Shey Marque’s second poetry collection, The Hum Hearers, explores memory, imagination, and inherited trauma through an epigenetic lens. Shey tracks her family history, from Victorian London to modern time, linking generations of women through cellular memory. In this interview, Shey speaks with UWAP intern Maria Kakani about how her scientific background led her to poetry, and the development of her new poetry collection.
Shey Marque is a poet and former clinical haematology and research scientist from Boorloo. She holds a BAppSc (Hons) in Biomedical Science, PhD in Molecular Pathology, and MA in Writing. Currently she coordinates the Hospital Poets Program (Australia) and serves on the Board of Writing WA. Keeper of the Ritual (UWAP 2019), her debut collection, was shortlisted for the Noel Rowe Poetry Award. The Hum Hearers (UWAP 2025), shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award, is her second collection.
Maria Kakani: What was your writing process like for this collection? How does it differ from your previous book?
Shey Marque: The writing process for The Hum Hearers is probably very different. With my first collection, Keeper of the Ritual, it was me trying to find out who I was as a poet, so I was experimenting with all kinds of styles and didn’t really know my voice. As for topic, it was anything that entered my head. This time around, the collection was planned. I’d found my writing voice, partly through other people bringing it to my attention, and I had a project in mind.
MK: What changes (intentional/unintentional) did you make to your writing style in The Hum Hearers from Keeper of the Ritual?
SM: I had an idea for the form I was going to use from the outset because I was basically writing nonfiction narratives, as much as memoir and family history can be nonfiction, and so I chose a prose style poetry. Westerly was offering a free workshop on prose poetry with Cassandra Atherton. I went along and loved it. That must have been around 2018, so I’ve spent a long time putting together my ideas for this book. I decided from that day that the prose poetry form would be my focus for this collection.
MK: In this collection, you combine your scientific knowledge and experience with your poetry. How did this influence your writing, and your engagement to the writing process?
SM: When I started to hear a bit about my family history, I got really interested in the anecdotal stories I was hearing from my mother. I found myself developing a sort of affinity with relatives I had never met, from generations ago. I felt that there was something else in it, something connecting us physically. I thought 'It’s this epigenetic memory, the cellular memory coming into play.' Whether that was just partial imagination on my part or not is somewhat irrelevant because from my prior experience as a scientist, I knew it was a real phenomenon. I was a bit excited to use the knowledge that I had picked up about epigenetics when I was a scientist, but unable to do specific projects at that time because it was back in the early 1990s. Nobody knew enough; the concept was still in its infancy so it was like groping around in the dark and I had to get the PhD done within a time limit. Then the realisation came that I could explore the same ideas with poetry.
MK: How did the idea for this collection emerge? Did previous research bring it about, or did the concept come before?
SM: I already had my family history; I started collecting that information around 2008, so quite a few years ago. When I was doing my MA in Creative Writing, one of the units was to write a family history. I realised that the little bits of family history I had learned were lacking in greater detail, so I was unsure how to proceed. Then, I thought that I could write in a certain style of poetry; free form poetry with lots of spaces to account for the missing information. So, that’s where I got the idea to write my family history as a verse novella. I had never written poetry before at that stage of my life. I remember my tutor at the time loved it, saying it was very 'creative and courageous.' The word 'courageous' did worry me a little though.
That started me off on my journey with poetry and researching my family history, because the small things I had found out were very interesting, dating back to Victorian London. I was fascinated to hear that my fourth great-grandfather was a singer and actor, and owned one of the best-known music halls in Covent Garden, London during the mid to late 1800s. I just had to explore that and put together a chapbook-sized novella in verse inspired by Dorothy Porter.
'Courageous', haha! It was all very well for my lovely tutor to grade it highly, but I knew I had to find out what the poetry community thought and joined the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. When the poets were very encouraging yet polite, I thought I should put this project down and come back to it once I found out how I wanted to ‘package’ it. I set about learning the craft and thinking I’d return to the collection to edit the poems. Instead, what happened was abandonment as I embarked on a new collection. By the time I finished that first collection, years later, I knew what kind of poetry I would use and what to do with it. I still have that early verse novella, but the current version is very different and more developed.
MK: How did the collection develop as more research on epigenetic inheritance emerged?
SM: According to the information that was available back when I was a scientist, we didn’t know much about the cellular memory aspect. I finished my PhD in 1994-1995, so it seems like so long ago now. This idea of the cellular memory passing through generations, particularly carrying bodily responses due to stressful environments, wasn’t being discussed. It wasn’t until years later, around 2013, that I started to see papers published which showed the original idea from sixty years ago was actually happening in that the epigenetic memory could be passed from parent offspring. There was one ground-breaking paper that showed how the fear response could be passed on in mice. That’s when I started to think, 'I can use this.' So, yes, it definitely did change the way I decided to go about writing this collection and is the reason why the final version differs so much from the early draft.
MK: Throughout this collection, you trace your family history/memory. How did you go about this research?
SM: I was very fortunate. I started out, of course, with ancestry.com, which didn’t get me very far at all. I had bits and pieces of anecdotally passed-down information, seeds of a story I suppose. Just enough to pique my interest. When I was researching the family music hall business online, I found a woman living in Sydney from a different branch of the same family who had already done the research. She had even gone through libraries in London to get the information. She wrote a little booklet in regular prose which I bought from her for $20 and there was a lot of information in there that I could use to write poetry. Other than that, I had the memories of my mother and what she remembered being told by her mother and grandmother, as well as information I found in books and online to inform my writing and provide context on society throughout different eras.
MK: Through writing intimately about past relatives and adding detail to their life stories, did you form a deeper connection with this poetry collection?
SM: Yes, I think so. When I started writing the first version of the collection, I felt no connection at all and was just trying to write what I thought would have been appropriate for the times. I was writing about ‘strangers’ and had also been using information from outside of the family history. Once I started writing poems for the second version, though, I realised that I had been putting myself in there. Just little bits at first. It might have been pure curiosity, maybe wanting to get closer to them to get that information that I was missing, and maybe even understanding aspects of myself that, hitherto, I had not been able to explain. The whole process made me realise the importance of staying connected to our ancestors and the impact that can have on our sense of identity and belonging.
MK: While this book brings up different themes from Keeper of the Ritual, they both discuss music and depict imagery of nature often. Is this something that is integral to your life?
SM: Somewhat. Music, like many of us, I have always loved. I have learned string instruments myself; the cello and the violin for around ten years of my life. When I realised that my third great-grandmother played and taught the violin, I thought I could just be trying to build a connection that’s not really there, but then again it might have been. So, I used that as a way to get a bit closer and start to build a similarity between us.
As for nature, I don’t know where that comes from other than the fact that I just like being in nature. I used to live in the hills, and now I live right on the beach. I guess where you live becomes a part of you. The environment gets in quite literally to impact our DNA.
MK: What poets/writers inspire you writing style, and contribute to your ideas?
SM: It probably comes from lots of different places. There are so many poets I admire. With the poetry in this collection being prose form, there were two main poets who had an influence on my writing style. Cassandra Atherton, who was my first real introduction to writing prose poetry with her collections Exhumed and Pre-Raphaelite. She writes very lively and inventive poetry, and reminds the form is not meant to be a straight narrative. The other poet is Paul Hetherington who put out a prose poetry collection called Moonlight on Oleander. It’s a different style to Cassandra’s, and it also drew me in for different reasons. He pays attention to the small detail brimming with what it is to be human, along with an astute use of language, which I found very engaging. His writing can be more storytelling in a way, which is what I needed to do here. I think my collection has benefited from reading both fine poets.
MK: How long have you been writing?
SM: Creatively? I left the science world when I went to live in France in 2005. I couldn’t speak the language initially, so I thought that it was my chance to stop work and get into writing, which I had always wanted to do but never had time. I enrolled in a MA in Creative Writing online so that, while I was travelling, I would be able to continue. That would have been at the start of 2008, I believe, and I finished it when I came back to Australia. I began part-time, and completed it in 2011 which is when I started getting into poetry. So, I’ve been writing for about 16 years.
MK: When and why did you decide to study your MA in Creative Writing?
SM: Since I was very much in the science world, I thought I would have trouble breaking into a different arena. People tend to pigeonhole you, so I thought that if I did a relevant degree, that would let me into the writing community. It’s a very different style than scientific writing, so I also wanted to learn the craft because I did recognise literature as a legitimate art form, and needed to be aware of what made for quality creative writing.
MK: What made you decide to move your career away from science and more into the literature field?
SM: There are two answers to that. I remember when I was still working as a scientist with no inclination to move overseas, and I suddenly wanted to write creatively. At first, I wanted to do that within science writing because I thought that was the only way I was able to write. That didn’t pan out the way I had envisaged so I still wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. I continued working as a scientist part-time while I figured out what I wanted to do creatively. I guess I just needed to be creative. I was already playing music, and I think it may have been responsible for the shift I felt. Over time, I found myself drawn more to the arts than the sciences. I had done enough of that, and it was time for me to live my second life with my other love which was the arts. The break happened when I got married in 2005 and lived in France on and off for 5 years. I couldn’t really work as a scientist there because I didn’t have enough language skills, so I knew that it was the right time for me to make the break.
The Hum Hearers by Shey Marque is out now from UWA Publishing. Order your copy here.
Maria Kakani is a student at Murdoch University completing a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major in Sociology, and English & Creative Writing. In her final semester, she plans to move on to do her Honours in Creative Writing.