Omar Musa — poet, rapper, wood block carver, and, lately, kickboxer — is someone whose work I've encountered for many years. Maybe it's our literal proximity: he's from Queanbeyan; I'm Canberran. Maybe it's because I worked with his mother, Helen Musa, the arts journalist. Maybe it's the pull of the work itself — I've encountered it through screens, such as when he read my favourite poem of his, 'The moon (unfinished)', during Covid lockdowns when a lot of creatives tried to do this very thing; to offer us what they could through screens. I have some of it on my shelves, such as Here Come the Dogs and Killernova. The latter I carried around with me to a tense medical appointment, hoping the combination of poetry and art would act as a kind of balm.
Reaching back into my memory, which feels a little poor these days, a little broken down by the sirens inside my phone who sang often enough that I answered their calls, I am quite sure I recall Omar buying his mother a Greek holiday with money he had made from one of his books. I'd like to do this, I'd like to buy my mother a holiday with my writing. As it stands, with the proceeds of my fiction, I could get Mum a pretty good laksa which, incidentally, is one of Omar's favourite things to eat.
Omar Musa. Photograph: Boyz Bieber
Omar Musa is the 46th in my series of creatives to take five questions.
When my creative process is stuck, I reach for... my running shoes or a really good book or story that has inspired me before. A recent example: I reread the brilliant short story "Something Is Burning Outside" by László Krasznahorkai and it got me going again.
The weirdest thing about being a creative human is... that you have infinite sources of inspiration. This infinity can be freeing or stifling, depending on how you feel in the moment.
The most unusual object in my house is... a jar of pickled watermelon rinds.
I celebrate my achievements by... feasting on Malaysian food and very sweet things that I usually don't eat. For example, I just won my first (and last) kickboxing fight on Sunday and I ate: a plate of egg gravy fried noodles, egg and onion roti canai, a glass of teh tarik, half a durian, 1 kg of langsat, a matcha Magnum ice cream, a mini tube of Pringles and half a packet of Tim Tams.
Something in the world that already exists that I wish I had created is... Hm, I never really feel this way: I'm cool with other people coming up with their bright ideas and me coming up with my own, so this one is hard to answer.
However, I'll answer with a story... Once upon a time, starving for some greasy food after a big night out in Stockholm, Sweden, a mate and I realised that there was a dearth of fried chicken shops in Stockholm. Having identified this gap in the market, we came up with the idea of starting one there, with a DJ playing soul music in the corner, and coming up with our own special recipe.
Of course, life went on and we never started the shop. Years later, at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand, I was sitting on the exercise bike next to a big Swedish guy, who told me that he came to Thailand once a year to lose weight, because, he said, "in my line of work, it's easy to put on weight."
"What line of work is that?" I asked. He said that he had become a millionaire by starting the first fried chicken franchise in Stockholm, years after my mate and I had come up with our idea. I suppose, in that moment, since I'm consistently broke as a writer, I wished that my mate and I had followed our bright, greasy idea.
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