Words by Courtney Peppernell
As a poet, I knew grief. Poetry trained me to capture a story in a single line, or a stanza, or a beat: to distil a feeling until it felt recognisable. A poem can hold a moment up to the light, the exact second you realise someone is gone, the suddenness of missing them, the way love and loss can exist in the same breath. Poetry lets you freeze that feeling; it allows you to hold time still. Writing a novel asked me to do the opposite – especially writing a novel with grief at its centre. It asked me to stretch my instincts to move through time.
When I sat down to write The Last Poem, I knew grief wasn’t just a singular moment. It was what comes before, during and after that moment. In poetry, you can end at the most honest point, the cleanest cut of emotion, and leave the reader there, connected to the words, because that’s what poems do best. But a novel is different. You don’t get to stop at the line that resonates the most. You have to go beyond that point. You have to stay with your character through the aftermath: all the intricate details, the longer ache, the whole wave of grief. That was the biggest shift for me as a poet writing fiction: endurance.
Poetry is built on compression. It relies on what’s unsaid as much as what’s said. A line break can carry an entire year of heartbreak. A stanza can remind you of joy in your darkest moments. A rhythm can light something in your soul and get you to move. In a poem you can trust the reader to meet you halfway, to fill in the gaps with their own memories, their own understanding of loss. A novel demands a different kind of honesty. It asks: what does this grief do to a person over time? Not just emotionally, but practically? How do they move through their life in response to it? What do they avoid? What do they forget to eat? What happens when they laugh and then feel guilty for it? Fiction wants the consequences and the contradictions. It wants grief to live in a body, in a journey, in other relationships, not just in a single line.
Writing this novel also forced me to learn structure in a new way. Poetry has its own architecture, rhythm, repetition, line breaks, prose, breathing through words. A novel has to continue carrying the story, chapter after chapter. I couldn’t rely on intensity alone. I had to learn pacing, let the scenes build slowly, and trust what happens off the page too. I had to write grief not only as something Wren survives, but as something that shaped how she arrived at who she is. I had to write Henry needing to help others because he couldn’t help Jacob. Olivia grieving in a way that is messy and complicated because of her relationship with her mother. Emerson trying to move forward while carrying the version of herself she lost. The story couldn’t be one note, it had to hold multiple forms of grief at once.
Time itself felt different in fiction than it ever has in poetry. We often talk about grief “firsts”: the first birthday, the first holiday, the first anniversary. The firsts are visible. They’re the dates people remember to check on you. They’re the parts of grief the world expects, and therefore allows. But a novel made me go beyond the firsts. The second time the calendar comes around, the second birthday when people expect you to be better. The subtle pressure of “surely you’ve healed by now”. Fiction taught me how much of grief is tied to time not because time heals, but because time demands you keep living while you’re still carrying it. It also made me learn patience with my own writing: drafting chapters that weren’t perfect, letting the story exist in a rough shape first, then returning to refine the language the way a poet would.
The writing process made me understand why The Last Poem needed to be a novel, not a collection of poems. Some stories don’t boil down to a single moment, they need a lifespan. They need room to show that grief can look different on different people, and that healing doesn’t happen on a schedule. Poetry taught me how to name grief, fiction taught me how it’s measured: in days that continue, in anniversaries that return each year, in the simple truth that love doesn’t stop just because time keeps moving.
