Helen Musa, today a Canberra art critic, and Musa Masran, still a noted Malaysian poet, fell in love over the words of Shakespeare. Of course their son would have the soul of a poet - and, as it would turn out, a rapper, and a writer, proudly from Queanbeyan, proudly Malaysian-Australian.

Omar would grow into a serious creative talent, his work brooding, dark, acclaimed. He has always been a mainstay in Canberra's art scene and a fast-rising literary star - drawn to the melancholy and the political, reflected in his work.

But, sitting on a weekday morning in a book-lined Canberra restaurant, Musa is filled with a new-found levity and optimism; he's now added visual arts to his repertoire, having gravitated towards the art of woodcut print-making, a modern iteration of the artistry of his Borneo heritage.

His latest book of prints and poems, Killernova, is an exercise in instinct, patience and absorption. It's causing him both pride and a massive sense of imposter syndrome, as a proud Malay who has, seemingly, just stumbled upon an age-old cultural tradition, and taken to it like one of the evocatively carved boats of his ancestors.

It seems inevitable, for someone so connected to his own heritage; his father lives in Borneo, he visits often, and he's been involved with the local arts scene there for the better part of a decade.

But in fact, coming to woodcuts felt almost by chance, a flickering from the corner of his eye as he gave a reading at an arts residency there three years ago, and a whimsical leap into a medium he'd never tried before.

But his three-year apprenticeship in woodcarving has a run parallel with a certain reckoning, and Killernova is part of Musa's personal salvation.

At the age of 37, after years of dangerously heavy drinking, he has quit the booze, an act that he says came down to a choice between life and death.

"I will say that I've dealt with alcoholism and addiction for many, many years, and it takes you to a very, very dark place," he says.

"And I do think that sometimes getting clean and sober is a matter of life and death ... Making those changes in my life has allowed me to live a much better life in terms of my physical health and mental health.

"It's quite hard to explain to people who haven't dealt with those issues, that sort of sense of powerlessness. But, you know, people have noticed that I've made a change in my life, they don't necessarily know what it was. But I'll just say that getting clean and sober has saved my life. And I mean that quite literally."

A lot of it had to do with unpicking the narrative he had created around himself about what it meant to be an artist - what it took to create things.

"I think an overarching and maybe almost unspoken one is around those mythologies of the drunk poet or you know, the addict musician or something like that," he says.

"Whereas actually, this is my first piece of work that I've created in this new headspace. And I've come to realise that no, you don't need these things to fuel you. I mean, I don't think I'll ever have the belief that all my work was completely fuelled by it, but it doesn't define me, and I think you can still let your mind free and actually do it in a more honest way when you have a clearer head.

"You know, I had this producer years ago in the States when I was recording a hip hop album over there, and he said, 'Hey, you know when Jimi Hendrix was at his best? When he was sober'.

"There's this whole idea that poets and stuff have to be shitfaced, and I just don't think it's true. And I think it's really unhealthy."

It's a beautiful clarity that shines through the pages of Killernova. But back in 2018, at that arts centre in Borneo, he was already going through something of a creative crisis.

His acclaimed first novel, Here Come the Dogs, had come out four years before; awards and plaudits had ensued. The book was longlisted for the Miles Franklin and received glowing reviews, and Musa found himself on Best Young Novelist lists.

But by 2018, he was over doing readings, and looking for something else. On this day, his heart wasn't in performing - he was more interested in the woodcarving workshop happening nearby. The guy running it - the heavily tattooed punk rocker and activist Aerick LostControl - was an acquaintance in the Borneo arts scene.

"So I went over - I was a bit late - and I said, Hey, look, I know I'm late, I'll probably be really shit at this. But have you got a spare block of wood? Could you teach me a little bit?" Musa says.

Three years later, and he has a whole book of work, encapsulating more or less his entire learning process - including his very first carving, right at the end.

"Aerick LostControl, [who's] actually from the same town my dad's from, taught me how to do it. And he just said, 'Carve what you feel'," he says.

"And then when I finished, I looked at it, and thought oh god, it looks like something a child would make. But there was something in it. He said, 'Look, I feel like this comes naturally to you, and you're going to be really good at this'."

Musa returned to Australia and kept going, using the cheap MDF board, simple principles and minimal tools he'd been taught with to carve words, images, poems, stories.

And, importantly, he wasn't afraid to be bad at it.

"I don't mind being shit at something. I kind of enjoy it, because I think maybe we're all so paralysed by fear about these things, we lose that sense of childlike playfulness," he says.

"There was no pressure, I didn't expect myself to be good at it, I just did it for fun because I like picking up new things."

He set himself up in the corner of the glass-making studio of fellow Queanbeyan artists Harriet Schwarzrock and Matthew Curtis, and approached artist friends at the Kingston print studio Megalo to teach him about printmaking. It was, he says, very much in keeping with the collective spirit in which the woodcarvers and weavers of Borneo have always worked, and put paid to his long-term self-image of the solitary writer, locked in his tortured tower.

Instead, he worked and collaborated, and let his instinct and imagination run joyfully over the pages. He started posting some of his work on Instagram, drawing the attention of his publisher, who suggested he put them together in a book.

Imposter syndrome aside, the book has been an outlet for his lighter side - the side that hadn't seen much action for many years.

"It's allowed me to show this different side of my personality, because I think people are oftentimes a bit surprised when they meet me in person that I'm friendly, joking around, smiling a lot," he says.

"They always think that I'm so intense, angry, political... I'm not sure why, but my writing was always, I think, this kind of steam vent for anger and melancholy."

And as he brought his works together into various themes - Borneo, Canberra, bushfires, the pandemic - he says he felt more connected than ever to his heritage.

"I also realise that it's an everlasting kind of journey to understand and to connect, especially when you've grown up so far away from the quote unquote homeland," he says.

"Identity is not some fixed thing, you know, it's a shifting ground ... It's been a way of telling my story, and also learning about history. And then this really visceral sense that I'm doing something that my peoples have been doing for thousands of years, really."

In many ways, it's been a lifelong process, and Musa has always had a bowerbird instinct, throughout his travels all over the world, for collecting books, stories and writing about South-East Asia. Killernova has become something of a repository for many of these historical, eclectic and esoteric tidbits.

"I've got a really good book collection, and I'll read just the most obscure things," he says. "I found this whole book that was written by a tiger trapper in the 1930s, about the nature of tigers in mainland Malaysia ... I just thought that is so evocative and interesting, but where am I ever going to put that in a novel?"

The tiger trapper is in there, along with family, food, love, and Asian history. It is, both for the reader and for Musa, a balm for the weary soul in this age of discord and divide and the tedium of social media and a fractured political discourse.

And rather than a dark path, it's helped him find more light.

"The arts has been such a source of joy and release for me, although at the same time, you know, I call it a beautiful destroyer, because sometimes it feels like it also erodes me," he says. "Sometimes it's a myth, that it's all just this beautiful therapy session. Sometimes it can also, when you're exploring the dark places, take you further into them."

But this work - these carvings, and the words and stories he has woven alongside and through them, have come instead from a place of joy, even with the dark threads running through.

"Even in our personal lives, I do think generally, you've learned more from the bad things that happen to you, than the joyous things - it's about how you respond to those things," he says.

"I think I'm really exploring it in this book, to be playful with form and to be playful with your ideas. Even if you're talking about the most deadly serious subject matter, I think that's important, because sometimes, as writers and artists, we take ourselves so damn seriously, and forget that part of the joy of the arts is letting the imagination run free.

"It's a risk and I think there's no good art or writing without risk. Sometimes you can fall flat on your face, but that's alright. So it's a risk I'm willing to take."