Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle: a note on Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle reflects on her new book of poetry, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama (April 2026), a collection of prose poems which explore the relationship between thinking patterns and ill health. The book is published simultaneously with the re-release of her debut collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite, and follows her popular novella, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.
Although this book appears as my third publication, I actually wrote it in 2011, when I was 20. I was studying English and Psychology at the University of Auckland. I had an intention to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML (Wellington, NZ) the year after, and wanted to make sure I could complete a book on my own first, outside of a writing workshop programme. I completed the manuscript in only a few months, and I remember listening to The Beatles’ album Revolver on repeat on my CD player while working on it in my mother’s bedroom, where the computer was (I didn’t have a laptop). It has been strange revisiting these poems almost 15 years after they were first composed. In a way it feels like a posthumous publication.
At the time, I had become sick of writing lyric poems and wanted to try something different. Taking inspiration from Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘The Rejection of Closure’, (and her book, My Life) I wanted to use parataxis and non-linearity in the book to subvert traditional narrative and lyric expectations. There are many ways for a reader to step into the room of each poem; each sentence can be a complete story on its own, as well as coming into play with preceding and following sentences, and with the larger narrative framework of the paragraph. In contrast to regular prose, the sentences are written and arranged to decrease syllogistic movement and increase polysemy, leading to ‘gaps’ in which the reader must bring their own beliefs/experiences.
The prose poems focus on cycles of belief, life scripts, anxiety and disease (dis-ease). The book takes ideas from psychology theories (such as transactional analysis), and metaphysical theories of illness, attempting to explore the way we chose ‘life scripts’ for ourselves from messages we internalise from others at a young age. Each poem creates resonances with other poems as the book develops (most noticeably in the use of specific repeated phrases).
At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured. My own experience with chronic illness led me to holistic approaches that highlighted the link between the mind and body. My mother had a copy of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and this book became an important part of how I related to my illness, as well as being an influence on my writing. Hay’s philosophy is built on the foundation that our thoughts shape our reality, and negative thought patterns could lead to emotional and physical suffering. In Love Your Disease: It’s Keeping You Healthy, (another influential self-help book for me), John Harrison posits that disease is not the result of external forces but rather a subconscious choice, a way of getting our needs met – needs such as attention, love, respite, or even the affirmation that the world is dangerous/unsafe. ‘If you have no need of major illness’, Harrison wrote, ‘you will have no major illness.’ This is controversial idea, which many people find threatening, although these days books like The Body Keeps the Score have become mainstream, and we have evidence-based correlations between adverse childhood experiences and the likelihood of developing autoimmune disease. My first published book, Autobiography of a Marguerite, written a year later, further explores these themes, and I see Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama as its companion.
At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured.
