As I posted my poem on One Shot Wednesday on One Stop Poetry.com  I wondered yet again how much it is allowable to embellish what started out as ‘life writing’.

My poem (https://sallyjblackmore.co.uk/other-poems/the-heather-tweed-cable-knit-jumper/) started out as an exercise to write ‘in the style of’ Maurice Devitt’s poem ‘The Watch’. No problem there. Yet as I started to write about an imaginary jumper belonging to my father, I strayed closer and closer to a truth, and my conscience began to prickle.

Just how much of the truth can morally be revealed when some of the prime characters are still alive to be hurt or angered? Of course, this is an old discussion – one which raged long and hard on the forum of the OU writing courses I studied.

I thought I had sorted it out to my own satisfaction long ago, yet had to remind myself as I wrote the jumper poem , that the truth I know is only my truth. It is as I remember and not necessarily even recognisable to the other parties as anything remotely real or truthful.

And so, I followed my poem to its conclusion. It is fiction. I think.