Author(s): Dominic Hoey

Poetry

I Thought We’d Be Famous is a line in the sand. It's a look back on Dominic’s days pre chronic illness and a new life of blood tests and cancer scares. It’s about the dreams that rusted in the backyard and the ones he ended up living. It's about the guilt in his blood after escaping a life of welfare and minimum wage. It's about the absurdity of trying to make sense of this broken society. It's about Channing Tatum and Edward Furlong and Chilli the Pomeranian and the teacher who beat us half to death and killing your landlord and sleeping with zombies and falling in love so hard you wake up concussed.

I Thought We’d Be Famous is my new poetry collection that I’ve been working on for the last five years. In that time, I published a novel, wrote and performed a one-person show and invited a small vicious dog to share my life.

In some ways the book is a line in the sand. I started writing it after being diagnosed with a chronic illness.

Suddenly my life was a stranger. I got prescribed drugs with names I still can’t pronounce, went to a thousand doctors and pleaded my case, spent a year in bed in a house filled with spiders. I also became a youth worker and creative writing teacher and learnt how to breathe.

I Thought We’d Be Famous is a look back on my days pre chronic illness, but also examines my new life of blood tests and cancer scares. It’s about the dreams that rusted in the backyard and the ones I ended up living. It’s about the guilt in my blood after escaping a life of welfare and minimum wage. It’s about the absurdity of trying to make sense of this broken society.

It’s about Channing Tatum and Edward Furlong and Chilli the Pomeranian and the teacher who beat us half to death and killing your landlord and sleeping with zombies and falling in love so hard you wake up concussed.

About Dominic

Dominic Hoey is an author, playwright and poet based in T?maki Makaurau. His debut novel, Iceland was a New Zealand bestseller and was long-listed for the 2018 Ockham Book Award.

His autobiographical play Your Heart Looks Like a Vagina, a dark comedy about living with auto-immune disease, had three sold-out runs and Dominic was nominated for Best New Playwright at the Wellington Theatre Awards.

As a screenwriter he’s scripted four short films which were accepted into a number of festivals including Palm Springs, The Orlando Film Festival, The New Zealand Film Festival and Show Me Shorts.

Dominic is also a youth mentor, working with rangatahi, using art, yoga and meditation to help with their mental health and to transition into higher education or employment.

In a former life, Dominic was an MC battle and slam-poetry champion. He’s performed his spoken-word poetry in Australia, Europe, England, Japan, and America.

Dominic is currently working on his second novel, Don’t You Wanna Be Rich?, and a new play with Barbarian Productions.