![]() ![]() Was there anything you noticed in the game then that you hadn’t before? So much of my childhood was there, waiting for me to return. The game became my mnemonic device: through it, I could recall childhood moments I’d forgotten: fumbling with the cables at the back of the TV when we first plugged in the Nintendo, inching through the Special World – a kind of glimpse of that game’s afterlife, I always thought. I wanted to intertwine machine memory – fixed, unchanging – with my own memories. I found this amazing and, in some ways, reassuring.Īs an enthusiast of technology, I’m fascinated by what the makers of Super Mario World managed to do with such a tiny (compared to today) amount of RAM. Its physics and conventions and puzzles were already part of my memory, there was nothing I had to learn again. What surprised me is how much of it was automatic. Forest of Illusion becomes the strange new world the Valley of Bowser casts Bowser as a kind of death figure. From there, I followed the story I’m telling – Vanilla Dome, underground, becomes a place of sedation and surgery, then the mountain top. As the game goes outwards, to Donut Plains, I looked at Northern Ireland, where I live, which is not unlike Donut Plains: there’s a lough in the middle, some famous caves in the west (the Marble Arch Caves in Fermanagh – Donut Plains 2), a famous rope bridge on the north coast ( Carrick-a-Rede). Yoshi’s Island is a kind of domestic space, so all of the Yoshi’s Island poems are full of images from the real place I grew up. Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeĪnd you connected many of the game’s locations to real spaces?Īcross the book and game, there’s a trajectory from home to the unknown. For me, this book is caught between those two positions: the unadulterated play and silliness of childhood, compared with the worlds of adulthood: age and illness, loss and responsibility. Grief does strange things to the world: it makes it both unreal and hyperreal the death of a parent makes you more aware of your child-ness but also, abruptly, your grownup-ness. They can’t enter a ghost house without thinking about their own house, lonely and haunted. The speaker of these poems can’t see the cactus wandering about Yoshi’s Island without thinking of needles and chemotherapy. The book is about my mother’s illness and death, mapped onto the journey of Super Mario World. Suddenly, I was writing a book about grief – something buried so deeply I had to trick myself into writing about it.Ĭan you tell us a bit about the contrast between the game’s playfulness and the seriousness of grief and love? My mother was still alive then (she died in 2012), and the longer I thought about my childhood, the more I thought about her. Partway in, I felt more and more drawn to the memories of playing, in my house in the countryside, looking out the window into the ‘real’ world. I started to write a poem for every level, from Yoshi’s Island to the Forest of Illusion, treating them as real places. It’s my favourite game, and I think the most perfect. Out of nowhere, really, came Super Mario World’s landscapes. I think we all feel, on some level, like Super Mario World is our own private space In a fit of mischief, I thought, why not take a familiar image instead of a classical one? As part of a Creative Writing PhD project, I was writing poems responding to paintings or photographs and I became increasingly bored. Stephen Sexton: I started it by accident. ![]() Nintendo Life: How did the idea for If All the World and Love Were Young come about?
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