A conversation with M.T.C. Cronin.(Interview)

Anyone looking at your CV would I think be quite startled to find your first publications coinciding with the beginning of your legal training. Did you really embark on a writing career at the same time that you began to seriously apply yourself to the law?

I actually began studying law in 1981, but didn't publish my first poem until 1992 (only shortly after I began writing it and before I'd really read any). I went straight from school to university to study Arts/Law and didn't have any ideas about literature or writing. In my arts degree I did a double major in political science and I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking about politics as a possible career. Frankly though, I didn't really have any ideas about a future path. As a child and adolescent I read loads and loads and loads of books. But I never read poetry. Like most children I did write it from time to time. Apart from the first two years of secondary or high school, when I attended a Brigidine Convent as a boarder, I went to public (or state run) schools in Caloundra where I lived. There was not a huge focus on academia. Caloundra was a small beach town back then and we just used to occasionally wag school and go to the beach! Only a few people from my senior year went on to college or university. We just hung around. We went out with suffers. We went to the pub. I don't really know why I went to …