My name is Isaiah Soares and I am a writer.
I grew up all over Sydney, from Redfern to Liverpool. I’ve always used writing to check in on myself and the world around me. Writing is not only a way of creative expression but a tool to navigate life as it passes.
Story Factory has been a consistent part of my life since I attended my very first writing workshop there when I was 16, and I couldn’t be more grateful. To be in a space where I am free to be myself and explore my creative limits is such a refreshing experience that I came back for a second year and published another book, Visage. It’s a story about a young woman who returns to her hometown and is flooded with memories and images of a self that doesn’t exist anymore.
I am 19 now, studying criminology at the University of NSW and also working on creative projects in my free time. I am delving headfirst into poetry so if you’re ever at the Bankstown Poetry Slam you might just hear my newest stuff.
Excerpt from Visage by Isaiah Soares
She can’t get the sound out of her head. She hears the voice on repeat. The words, following each other with such nurtured horror. She feels like she hasn’t blinked since she left. She’s afraid of giving an image to what she heard. She has to strangle the steering wheel just to stop the shaking.
What did he mean?
She takes the next exit and flips her headlights off. The sun peers over the horizon behind her and a raw sky spills through the bush.
Google maps hasn’t been working the majority of the drive, and she instead is relying on a dodgy sense of direction to head somewhat inland.
It’s a while before she passes the first batch of houses. She can’t tell if nostalgia clouds her memory or if the place has always been a dump. Each roof has its own type of cave-in, and every window she can make out has been shattered. Even the better-off houses with the wrap-around porches on the distant hills have aged with the same grace of the flat-roofed tin sheds she grew up around.
She winds down her window for another smoke; the smell of forgotten asphalt and gum leaves that she lost in the city, so close to the coast. The road swerves into the main street. She remembered the houses being further spread apart. Now they looked back-to-back, as if they stretched into each other. The porches and front steps formed faces that seemed to frown at her as she passed by, blistered and pale.
Nothing here is familiar yet it’s unshakeable.
She is home.
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Story Factory is a not-for-profit creative writing organisation for young people, with centres in Redfern and Parramatta. You can purchase Isaiah’s books here: https://shop.storyfactory.org.au/products/visage-by-isaiah-t-soares
https://shop.storyfactory.org.au/products/frost-bite-by-isaiah-t-soares
