP: _{Elephant Journal has been a wonderful platform for my writing, and I have been honoured to have been featured there, and thankful for the love and support shown from readers all over the world. However, I have chosen to step away from there for the time being, and from other platforms I have been writing from, as I feel at this point in my career it’s more important for me to be building my own readership, and not the readership of other journals.}

@abylovesblogging: Which issues would you like to write about in the near future? And why ?

KP: _{There a lot of issues I currently write of that I would like to delve a little deeper into that I have been too scared to push the boundaries of up until now. I spent many years without a voice, and now that I have found it, in many ways I am still learning to use it, and to understand the power of it. I don not believe in using a shock factor when writing, but I do believe if my writing makes people uncomfortable at times that is not necessarily a bad thing. In saying that, one area of my life I have not written much about has been my faith, and my journey from being religious to becoming spiritual, and what that has meant for me – the ways religion can damage an already damaged person and be counter-productive to their journey to healing and freedom. This is something I would like to explore more.}

@abylovesblogging: What are your wishes for your future? What do you want to achieve ?

KP: _{The thing I have loved most about my journey as a writer so far is that it has been an entirely organic process. I have never really known where it was going to take me, I started to write because the words began to mean everything and I could no longer not write, so there was never any goals or targets or achievements aimed for as such, just a desire to write. I have loved my journey and the unknowns and the surprises. To be where I am today still amazes me, but mostly, I am amazed and inspired by how my words reach the hearts of people all over the world, and as long as this remains the core of my achievements, then that’s all that really matters to me. I do have a couple of projects I am working on at the moment however, and I hope to see these come to fruition in the next 12 months – both a published collection of my poetry/prose and also to finish writing my first full-length novel and see that to publication also. But really, I just hope to keep doing what I am doing because writing is where my joy and passion come from. It’s like the quote by Howard Thurman – “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Regardless of outcome or achievement, I am just happiest and contributing best to the world when I am writing.}

@abylovesblogging: Could you imagine to write a book, if yes, which topic would it be about?

KP: _{Yes! As I said earlier, I am currently in the process of writing my first book – a literary fiction novel that addresses the themes of childhood abuse and trauma, domestic violence, relational wounds, generational cycles, and how we overcome, heal and find the way back to our own hearts. It is a difficult book to write, and while not a memoir, much of it comes from a deep place of my own pain which makes the process slow and careful – it is not the kind of book you can smash out in a few months, but one which I believe will be worth every amount of bloodshed it will have taken to get the words on the page.}

@abylovesblogging: Do you pay attention to rhythm or epic to make the importance more “visible”?

KP: _{I am quite new to writing poetry, and when I first began to write poems I did not pay a lot of attention to the structure of how I wrote, just placed words on lines and hoped for the best! Since then I have studied hundreds of poems, traditional and contemporary, and now pay more attention to the structure of what I write. I am probably most drawn to alignment, I have this thing where I like to see the sentences line up evenly, probably a throw back from my perfectionist days. I never rhyme in my poems, not because I don not like poems that rhyme but because it takes me back to many, many lame poetry efforts in my high school days that make me shudder at how bad they were. I don not always write in verses but when I do it matters to me that each verse has the same structure, same amount of lines and equal rhythm. I still love what Picasso says though, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist” and some of my favourite poems are still my earliest ones where rules didn’t exist for me.}

@abylovesblogging: Do you have favorite poets and writers ? If yes, who are they ?

KP: _{So many! Most of my favourite authors are Australian women who are excelling in the area of Literary Fiction. My favourite poets are a little more widespread however, and most fall in the category of Modern or Contemporary – ummmm, just to think of a few favourites from the top of my head – Clementine Von Radics, RM Drake, Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, Alfa, Atticus, Nausicaa Twila, Sarah Jean Bowers, Cindy Cherie, Beau Taplin, Nicole Lyons, Stephanie Bennett-Henry, Zachry K Douglas, Michael Xavier, Becca Lee, Nikita Gill, JM Storm, J Raymond… there are so many amazing writers out there!}

@abylovesblogging: Unfortunately, our interview is almost over, but here is last question: where can my followers find you ?

KP: _{This Girl Unraveled: www.kathyparker.com.au
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kathyparkerwriter/
Twitter/X: @kathyparker2206
Insta: @kathyparkerwriter
Tumblr: kathyparkerwriter.tumblr.com
You can also find articles I have written at Elephant Journal, Huffpost Australia, The Mighty, The Minds Journal, Thought Catalog, and Lessons Learned In Life Inc}

Note: ^{This interview was originally conducted on July 18, 2017, and is being republished with the permission of Kathy Parker.}