Category: Interview

‘Life felt like a terminal illness until I accepted my queerness as a ‘gift’. Derek Jarman helped me do the same with HIV’: Celebrating the publication of ‘lamping wild rabbits’, Simon Maddrell reflects on why ‘giving life is part of the human condition’, and how his poems green the page.

A smiling person with spiky gray hair and glasses stands in front of a red brick wall, holding an open book in one hand and gesturing with the other. They are wearing a patterned shirt and several necklaces, with sunlight casting shadows on the wall.
SAT 14TH SEPT 2024, BRIGHTON, EAST SUSSEX, UK.
A selection of photographs of local poet Simon Maddrell. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIENSEN PAMBEN.

Two or three years ago, on a warm, late summer afternoon, Simon Maddrell and I met on the South Coast of England, just along from Brighton. The sea was a flat lustre of gold and blues, barely moving, the tide beginning its slide out towards France. With the air tickled by the faintest breeze, we drank at a beach cafe, sitting on the shingle among barbecuing families, then set out with my dog Ithaca on a long, slow meander along Worthing’s gritty sand, skirting between tide pools, looking for hag stones and beach treasures for Simon’s Brighton garden, and flints and sea-shaped chalk for my desk in London. As we scanned and walked together, comparing finds, pointing things out to each other, the sea always beyond us, the sky huge and wide, we felt an ease of familiarity growing, recognising the mutuality our shared of experiences of London in the early 1980s, when HIV and AIDS were visited upon the queer communities in which we moved, and comparing notes on coming to write poetry in our fifties, and why each of us had needed time to arrive at voices that would hold our complex subjects. That conversation is still flowing. It is the greatest pleasure to bring some of our words to the page — as Simon publishes a long awaited debut collection, after a string of stirring pamphlets, on both sides of the Atlantic. The photos which flower between our words were taken by Simon Maddrell in their salvaged, cherished Brighton garden — from which many of the poems grow.

A decorative hanging made of various stones, suspended from a branch, surrounded by lush green foliage in a garden.

ah: Let’s start with the big news.  Your debut collection, lamping wild rabbits, is published by Out-Spoken Press in February 2026, edited by the legendary Anthony Anaxagorou. Tracing the rainbow arc of your life, you begin by exploring being born queer and Manx at a time when homosexuality was still illegal on the Isle of Man (IOM). The poems ask how a person can be, and grow, if their deepest self not only is prohibited, but also punished in law? It’s still a live, and lethal, issue in many countries around the world.  Is the personal inherently political for you?

sm: lamping wild rabbits with Out-Spoken Press is my best poetry dream-come-true. Anthony was the first poet/teacher to encourage me, even as he gently demolished six of my earliest poems at a Poetry School one-on-one session! (I looked it up; it was March 2nd, 2019). He has been a mentor and teacher of mine at various times ever since, so it was wonderful for him to be so effusive about my collection manuscript, and then to work with him to craft the final book. It’s such a privilege to be part of the Out-Spoken stable, and I hope its reception does them justice.

Talking of justice and the ‘personal as political’ –– our mere existence is political, and for too many of us, who we are personally is an existential threat. Of course, my personal existential threat is not what it was 40 years ago, but lamping wild rabbits shares some of that experience, and some who didn’t make it. Even if childhood traumas are personal, they soon become political e.g. how the social service system fails to support victims of child abuse.

It must be said that whatever existential threats I have endured, they don’t compare to the fears many trans women have walking down the street today; the ten miles that women in Africa walk for water daily to sustain their families; the 24/7 drones in Gaza that are even felt by deaf children, never mind the horrors that are inflicted upon Palestinians. The collection does reflect on these more collective threats, and I firmly believe that the ‘personal and collective’ are allowed to sit alongside each other, rather than in competition, or even comparison, with each other.  There is neither competition nor comparison in these things.

When I think of the times of my youth, they are deeply affected by the Greater Manchester Police GMP) Chief Constable James Anderton and his assistant Robin Oake, who exported their homophobic policies to the IOM in 1986 –– harassment, entrapment, and inequitable law enforcement that cost lives. My youth was shadowed by these direct & indirect threats, like The Bolton Seven who were arrested & convicted for consensual sex, Anderton buying a cruise boat with a spotlight to catch men kissing under bridges on Canal Street, Manchester, him epitomising people with AIDS as ‘swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making’, and Oake’s illegal entrapment and forced confessions of gay & bi men in the IOM in the late 80s/early 90s (Brilliantly portrayed in the short film No Man Is An Island). I think when a serving Chief Constable says, as late as 1987, that “sodomy between males…ought to be against the law” it is difficult to not see the personal as political.

Book cover for 'Lamping Wild Rabbits' by Simon Maddrell featuring a stylized illustration of a rabbit on a blue background.

ah: Your opening poem strikes a sombre note, while simultaneously upholding a movement of hope and transformation. It begins 

it’s as though
we have to climb 
out of our damage
up an invisible rope
and apologise.
a rope we’ve been carrying 
all our life

That determination to give witness, alongside a refusal to be defeated, appears central to your creative impetus. Is that how you experience it?

sm: I believe that ‘bearing witness and a refusal to be defeated’ are central to my life’s impetus, but only a part of my creative one, if I am understanding the question correctly.  As will hopefully be apparent in discussing my pamphlets and the collection, I feel the central impetus to what I write is varied. Of course, as with most early-stage writers, I began with the autobiographical in the way your question describes. Queerfella was “my journey from shame to unashamed” and hence central to the creative impetus. One might say section one of lamping wild rabbits, ‘caged rabbits’, is just a better version of Queerfella, but I hope people experience it as more than that. I think at other times, the creative impetus is more subject-driven, whether that be queer history, queer biography, the ambivalence of an exile, or the Isle of Man as a place (even if, like Penny Lane, it ‘is in my ears and in my eyes’). Whether that does or doesn’t include my direct experience is just a consequence of how to best explore the subject, rather than it being central to it, or even necessary to it.

ah: Going back to you beginnings as a poet – your first publications were the pamphlets Throatbone and Queerfella in 2020. I believe they found their way into print along two very different pathways?

sm: Throatbone did have an unusual birth. The Raw Art Review, a Massachusetts magazine, published a couple of Manx poems in Summer 2019. In December 2019, I was shortlisted for their Poet-in-Residence. The editor, Hank Stanton, loved the Manx poems I had submitted, so I asked if I could pitch the pamphlet draft, Throatbone, in January, which he accepted (thanks also to the mentoring support of Anthony Anaxagorou). The Manx heritage organisation, Culture Vannin, funded 300 copies for me to sell over here –– I just sent the last copy to the British Library!

Joelle Taylor mentored me to improve Queerfella, but it was rejected by four publishers before eventually jointly winning The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020 alongside Selima Hill’s Fridge –– the latter being a particularly surreal fact. 

A person with short, light hair wearing a plaid blazer holds a microphone and stands on stage. In the background, there is text displaying the name 'JOELLE TAYLOR' and social media handles aligning with an event or performance.

ah: Since then, you’ve published The Whole Island and Isle of Sin, which grow out of the intersections of your Manx heritage and out and proud queer identity, and the history informing both.  Tell us about these two books. 

sm: Even though Isle of Sin was published first, in Feb 2023, it came as an overspill from The Whole Island, which I wanted to be an exploration of what I later realised was an ambivalence about the IOM, albeit an ambivalence of joy & sadness rather than love & hate.  The central titular (but in Manx Gaelic) poem was inspired by Virgilio Piñera’s long poem La Isla en Peso, 1968. Whilst this is usually translated as The Whole Island, literally it means “the weight of the island”, which to me, more poetically encapsulates both poems. The Whole Island explores the ambivalence of a returning exile, rather than someone ‘stuck there’ but also explores the place, the island as a body, the body as an island. The Whole Island was funded by the Manx sister to the IOM Arts Council –– Culture Vannin, and published by Valley Press.

In embarking on this, I found myself also reflecting more on the dark days of the police harassment and entrapment of gay & bi men in the late 1980s. I’d done this in a  poem sequence in Throatbone, but was now driven to transform that anger into activism and, to be frank, mockery. Consequently, I was involved in lobbying the IOM Police for an apology (they became the first police force in the British & Irish Isles to apologise for the way they treated people like me). This also coincided with It’s A Sin when I became aware of Manx actor Dursley McLinden –– who was one of the inspirations for Olly Alexander’s character, Richie Tozer –– and how he had been mostly erased from history (I performed at the launch of the first-ever queer exhibition at the Manx Museum and he didn’t even appear anywhere). After all of these diversions, I ended up with too much for a pamphlet, and as I didn’t want to do a first collection yet, I developed a manuscript for Isle of Sin –– including improved versions of the Throatbone sequence –– and approached Peter Collins at Polari Press who I knew was keen to tell queer stories.

ah: A more recent publication, on the thirtieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, is the wonderful, intensely moving,  a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, with Polari Press. How did this project come together?

A person taking a photograph of a small black house with yellow window frames, surrounded by a colorful garden filled with flowers, under a partly cloudy sky.

sm: Derek Jarman is an overwhelming inspiration, not in the least because of his response to being diagnosed HIV+ and his ‘return’ to the coast and creating a garden out of nothing, which inspires mine. I re-immersed myself in Jarman, in particular his time (and garden) at Prospect Cottage, along with the Protest! exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, plus the ones at The Garden Museum, London and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. I found myself writing voraciously about him –– or perhaps more accurately –– about HIV, mortality and connection to nature. 

a finger in derek jarman’s mouth was turned down by nine publishers (longlisted by only one) so I approached Polari Press about the idea of a series of three pamphlets over three years, with the third being Patient L1 in Feb 2025 (more of that later).  I also knew that Peter liked the idea of doing a boarded-cover limited edition at some point, so I pitched that too –– we sold out the 130-copy limited edition before publication date, and Peter deservedly won the Michael Marks Award for Best Illustrated Pamphlet in 2024 –– for the cyanotypes that feature in both editions.

ah: If we ever needed someone to defend the values of persevering, and always trying another route if the obvious path is blocked, you would be that person Simon! Ideas of continuing, and persisting, and creating things which will resonate beyond our lifetimes are at the heart of your relationship to Derek Jarman as you have told us. In the last but one poem, ‘dear derek jarman’, you write

you refused to die without the sun
rising without stones threaded
and hung in a garden that grew out
of nothing, without going quietly
smiling in slow motion like an iceberg
sinking from the sky, the ripples still
licking shingle in a one-way tide.

These lines hold for me the coalescence of life in death, and life despite death, which contribute powerfully to the book’s magic. Could you say something about them?

sm: As I mentioned, engaging with Jarman is an exploration of mortality, and while you capture it, I’d perhaps say ‘life despite impending death’ and the reckoning with the truth that ‘impending’ is true for us all, not just those with a terminal illness.  I think for me, life felt like a terminal illness until I accepted my queerness as a ‘gift’ (if that doesn’t sound too glib). Jarman helped me do the same with HIV –– “as if being banned and disliked is a pinnacle after all” (‘dear derek jarman’). I think ‘giving life’ is part of the human condition, and for queers of my generation, ‘offspring’ wasn’t an (easy) option, but gardens are! Perhaps, the older we get, the more we see life, like Dennis Potter’s whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be.

A wooden lounge chair in a garden surrounded by various plants and flowers, with a stone path in the background.

ah: That’s a wonderful way of seeing things Simon. I concur, wholeheartedly, in full blossom! Thinking more into the connections between you and Jarman, refracted dualities are at the heart of a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, which adapts its title from Jarman’s collection a finger in the fishes mouth. You are, and Jarman was, both out and HIV positive with all the difference that three decades make in terms of effective treatment protocols. In speaking queerly with him, through blurred and echoed reflections and transmissions of his artworks across multiple media, was part of your intention to explore how, without invoking biological intergenerationality, we all live through and beyond time, through our enduring vibrations within the lives of others? 

sm: I’m not sure I am capable of intentions that grand –– or that well-thought through, but now you say it, I do think that’s what the book does. I guess I’m primarily a practical man –– so decide to ‘do things’ wholeheartedly, and it is through that whole-heartedness that something deeper emerges, something you can arguably only realise or discover in hindsight, rather than plan for in advance. Also, if Jarman creates ‘enduring vibrations within the lives of others’, as I feel he does, then those vibrations are there anyway –– rather than requiring exploration, they need expression. 

ah: By working so strongly through multi-gendered transitory experiences – flowers, gardens, weather, sex – the poems give off this heady summer heat, and with that the sense of being a memorial to a whole generation of people of both genders dying in the prime of life from HIV/AIDs before treatment became available. While Europe and North America saw a predominance of male deaths in the first wave, in Africa and beyond, gender was not a factor in  transmission and infection. Was that an interest of yours? 

An engraved signature on a dark stone surface with green foliage in the foreground.

sm: With a finger in derek jarman’s mouth being a tribute to Jarman then to me the focus of the book was to reflect his UK experience of HIV/AIDS, as you say “the sense of being a memorial to a whole generation”. But also, what he said and role-modelled in terms of confronting HIV stigma, and how that is even more important today. 

But worldwide HIV/AIDS is absolutely an interest of mine. I get frustrated when queer people and organisations talk about HIV/AIDS as though it is a thing of the past. (For heaven’s sake even The Guardian refer to it as “Aids” for that very reason). It is still a global epidemic. Not only is HIV/AIDS a real, and growing, problem here, but it is even more of a problem in the USA due to lack of blanket access to medication, and even more of a problem overseas, especially in Africa. Africa has 50% of new infections, and the latest Trump attempts to block US-funded medication for Africa would be catastrophic.

630K people died of HIV-related causes in 2024. WHO is only targeting this to decrease to 400K by 2030. Can you imagine if WHO had said that about Covid?  

An ornate metal cross mounted on a dark wooden surface.

ah: The physicality of Prospect Cottage, and the shoreline at Dungeness, moves like a blessing through the poems.  They are good places where the reader can seek imaginative refuge, as Jarman did. At the time of writing you had yet to visit. How did you make the site feel so real?

sm: I am an island boy, and had also moved to Brighton in early 2020 with its shingle beaches. Like Jarman I collected hundreds of hag stones from the beach and hung threaded ones from trees, or on spikes, in the garden. A garden I was creating inspired by Jarman, albeit mine had four walls rather than none, and some of the jetsam is from the street not the beach! I also immersed myself in his books and the amazing derek jarman’s garden (Thames & Hudson, 1995). There was also a wonderful exhibition, replicating the cottage at The Garden Museum in London. The gateway technique, of course, is to focus on capturing the emotions of it all. The technical facts are easy in comparison, but still crucial as we are reminded in William Blake’s “holiness of minute particulars“.

ah: The photos you gave given us from your garden, which blossom through our conversation as moments of ecstatic, transient, green beauty enact what you say, Simon. More soberly, since COVID, the whole world has discovered what it’s like to become vulnerable to a new virus.  You and I both remember the onset of HIV/AIDs at first hand, and its early ravaging of queer communities in the UK. 

Like COVID, HIV/AIDS offers us the chance to look at natural evolution in the raw, with all its extraordinary potential for mutation. In ‘powered by HIV’ you write of 

an overactive fuel
energy from atomic
cell destruction

Did this terrifying energy also run through these poems as a paradoxical creative source? 

sm: I saw radioactive destruction as a metaphor for HIV and saw, as Jarman did, HIV as a creative energetic force –– driving the imperative to explore and accept mortality. Radioactivity is of course a paradox in itself –– giving energy, curing cancer and giving us a toxic legacy for generations, and in that it is not alone. In many ways, there are other ‘terrifying energies’ we face as human beings, especially the ‘others’ and ‘less powerful’ amongst us, and that certainly fuels what I want to say and explore. It is probably fair to say that the toxic energy and impacts of shame are very predominant in the collection, as is the power of redemption.

A black wooden house with yellow windows and a chimney, surrounded by a landscaped garden with gravel and various plants.

ah: Both energies pulse through the poems. You have mentioned that in Europe and North America the most deadly aspect of HIV/AIDS is the stigma that is still attached to it, and the consequent reluctance of people to come forward even when they suspect they may have symptoms, or have simply had an unprotected sexual encounter which should  logically point to the need for testing. Could you say more about this perceived stigma, as the statistics, and their consequences, are something people need to be more aware of. 

sm: I don’t think stigma is perceived, but there are two types– the stigma attributed and directed by others, and the stigma we impose on ourselves, HIV stigma, both of which negatively impact male suicide rates (and also female suicide rates in Scandinavia). According to a study published in The Lancet, the male suicide rate is five times higher than average in the first year after diagnosis and twice as high overall. Of course, we know how high male suicide rates are for men already (especially for those 18-30 and 45-60). The reason that the study concluded that the prime cause was stigma was that the rates were unchanged between 1996 and 2012.

I would argue it is the prime cause of the fact that more people are now diagnosed with HIV in the UK through heterosexual sex than ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), and even more crucially, why late diagnosis is significantly higher for straight men and women, compared to MSM (70%, 50%, 30% respectively). Of course, late diagnosis means that it is highly likely that more people have been infected per diagnosis, and that the risk of suffering life-long or life-threatening illness such as PCP is much greater.  Someone died of HIV-related illness in Brighton last week. 

Stigma was something that Jarman recognised, which is why he was the first ‘famous’ person to declare his status in late 1986. Greater openness is a key to breaking down stigma, but so are public attitudes –– hopefully helped by HIV no longer being a “lethal weapon” carried by those successfully managed on medication. In my own case, I realised in the 2-3 years after diagnosis that I risked being locked into another closet, and more so reinvigorating that ‘voice of shame ‘ telling me I was worthless and ‘being what I deserved’. To counter the championing of openness, it is important to acknowledge that English Protestant culture, and many of the other cultures here, don’t really approve of talking about sex, and the fear of being considered queer is more prominent than one might expect.

A garden scene featuring a wooden planter filled with natural material and green plants, accompanied by two decorative gnome statues on either side.

ah: In the ‘feral rabbits’ section, a short sequence of sexy, razor-sharp, poems rush the reader into a space from which safety abruptly exits. We get to feel-along with what it might be like to find yourself with an HIV positive diagnosis. How did these poems come together? They feel brave, intimate, and honest, but also deeply crafted and deliberately made – acts of beauty that refuse shame. 

sm: I’m really pleased that is how you read and saw the poems. The three poems, ‘Private Members’ Club, ‘The first sex party…’ and ‘Did he…?’ were originally written as a triptych (I honestly can’t remember why they now aren’t!). I wrote them over a relatively short time period, but ten years after my diagnosis (and after a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, which may be relevant or significant). For years, I’d found it impossible to write about the specifics of my HIV contraction or diagnosis, or about navigating the trauma. There are so many pitfalls, and at least three mineshafts to fall down — and I know you’ll forgive me, but I won’t name them as they do not warrant being ‘invited in’ for scrutiny. Those three poems were definitely the hardest poems to write in the whole collection, so it makes me very proud when you, and especially you, say they are “deeply crafted and deliberately made”. They were poems I knew I had to write, there would have been an elephant-sized hole in the collection without them, whether anyone else would notice or not.

ah: More practically, would you be able to share a few words about your experience of being supported by healthcare providers on this journey, in the event that someone who reads our conversation is fearful of being judged if they come forward for testing? 

sm: HIV doesn’t discriminate, and neither, almost without exception, do healthcare professionals, who are also bound by professional confidentiality. Self-test kits are now available, albeit I would recommend going to a clinic if you feel there is a high chance of diagnosis so that you get the excellent support they offer. I have taken PrEP twice, which you usually get via A&E rather than the specialist health workers –– on both occasions, I was thanked by the doctor for coming in and taking it. My dentist didn’t bat an eyelid and I am unaware of any actions they take which make me feel stigmatised (e.g. the ‘end of day appointments’ of yesteryear). I had my ear pierced the other week and I told them. The response? “Oh, that’s fine! I don’t think we are even allowed to ask you that nowadays! It makes no difference, but thank you for thinking about it.”

A close-up view of a tree branch adorned with small stones, surrounded by lush green foliage and a background featuring a black structure and a bicycle.

ah: Life lived alongside HIV is also a theme within the poems that you have co-created through conversations with actor, activist, artist and tailor Jonathan Blake. They have so far been published in your Polari Pamplet, Patient LI, which you and Jonathan have performed from together, but this is just the beginning. 

sm: In 2019, I approached Jonathan Blake (who was played by Dominic West in the film, Pride) about writing his life story in poetry. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1982 ––known as  ‘Patient L1’ at London Middlesex Hospital. He is now 76 years old. I have done over 50 hours of interviews with Jonathan and I also have access to 4.25 hours of interviews done by the British Library in 1991. 

Thanks to Arts Council England, Polari Press published a pamphlet version of Jonathan’s story, Patient L1, in February 2025. Jonathan read poems at the launches, which included found poems from a journal Jonathan’s partner of 39 years, Nigel Young, wrote on a holiday in April 1985. The poems went down so well, we published, under Nigel’s Septum Press, Jo & Ni Go Cruising in July 2025 –– thanks to Andrew Lumsden’s Grand Camp Maisie Fund. 

Work continues on the full book, which is a mixture of prose in the writer’s voice and verse in Jonathan’s voice, provisionally entitled, The Life of Jonathan Blake in Twelve Acts –– with a Prologue, Interlude & Epilogue. Its length and complicated categorisation will make finding a publisher difficult, but sure we’ll get there.

ah: I have both books, and cherish them. I also really valued hearing you and Jonathan Blake reading the poems together. His story, through your and his words, in both of your voices, is a compelling and miraculous enactment of what co-creating can engender. That’s a pleasure to come, but let’s close for now with lamping wild rabbits. Having had the privilege of reading a press proof, I know that ‘dead rabbits’ is the last section, albeit that these poems are uncompromisingly full of life. Tell us a little more about them, and also what leads into this final act. 

sm: Death, and hence mortality, is such a taboo, but I find exploring it strangely reassuring. For me, I can’t have lived through the last two years without meditations on mortality broadening to what it is to be human, broadening into considering the deaths that we are seeing every day –– especially those under the shadows of war crimes & genocide.

lamping wild rabbits hinges or pivots around the central ‘dungeness rabbits’ –– a tribute to Derek Jarman’s responses to his HIV diagnosis, with nine poems from the pamphlet. The book begins with ‘caged rabbits’ –– arguably a better version of Queerfella escaping shame and embracing freedom while ‘feral rabbits’ confronts the trials and tribulations of escaping the ‘domestication’ of sexual oppression. ‘wild rabbits’ is my response to HIV, inspired by Jarman connecting gardens & nature. 

I’m excited about it. Outside of the Jarman section there are only seven poems from my pamphlets leaving over 50 poems –– half of which have never been published anywhere else.  

ah: I know that readers will be as blown away by them as I have been, Simon. For people who want to order a copy, or attend a reading, the links are here. 

Website: 

Order from Out-Spoken: www.outspokenldn.com/shop/rabbits

Signed Copies: simonmaddrell.sumupstore.com/product/lamping-wild-rabbits

Launches & Readings 

(Up-to-date events and ticket links at linkin.bio/simonmaddrell/)

Launches 

London 
Thurs 12 Feb Betsey Trotwood, EC1R 7pm
with Kostya Tsolakis

Brighton
Thurs 19 Feb The Walrus, Ship Street 7pm
with Naomi Foyle & Robert Hamberger

Manchester George House Trust Fundraiser
April Queer Lit Bookshop 7pm

Readings 

Common Press Bookshop
Sun 22 Feb Bethnal Green Road, E2 7pm
with Nathan Evans

Milton Keynes Lit Fest
Tues 24 Feb Online 7pm
with Julia Bell & Len Lukowski

Yer Bard Poetry
Wed 18 March Dash The Henge, SE5 7pm
with Jake Wild Hall

Kemptown Bookshop
Thurs 26 March Kemptown, Brighton 7pm
with Ken Evans & Luke Kennard

The Elephant in the Room
Tues 31 March Online 7pm

Cork International Poetry Festival
Fri 15 May Cork Arts Theatre 7pm

‘The HIV Readings’ Fundraisers 

Brighton: Lunch Positive
Thurs 12 March The Queery Bookshop & Café, 7pm
with Jonathan Blake & Robert Hamberger

London: UK AIDS Memorial Quilt
Fri 13 March, 7pm
The Devereux, Temple WC2R   
hosted by Jonathan Blake, Patient L1
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-hiv-readings-in-aid-of-uk-aids-memorial-quilt-tickets-1981421186106

Simon Maddrell Social Media
Website: simonmaddrell.com
Facebook Page: @SimonMaddrellPoetry
Facebook Personal: @SimonMaddrell
Instagram:   @simonmaddrell 
Bluesky: @simonmaddrell
Threads: @simonmaddrell

‘I close my eyes to open them’ : Paul Tran and Chen Chen on how we can define our traumatic experiences while refusing to be defined by them ourselves.

Back in 2022, I was lucky enough to be asked by Wayne Holloway Smith at the Poetry Review to review All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran, published by Penguin in the UK, and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen published by Bloodaxe in the UK. 

Preparing to speak with Tamsin Hopkins about bird of winter, alongside new projects, for Red Door Poets on Sunday 30 November, (you can watch our conversation here) I’ve been thinking about art-making as a healing energy, and a source of agency that can generate transformative encounters between the maker and the work, and the work and the world. It made me realise how much I have received, and continue to receive from the voices around me, whether on the page, in person, or over the airwaves – as with the recent, riveting, brilliant documentary, Ladies First, about the first generations of Black African American women claiming their voices through Hip Hop.

Paul Tran and Chen Chen are two poets whose practice and fierce, sometimes fiercely funny, creativity inspires and informs my own. Ahead of my conversation with Tamsin, I wanted to share my review of how they define and document complex events that have been visited on them, their families and their wider communities, while simultaneously refusing to be defined or diminished by energies that had their origins in acts of intended harm. The text of the review follows:

A portrait of poet Chen Chen, wearing glasses and a dark jacket, alongside the cover of his book 'Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency,' featuring a red and white design with illustrations.

Near to the end of All the Flowers Kneeling, a segment within Paul Tran’s long poem ‘SCHEHERAZADE/ SCHEHERAZADE’ reflects: “Reap. Pear. Pare. Aper./  These are versions of the word// I won’t say the word/ without which there’s no speaker.”   Recognising and articulating this paradox is central to the work of change Tran’s poems perform.  Defining, but refusing to be defined by, traumatic experiences is equally a live issue in Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.  Audacious in their uses of form, and possessed of a fierce sense of mission, Tran’s and Chen’s new works have in common a doubled structure exploring overlapping generations of trauma. Compellingly readable, each collection also arrives at a new relationship with their core materials through a redemptive turn into the once rejected or diminished body-self.  

Giving witness to two sexual assaults, and multiple historic acts of violence, Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling is nonetheless a freedom song.  ‘Victim Report’, then later ‘Progress Report’, direct our path forward. The larger healing work is also shaped by the Buddhist tenet that nothing is fixed. Structured as four segments, the first part of Tran’s debut centres around “my death in that room without sunrise” on “the night before my twenty-first birthday”. It also holds a partial  account of what happened to “my mother/on her knees” fleeing Vietnam as a young woman. “Her silence demanding mine” means neither adult-child nor parent can speak fully what was done to them:

        My mother disappears whatever blights her the way she now makes her living: altering and tailoring the story

as though the truth were trousers to be hemmed. 

Tran’s second segment opens with “my father”, who “lives alone”. He is similarly haunted by the Vietnam War. Driving his 93 Mazda MPV: “We sail I-15 South as though it’s Thu Bồn River,/ flee Hội An’s cinnamon forest barricade, viscera-flooded streets/ American soldiers peeling his house apart, straw by straw.”  Formally recording the separate traumas which continue to entrap their parents, enables Tran’s voiced self to recreate on the page the place in which their own mind was caught. We the readers feel it with them: “the right hand placed over my mouth/ while the left hand held me, held me// there, held me down”. Refusing silence generates a shift into agency. ‘Winter’ retells the fable of a Buddhist monk and his mother which leads the speaker to understand that “She left me behind in// Hell, where I had to find a way to save us both.” 

Transformation takes root through a Buddhist metaphor of rebirth within Tran’s third segment: “I had to keep on/ Remembering the desert wind, the flames that broke into and broke open// This body, that released from me another me, another”. These flames seem at first reading to be the sensations experienced when “A man seeded me without consent”. They become also the successive selves arising from living beyond this event, and the artworks these evolving selves make. Tran afterwards offers the image of a desert blooming “after decades dormant […] a sea of gold and pink and purple”. 

The final segment begins with ‘Enlightenment. It reveals “I close my eyes to open them” and   celebrates “coming/ back from the dead”, most gorgeously in the poem which gifts the collection its title. Named for California’s “desert wind”, ‘The Santa Ana’ rejoices in the full flamboyance of self-created, trans life: 

Text excerpt from a poem about self-identity and fashion, featuring lines that emphasize personal expression and cultural commentary.
A portrait of a person with short hair and sharp features, looking over their shoulder, wearing a black velvet top, beside the book cover of 'All the Flowers Kneeling' by Paul Tran featuring a yellow flower illustration.

How far we have travelled towards “sunrise” is registered in the same poem’s “Pop quiz: who’s that bitch?” The answer can only be: “That bitch,// bitch. That’s me/ looking at myself/ for the first time!”  Queer gorgeousness as a radical, political act is also at the heart of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency.  Written during Trump’s presidency – “endorsed/ by the KKK” – and the pandemic, Chen Chen’s second collection documents the double assault of coming of age in an America, some of whose citizens publicly denigrate Asian Americans, while at home your parents deny and endeavour to change your queerness. 

Chen’s poems confront head on the fearfulness that living in a frequently hostile environment may exacerbate. ‘The School of Fury’ recalls “my father almost getting arrested for trying to retrieve his son” as a result of having gone to “the neighbor’s door”, rather than that of Chen’s friend, at the end of a play date.  This occurred not long after the family had arrived from China, but such incidents are shown as continuing right up to the present day, and possibly contributing to the harshness with which Chen’s parents enforced what they perceived to be a protective conformity.  

‘The School of Red’ recalls being “struck” on the face, aged fourteen by his mother, for saying “I think I like girls/ & boys”, and afterwards being told for many years “never” to tell his brothers, or any other family, about his queerness. ‘I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party’ is a brilliantly funny, and bitter-sweet, enactment of the slow process of change, and the deep family love that enables this. Chen does not turn away from how he likewise absorbed self-hostile beliefs.  ‘Winter’ remembers “my first boyfriend” approving my “not really chinky eyes. The way I said, Thank you.” and “my third boyfriend, how he liked to call my dick an eggroll, proudly called himself a rice queen.” 

What strengthens Chen to resist and make different are the qualities for which he was persecuted and diminished.  From ‘Every Poem Is My Most Asian Poem,’ to multiple segments in untranslated Mandarin, to a celebration of his mother’s rocking a three-sweater-look, Chen affirms how where he hails from nourishes and roots him. Aesthetically as well as personally. Similarly, he shows how he writes out of the life-givingness of queerness, and his committed partnership to “my Jeff, who fixes the computer, who fixes us dinner, fucks my face et mon ȃme”. 

Sounding a note of jubilant defiance, ‘Ode to ReReading Rimbaud in Lubbock, Texas’ plays out “my poetics of deepthroat & tonguefuck”. Their chant is “Let’s holler, troublemongers. In the/ lick of many summers”. The last poem is ‘The School of Joy’. It closes the collection with Chen’s hand refusing exclusion and making instead

Text image featuring a poem with the line 'A one-word song to fill the board– Welcome' in an artistic font.

Making and sharing poems that hold the central acts of our lives : Mary Mulholland, Wendy Allen and Natalie Whittaker at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden.

From October 2028 – seven years now, and counting – I’ve been part of a loose affiliation of poets who work with complex materials. Drawing together our earliest members, my hope was to create a group whose participants would co-resource each other. I wanted us to collaborate creatively, and editorially, but also offer mutual support – especially where confidence and courage, and above all, tenderness, might be needed. What we had, and still have, in common was knowing that we were working with materials that had the potential to be dangerous to us, and to each other. Together, we enact our shared commitment to go gently as we allow new work to take shape. Many of us work with our individual experiences as starting points to travel outwards towards the world, and inwards towards the wider histories and geographies that have embedded themselves within our spaces of being and are ask to be spoken to and of.

While work always originates with the maker who creates it, since that autumn evening in 2018, many collections, and pamphlets, including my own debut bird of winter, have gained strength and momentum through being brought, one poem at a time, to our group’s monthly meetings. We started out above the Poetry Café in Betterton Street in Covent Garden, then moved to the foyer of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank, waiting for the audiences to take their seats before getting down to our feedback.  Having gone online during the pandemic, we have stayed there ever since, freed from geographical restrictions. 

In different ways, all of us have been nourished by the conversations around process, and working practices, which open every session. The privilege of meeting each other’s works in progress, and giving them our careful responses, has been powerful and generative. Natalie Whittaker, Wendy Allan and Mary Mulholland have all engaged at different times with the group. When I heard they were planning to share a reading at The Poetry Café, I was thrilled to be asked introduce them.  It seemed like a true celebration to hear their work and voices out loud and proud, two floors down from where our group began.

The evening didn’t disappoint. In fact far from it.  Going to places where many might fear to tread, Mary Mulholland, Wendy Allen, and Natalie Whittaker make poems to hold the central acts of our lives. Through their words, we live, love, bleed, heal – and  meet life towards its endings, as well as its beginnings. The audience’s warm engagement with their passionate, wry, fiery readings, and the conversations we had about the poems following on from them, made me want to share something of that evening with a wider audience.

What follows are my introductions, and videos of Mary, Wendy and Natalie reading their sets, which they filmed individually at home afterwards.  At the time publication, Wendy’s was still on its way. The blog finishes with a question from me for each of them, engaging with a theme that’s central to their practice. I’ve also included the all-important buy-links within the titles of their books, so you can go deeper, and support them, and, the publishers bringing this essential work onto the printed page and into beautiful bound volumes. 

Mary Mulholland reading at the Poetry Cafe.

A few words about Mary Mulholland, now, before the video of her reading. Her first two publications were both collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell, published by the inimitable Nine Pens. All About Our Mothers led the way, with its logical sequel, All About Our Fathers, following. Both acid-sharp pamphlets.  Her first solo pamphlet, the wonderful, not entirely woolly, What the sheep taught me, then came out with Live Canon in 2022. Most recently the elimination game, published this year by Broken Sleep.  Rebecca Goss hailed it as “an illuminating, fearless study of the rich intricacies of female life”. Beyond Rebecca’s tribute, Mary Mulholland is widely published.  More recently her poems have appeared in 14 magazine, Anthropocene,  Stand, and are forthcoming in Finished Creatures. Mary also founded the generative and nurturing, live and online gathering, Red Door Poets, and is Editor of The Alchemy Spoon. 

Speaking more personally, for me one of the delights of Mary’s penetrating poems is how they encompass adventure and irreverence as life-giving energies, but then move in a heartbeat to questing, questioning vulnerability. Time is folded and unfolds itself from moment to moment, as we move from a “kohl-eyed girl in a purple kaftan” to a “bronze age mummy” smelling of “honey scent and sweet bark”. Elsewhere an older woman enters an arctic whose cold “takes her back to childhood,” only for the mood to shift again as we come upon “a cluster of Parisian grandmothers” who are “elegantly chatting and laughing”, entirely  oblivious to their charges’ high risk play choices. 

Here’s Mary’s video.

Here’s Mary Mulholland’s ‘Woodstock’ from the elmination game as a bonus.

Our next reader was Wendy Allen, who shot, more or less fully formed, into the poetry firmament, after a first career in aviation. Early on, Caroline Bird hailed how “reading Wendy Allen’s poetry makes me realise there is a precision to the erotic, every line feels like a held breath.”  Wendy’s debut pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird, was published by Broken Sleep, in 2023. She has since collaborated with Charley Barnes on freebleeding (Broken Sleep 2024) and Galia Admoni, i get lost everywhere, you know this now (Salo, 2024). Most recently, we have Portrait in Mustard from Seren. All are magnificent, and unmissable. Wendy’s currently in the final year of her Creative Writing and Art History PhD and is a tutor in Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Met. 

Wendy Allen reading at the Poetry Cafe.

I love how Wendy’s work is centred on, and translated through, the variously fertile female body, and its desires, and despairs, often calibrated relative to made artworks and consumable objects. In ‘Apricot’ the narrator ends up inside the said fruit only “the stone is missing, and I am/ curled up in the pit where/ time should be.” Moving through such landscapes, Wendy’s poems creates a magic lantern play of shadowed and projected selves. They rise up and deliquesce away, even as their “nipples tiara against an/ endlessly repeated new-start sky.”   

Finally, our third reader was the extraordinary Natalie Whittaker, celebrating the launch of The Point is You Are Alive, her heart-stopping first full collection which came out with Broken Sleep in April this year. As many of you know, Natalie writes with a spareness and precision that allows her poems to vibrate with imagistic intensity. Writing for the Poetry School, Jonathan Edwards admired the way “elegant sentences and striking images cast enormous shadows, conjuring something much bigger than themselves.” 

Natalie Whittaker reading at the Poetry Cafe.

Integral to the work she makes are Natalie Whittaker’s roots in South East London. A poet and teacher, she is the author of two stunning previous pamphlets: Shadow Dogs, published by ignition press in  2018, and Tree, published by Verve in 2021. Natalie was also a London Library Emerging Writer from 2020 – 2021. 

Deeply embedded in landscape and place, Natalie’s poems often ask us to see visually, as a starting point to participating in an act of shared perception. In SANDS, facing the loss of a child, “it is November  I steer headlights through drizzle / pull up outside a church    that’s switched off”. Earlier, there had been a “ghost dog […] beneath the ice”. Finally, and redemptively, comes SPRING “in a contagion   of blossom/ a pink blooming   pandemic” – where, paradoxically, life can start again. 

Here’s Natalie Whittaker, reading her specially recorded poems.

And this is a ‘Jenga’, from Natalie’s set.

To close, the three questions, which transitioned us from the live readings into a wider discussion with the audience. It’s always so powerful to hear poets speaking about the making and thinking of their work, bridging the gaps between the creative energy as it first came to them, and the shapes it forms on the page. 

Firstly, a question for Mary Mulholland.

ah: You’re a savagely witty, wry writer in a way that is pure delight for your readers. Tell us about humour as a lightning rod shooting us deep into the complex heartlands of your work? In short, why so wry?

MH: I suppose I find people behave in funny ways. The disjunct between what they say and do. Our secret lives. And life/ fate has its own sense of humour, which is not always kind, but perhaps serves as a reminder that things are always changing. I never set out to be funny so I guess it’s ingrained  – I have a fairly existential approach. Life’s taught me there’s much that one should not take too seriously. Seeing the ridiculous or ironic in difficult situations can ease the tension and laughter is infectious, it connects us, releases endorphins, transforms, breaks through, like shining a light in the dark.When my father who was so sharp and accomplished developed dementia, the subsequent crazy conversations we’d have ironically enabled me to get to know him better, as if a lid had been lifted from his controlled way of being. It’s irony mainly that I enjoy. Humour is a bit like playing with fire. Of course not everything can or should be laughed at, but without humour life would be very heavy going.

ah: Wendy, as you write her, the female self is infinitely expansive, imaginatively, physically, and aesthetically. Also witty, and hungry. Tell us more about working through seemingly individual female experiences as portals to something much larger. In short, why so radical? 

WA: Why so radical? A conversation. 

Dear alice, Mary, and Natalie,

I’m writing this at the onset of my period. I am so tired I feel like I’m filled with lead. 

You may, at this point, be questioning why you need to know this. You need to know this because I write what I am, and what I currently am is a body about to bleed. 

I have just started teaching at a university, and one thing I repeat to my students, is the value of feeling the poem – to understand our bodily response to the poem – to its visuals -to its (the poem’s) body. 

Recently in the news it has been reported there has been research into how visiting a gallery and looking at art is beneficial to our health. 

I think the same about looking at the poem. 

I love looking, and by that, I mean really looking, at poems, just as I like looking at my menstrual cup, just as I like looking at the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth (and we all know I like that).

My poetry is not a book of hidden desire. It doesn’t mute desire or mask its own pleasure. All my books speak of desire with pride. They paint desire on a huge canvas and make pleasure so large that when you walk past it in the gallery-that-is-a-book, you are unable to not see it. The fact that sometimes, my poetry may provoke a response which questions its necessity, simply highlights that there is a need for this. I think of Eileen Myles here. I love writing like this. 

In answer to your question, alice, why so radical?  Because it makes me sad when I see bestselling books of women sharing their fantasy as a hidden desire. In Portrait in Mustard (Seren Books, 2024) the speaker of my poems uses poetry to display her pleasure, her disappointments, her sex as her art. She wants to flaunt this –

In April 2024, I attended the For Art History conference at York University. On the final day there was a panel on the work of Art Historian Griselda Pollock, and at the end, Pollock gave her own response to the papers.

I will never forget that in her introduction to the lecture, Pollock acknowledges the work of the panel but raises the point that her work’s impact should not be viewed as a singular, rather, because of the community of women she worked alongside, whose belief and desire for change, collectively changed feminism in art history, and the wider sphere. Radical practice involves collaboration. It is incredibly important to me to address this notion of change through my poetic practice. 

At the recent reading at the Poetry Society in Covent Garden with yourself, Mary and Natalie, our conversation reminded me that collectively, we can achieve so much. Our practice may differ, our poetry may be thematically different, but when we are together, when we share our work and engage with each other, as we do within our Stanza community, that, then, is where the change happens. That is where we are at our strongest. 

Wendy x

ah: Natalie, your collection holds some tough material, around societal harms, and the profound loss of stillbirth. At every turn, though, your  poems pulse with fierce life, and an intensity of being that sees off their darknesses. In short, where does the joy come from?

NW: The joy comes from writing poetry; the joy of playing with language and experimenting with form. Even though the subject matter of my poems is often something that has troubled me in some way, there is usually a real joy in the act of writing a poem. The ‘Tree’ sequence is an exception, as I can’t honestly say that I ‘enjoyed’ writing those poems. But there’s a different sort of joy in those poems; a slow-burning joy that comes from transforming painful experiences through art, and the joy of sharing my work with others who may be going through something similar.

Reclaiming the records that other people make of our lives: working with my historic medical notes.

Youtube interview between alice hiller and Danne Jobin.

How do we see ourselves when we look in the mirrors that other people have held up to our lives, during times when we ourselves had little or no control over them? Do official records have value if they were made while we were silenced children, or discredited teenagers, and only our bodies were able to communicate that a crime was being committed against us? 

These are questions I ask myself working with my historic medical notes, specifically those relating to my childhood, adolescence and early twenties. For the past decade, first as I wrote the poems of bird of winter, and now as I put together a new prose memoir of my first eighteen years, I’ve been looking at the ways these records register and reflect the sexual abuse to which I was subjected by my mother until I was thirteen, and also its long aftermath.

I initially requested my medical records from my GP following surgery for ovarian cancer, which was diagnosed in 2011 when I was forty-seven. I had no idea what my file might contain, or how far it would reach back. I had lived permanently in the UK from 1972, when I was eight, but moved around until I was seventeen, with a series of different doctors. 

After the GP’s receptionist called to say my file was ready, it took me six weeks to be ready to walk the fifteen minutes from my home to the surgery to collect the photocopies. A further eighteen months were required to go through the file in depth. There were a limited number of pages, but the events they referred to were seismic for me. Reading about them remained impactful – even at a distance of decades. I had to take it slowly. I would advise anyone else with a complex history to proceed with care in investigating its official documentation, and think about how you will keep yourself safe as you do.

Some of the things I read were eye-opening. Seeing myself described by different doctors, while knowing what my mother was actually doing to me at home, I found repeated evidence of the lack of awareness of childhood sexual abuse within the medical profession during the 1960s and 1970s. Doctor after doctor clearly had never been trained to look out for how children being subjected to this crime might present when seen in their surgery. 

I also discovered extensive, and often devastating, examples of how some of those doctors judged me as a child, and later a teenager, for behaviours arising as a consequence of what was being done to me by my mother, who was my abuser. To those doctors, I was clearly misbehaving, delinquent, disreputable and of less worth than a better behaved child. Others connected with me, and let it be understood through what they wrote to each other that they had concerns about how my mother was behaving towards me, as when she was pressuring them into performing an appendectomy on my for my teenage stomach aches.

What I saw were only samples of a larger body of material to which I was not able to gain access. Huge swathes of documents and correspondence had already gone missing from the photocopies I was given across the counter. The receptionist wanted to know why it had taken me to so long to come in for them. She then backed down and became more understanding when I told her.

Whether the missing documents had been lost or destroyed over the years, and during the moves from one practice to another, or simply not photocopied for me, as the file was considered too large, I will never know. This GP practice would not allow me to see the original file of my historic medical records despite my requests. The same historic file then failed to arrive at the new, much more helpful, practice I transferred to. It has since become untraceable, despite my repeated attempts.

Redacted and circumscribed though they were, the blurry photocopies I finally recovered, when I was approaching fifty, were nonetheless invaluable documentation. In them, I found concrete records of physical symptoms I remembered, tests I knew I had gone through, hard conversations that I had been part of, and a prolonged hospital stay when I was thirteen and being treated for anorexia within a psychiatric unit after the school nurse had insisted I was referred for medical attention, while all around me were busy looking away.

Reading through the pages, over and over again, I met my younger selves holding onto life – sometimes against all odds. As a child, I presented with symptoms that tried to say all was not well with my mind and my body. As a teenager I ‘acted out’ and asked questions some doctors considered inappropriate. While this was not always the case, often I was often heard and responded to with care and professionalism by the doctors who made the notes and wrote the letters – even if they did not question the root causes. 

Because I eventually left my childhood home with no material objects, these medical records gave me back needed physical evidence of how my younger selves moved in the world, and who surrounded them. Confirming events I remembered with unexpectedly forensic precision, document by document, vertebra by vertebra, they grew into an invisible but strong spine of correlations — as I continued to write and heal. 

The photocopied records also allowed me to hear fragments and refractions my own muted voice, under the dominant tones of my mother speaking about me to medical professionals. Through the doctors’ recorded comments in my file, and in correspondence with each other, I witnessed how my mother re-positioned the physical and psychological symptoms which her sexual abuse of me gave rise to, so that the doctors would look away from what caused them as my family members did. 

This reframing of the abused child’s narrative is of course the practice of many abusers. Along with the child, the abuser grooms the circle of adults around them. From relatives, to friends’ parents, to teachers, to medical professionals, all are led to look in other directions, so that the abuser can continue to perpetrate their crime without interference. 

What prompted me to think about this subject more recently was a request by the poet and academic Dr Danne Jobin for an interview about using my medical notes within bird of winter, as part of the Poetology series. I wore a spring green cardigan I’d bought the day before in a charity shop for positive energy and hopefulness, and set a photo of Ithaca behind me to reflect her invisibly lying on guard at my feet. Together these magical objects worked their spells of protection. Danne and I could talk about hard things with laughter as well as anger, as our conversation opened further into how we experience and process childhood trauma, but also recover our lives beyond its harms as you’ll see if you watch the video whose link is here.

Danne and I additionally explored how creative acts of making have the power to generate autonomous objects, such as the poems in bird of winter, through which trauma can be interrogated with a measure of safety and agency. Invoking the collaborative play that arises between a recipient and an artwork, whatever the medium, this interactive process is integral to its reception. 

To give readers a chance to find out for themselves how this works, and also to see how one of my medical notes became part of an artwork, I’m ending this blog with my poem ‘pistil’, along with an extract of the medical note which I built into it as an act of witness. As you decipher the looping handwriting, imagine a GP somewhere near Victoria Station. I would have been taken to visit her during the course of a trip from Paris, where my father worked as a diplomat, to London for my mother to see her family. 

This doctor, who I’ll call Dr P., is named for a fruit. She has short grey curls, framing her round face. Green Virginia creeper leaves surround the window, giving the light an underwater feel. Dr P. wears a business-like white shirt, and matching grey flannel jacket and skirt, with flat black shoes. Her belly bulges a little under her skirt and her calves are wide and strong. I notice them because I’m sitting on a red and blue Turkish rug quietly taking toys out of a wicker basket, and turning them over.

Meanwhile my mother, who has been this doctor’s patient for many years, tells her with some irritation how I am  Difficult with medicines. Aggressive & difficult with other children, that I bite and Scratch and that it’s difficult to get her off to sleep at night, leading the doctor to conclude  ie spoiled++. All the time my mother is saying these things, she knows that back home, when no one is looking, she’s pushing her fingers into parts of my body where no parental finger should ever go.

‘pistil’ holds how I was presented by my mother, and how this was received by the doctor who wrote the note. I would continue to see her intermittently until I was a teenager. The poem also records how this exercise of power over me resonated within my own two year old body, and the stomach aches the abuse resulted in. It closes with an image of me at that age, drawn from a remembered holiday photograph taken by my father. Named for the female reproductive parts of the flower, but reflecting in the shape of the gun and bullet how historic medical practices could be weaponised to further injure an abused child, as a poem ‘pistil’ honours the girl who I was, and her role in forming the woman I am now. Together, and notwithstanding the harms that were visited upon us, we look to the future with hope.

If anything I have written about is difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to go for further support.

For anyone in the Newcastle area, I’ll be teaching an-in person workshop on Colour as portal and energy channel: working the rainbow to amplify your poems’ impact and reach on Friday 10 May, between 1-3pm. Click the title to book.

We’ll be exploring how colour can be channelled to intensify the emotional, political and philosophical resonances of your poems. Generative practical exercises will offer fresh ways into creating – including a colour-themed guided freewrite, and a three stage writing exercise drawing together memory and association with found materials to begin new and develop new work. I’ll be supplying visual prompts and art materials. Supporting this, we will also look at colour theory and consider how colour is used by poets including Elisabeth Bishop, Gail McConnell, Airea D. Matthews, Anthony Joseph, Paul Tran, Padraig Regan and Ella Frears.

I’ll also be reading live and online with my fellow Pavilion Poet Hannah Copely between 1.30 to 2.30 pm on Saturday 11 May as part of Pavilion Poetry’s 10th birthday celebration. Hannah has recently published her wonderful second collection, Lapwing, and I’ll be reading from bird of winter.

You can book live tickets here.

You can book online tickets here.

‘I am a spring/ The storm enters her’: Sarala Estruch on making art that transforms the silencings of family, history and diaspora.

Few journeys are ever single or simple. Whatever we leave behind often moves alongside us – whether as a source of harm, or healing.  In ways that feel radical, and necessary, Sarala Estruch’s revelatory debut poetry collection, After All We Have Travelled, invites us to look with new eyes at the complexity of diaspora, and how the violences implicit in empire may impact successive generations. The poems also reflect strong energies that arise in speaking beyond the silencings of history – as Estruch does here, through fragmentation and uncertainty.  

Published by Nine Arches, and edited with great thoughtfulness and care by Jane Commane, After All We Have Travelled is a collection which speaks additionally to me as someone who lost their father in childhood, as Sarala did. This is something about which Sarala and I have talked about briefly in person, and in more depth within the interview which follows this review. Because I feel that both her poems, and the themes she explores, will speak to many of us with multiple heritages or languages, and complex histories, in addition to reviewing her collection in this blog, I wanted to offer Sarala a space to talk about how about how the collection came together, and the thinking, and reading, and living which informs the poems.

Review of After All We Have Travelled by alice hiller:

After All We have Travelled’s prefatory poem, ‘On Sound’, notices how it remains at a “frequency / our ears // cannot touch/ but // the body / hears”. In the speaker’s history, this reverberation is true of the separation before she was born (at the insistence of his family), of her Indian father and European mother. ‘Starting from a Dream, 1983’ observes the speaker’s pregnant “mother-to-be” waking at night in a separate room, in his family’s home.  By day the family appear “as though they are // already / watching her leave”. At the close of the poem the speaker’s unborn self rises up into an act of self-claiming that fuses separate perspectives into a voice that is simultaneously scattered, and whole: 

All too soon, the “single star” of the speaker’s father has been extinguished by his early death. Elegising his gifts to her, and honouring the inarticulacy of childhood bereavement, ‘the things that remain’ is made up of fourteen tiny couplets, laid out as seven pairs, with a central dividing space running between them. Enacting smallness, the worn objects hold a potent residue of love alongside the grief through which they have been cherished:

Speaking to a theme to which Will Harris, Sarah Howe, L.Kiew, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nina Mingya Powles and others respond, this second section also documents the complexity of growing up of mixed cultural heritage, and the fragmentations and dispossessions of self that can ensue. In ‘Freight’, these include “believing people/ were praising the whiteness/ in me when they called // me ‘pretty’.” Set alongside this is the confusion of travelling alone to India to meet the plethora of loving relatives who nonetheless chose to be strangers during her father’s lifetime. ‘Home/Home’ begins “It is hard to feel Indian when this country is as unknown to you/ as you are to her.” 

Like a tide flowing back, from the midpoint, the poems shift towards reclamation as the speaker understands what she has lived without, and becomes more able to heal. ‘how to talk about loss’ reflects “for // decades i’ve been a river-bed/ bereft ~ not a drop of// what i was made to hold ~ ”. Responding, ‘To leap’ is one in a sequence of passionately alive love poems encompassing an energy of deep regeneration. Opening with an epigraph from Toni Morrison, ‘I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.’  this honours “pitching your strength/ at every atom that has pressed// you down & soaring”, then ultimately  “learning to live// with doubt, learning to rise in it;/ learning to love like that.” 

The collection closes with multiple reintegrations. Arriving at “Indira Gandhi International Airport” in ‘Return’, the speaker and  her Jamaican husband are told by the immigration officer that their children are “universal.”   ‘Dear Father’ records a sense of homecoming in India when the grandfather, who originally refused her and her mother, now welcomes her husband and children, making her lost father also present again with them: “These rooms pulse with you, motes/ of thought and feeling still in motion.”

Three powerful poems directly address the harm resulting from the British Empire. ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, documents “crumbling walls pierced with exit wounds.” ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ contrasts the speaker’s family observance of the Spring Festival in 2019 with the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, when the British Army killed somewhere between 400 and 1500 of the people who had gathered peacefully in Amritsar to celebrate, wounding many more. ‘Grandfather Speaks (Via Audio Recording)’ documents how the family dispossession of their home, in the Punjab during Partition, remains unspeakable by him even in the present day: 

The final poem, ‘Ghazal:Say/ After Will Harris’, centres around a memory of the speaker running to meet her father in a “garden”, and cutting her knee. Her spilt blood is both historical fact, and a metaphor for the redemptive interpersonal transactions that occur through the reactions of art-making and art-sharing, and the energies that they confer on those who create and receive them. In a way that encapsulates both personal experience and the reverberations of history, the speaker realises: “All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time, you haven’t,/ you’ve been right here.” The collection ends with loss and connection inseparable from each other, remembering a father and daughter who have moved beyond fixed time into the resonant indeterminacy of art and memory: 

Interview between Sarala Estruch and alice hiller

alice: We both started out trying to write novels – then found our projects translating themselves into poems. I found the wildcards, and subconscious dark woods of poetry helped hold spaces in bird of winter that simultaneously required, and denied, language. What led you into poetry from prose, Sarala, and how did writing in this form help you realise After All We Have Travelled?

Sarala: Yes, ever since my late teens, I had been wanting to write about my parents’ story – how they met, loved, and separated. I kept trying to find ways into writing it. For years, I thought the book would be a sort of historical novel set in London in the 1970s and early 80s (where my parents met and then lived together for several years). Then, in 2016, after reading Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, I tried to write the story as an experimental novel or a hybrid work of prose/poetry, but eventually realised that what interested me most – where the energy really resided – was in the poetry. 

I came to see that I was less interested in narrative progression and more interested in language, specifically language’s ability and inability to explore the complexities of human psychology and emotion. Saying that, narrative is still important to me, and, in some ways, my collection could be described as a novel-in-verse, but the experience of feeling and thinking beyond the ordinary day-to-day parameters is more important, if that makes sense. 

And yes, as you’ve said, poetry is a place where it is possible to attempt to speak about things for which ordinary language doesn’t suffice – inexplicable loss, complicated and prolonged grief, devastating personal, communal and/or intergenerational trauma. Poetry helps us in our attempts to articulate that which cannot be articulated, to create a language (or a non-language) of the unspeakable. 

alice: That’s such a beautiful and thoughtful answer. I love the idea of the ‘language (or a non-language)! Following in that train, during your launch with Nine Arches Press, you referred to the voices of the poems in After All We Have Travelled as coming from their ‘speakers’, rather than necessarily articulating your single experience. I see my poems as speaking through and with me, but coming from a larger hinterland. Would you be able to say something about how your poems are voiced?

Sarala: I think when I insist that the voices in After All We Have Travelled are those of ‘speakers’, I am trying to draw attention to the fact that, while I have drawn on personal experience and family history, these poems are not purely works of autobiography or biography. The poems are works of invention and craft; throughout the writing of AAWHT, factual accuracy was less important to me than emotional and imaginative truth. 

In addition, a huge source of inspiration for my work, beyond my personal experience, is the work of other poets. The poems in AAWHT were created in conversation with the works of writers including Bhanu Kapil, Marie Howe, Emily Berry, Sarah Howe, Sandeep Parmar, Kayo Chingonyi, Ocean Vuong, Will Harris, and many others.    

alice: Those are all poets whose work has also been crucial to me in different ways. Some of them, like you and I, also operate in more than one language. ‘Bouchon’, meaning stopper, explores your work’s relationship to language, and to the blockages which also shape it, but moves beyond them towards a space of freedom and speaking. The poem ends ‘There are no stoppers –’  How has this journey come about in your own work and life as an artist?

Sarala: These are all such excellent questions – thanks so much for your care and attention to the work, alice. I think, in terms of ‘Bouchon’, the poem is speaking about how language can get in the way of experiencing things, how language can sometimes ‘stopper’ the world by making us see things in a habitual way, rather than allowing us to experience things afresh, as children do, without language. This poem is about having a complicated relationship with language, fearing how language can ‘hold things down. Its false claim / to ownership’ (which, of course, can also refer to the colonial impulse of ‘naming’ that which is ‘unknown’, but which may already have a name). I think this poem is about embracing the joy of not knowing; how there can be real joy in being in a place where you don’t have the language to describe the things around you, which takes you back to experiencing the world in a sensory, pre-verbal way. I suppose, in my work, I am interested in exploring ‘the nameless / things, a poet spends her life chasing and / never quite arriving at’. It’s a way of accepting that we can’t know or control everything; that it’s OK to ‘just be’ – this is also a form of belonging. You don’t need to know everything in order to belong.

This was a new way, for me, of writing about unknowing, which is a strong theme of the book and of my life, if I’m honest. There is a lot about my family history and  about my parent’s countries and cultures that I don’t know and that I often feel shut out or apart from, since both my mother and father immigrated to England before I was born (from France and India, respectively) and, also, as a result of the difficult, painful things that families avoid speaking about and which are enveloped in shame, such as my paternal relatives preventing my parents from marrying and being together. However, in this poem, the speaker is embracing the state of ‘unknowing’, how it can be a fertile and joyful ground to stand on. 

Of course, another important theme of the book (and one that is even more significant in my pamphlet Say), is the journey of moving from being unable to speak (about trauma, childhood bereavement, and complicated grief) to finally finding a language and the courage to be able to voice these experiences and emotional states, so yes, that is also another possible reading of the poem – thank you.

alice: Developing what you say here, poems including ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ and ‘Grandfather Speaks (via Audio Recording)’ address the ingrowing silences and shames that living beyond catastrophic loss may precipitate for some individuals, and considers the ways that art-making can offer spaces of communication, as well as commemoration and witness, which confer agency on both creator and recipient. Was that something which was important to you? 

Sarala: Yes, very much so – thank you for putting it so beautifully. Attempts at communication and connection are central to my work, as are attempts to create poetry of commemoration and witness. Trauma is carried in the body and passed down through generations, so speaking about and sharing our experiences of trauma, in a safe way and in a safe environment, can create space for reparation and healing, which is so important – otherwise we become stuck in cycles of suffering. 

Thank you for everything you’ve said here, particularly about the poems’ attempts to confer agency on both creator and recipient – this is such a vital component of the work.

alice: It is a collection which means a lot to me Sarala. I feel changed by reading it, which was part of why I wanted to share my response to the poems and ask you more about them. In reviewing After All We Have Travelled, I was strongly drawn to your experiments with form, and the freedoms these gave you, which of course generate agency for both reader and writer.  Would you like to say something about this space of deep play, perhaps with reference to ‘Camera Lucida/ After Roland Barthes’?

Sarala: Yes, I consciously wanted to include a wide variety of forms in this collection, having been inspired by Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, in this regard – Howe’s use of multiple poetic forms really highlights and illustrates the points she is making about the instabilities and multiple possibilities of language/meaning, and also in terms of shaking up the English canon and creating a space where multiple poetic forms (originating from various countries and cultures), languages, cultural myths and histories can sit side-by-side and be enriched by one another. Howe’s work also creates a fruitful space to think about the many possibilities inherent in cross-cultural and mixed-race relationships, and mixed-race identities. I was drawing on all of this while writing AAWHT.

It was also, as you say, a space for deep play – a liberating and (mostly) joyful (although, of course, at times highly challenging) experience to write these poems in the forms they asked to be in. 

‘Camera Lucida’ was strongly inspired by Barthes’ eponymous text on photography and mourning. The poem began because I had a memory of seeing a photograph in my father’s photo album which carried a lot of significance to me. I told Sarah Howe (who worked with me as a mentor on these poems) I wanted to write about this photograph but I wasn’t sure how. She suggested that I read Camera Lucida. As soon as I began to read Barthes’ text, I very quickly felt the urge to replace the word ‘photography’ with the word ‘father’ or ‘lost father’. Barthes seemed to be, from the very start, speaking directly to my experience of losing a parent, while, at the same time, speaking very intelligently about photography. I, therefore, played with Barthes’ words and incorporated many of them into the poem (the words in italics are direct quotations lifted from Camera Lucida) – so this poem is, in part, a found-poem. 

Early drafts of the poem included several parts, which were short and fragmentary, like discrete photographs. Then my editor at Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane, had the wonderful idea of drawing faint boxes around the separate parts of the poem, so that they would visually appear to be photographs in a photo album. In addition, I asked Jane to typeset the poem so that ‘the photographs’ slowly fade over the course of the poem, so that the final ‘photograph’ is only faintly visible, evoking how memory (like photographs) fades over time. At least, that is my reading of the poem. I am open to other interpretations; I don’t think an author has absolute authority over the meaning of their work, and, in fact, there is often a lot in a work which the author does not know is there, since it is as a result of the work of the unconscious mind. 

alice: I agree very strongly with what you say about the role of the unconscious mind in generating and shaping the work we make. Continuing with the theme of the deep experiences which inform our beings, I wondered if we might think alongside each other about early childhood bereavement, which I touch on in my review also, and is something my own work addresses. One of the most moving and profound journeys of After All We Have Travelled is towards finding forms of words to hold this succession of losses, which travel alongside a child as they grow towards adulthood and find their parent is absent also from the new places that are opening in their lives. Could you say something about the process of creative reclamation which your collection performs, and the sense of nurturing presence it generates? 

Sarala: Wow, alice, I can’t quite express how very grateful I am for your careful, close reading of AAWHT and what the work is trying to do. 

Yes, the central journey of the collection is the process of moving through life as a child who lost a parent, then as an adult and, finally, as a parent oneself, and all of the different and cumulative losses of growing up and living without a parent throughout the various stages of one’s life. However, as the closing poem ‘Ghazal: Say’ suggests, even while the person who was bereaved in childhood has keenly felt the loss of their parent throughout their life, they have also, at the same time, keenly felt their parent’s presence: ‘All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time you haven’t, / you’ve been right here’. 

The creative reclamation of After All We Have Travelled is the acknowledgement and expression of what bereaved persons know to be true: when you lose someone important to you, at whatever stage of your life, the person never fully leaves you; they are still always here, with you, within you – in your mind and in your heart. They are always present in your life, just as the loss of that person is also, simultaneously, always present. Expressing this perplexing, contradictory, and yet strangely beautiful truth gave me much solace, and I hope that readers of these poems will find a similar solace. 

alice: I personally felt that beautifully realised, complex, tender solace Sarala, and it is one of the many elements of your work that I wanted to bring to others. Finally, and to close, can I thank you again for the gift of your poems, and ask what you are working on now, and where we may hear you read from After All We Have Travelled in the months to come?

Sarala: Yes, I am currently working towards a second collection of poetry, as well as a work of creative non-fiction. Both continue to explore and develop themes of identity, (un)belonging, and loss, which are so central to AAWHT, although in new and different ways. 

In terms of readings: I am reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Lounge (online) on Tuesday 27 June, at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 1 July (with Stephanie Sy-Quia), and at Deal Music and Arts Festival on Saturday 8 July (with Jessica Mookherjee). I am also teaching an online poetry workshop on writing poems about memory and family history for Verve Poetry Festival on 18 July.  

Inviting the reader to collaborate dynamically in the act of reading – an interview and essay by alice hiller with Arc Magazine in India on how working experimentally can confer agency around complex materials.

Back in March, when spring was only beginning in the UK, Dr Pragya Suman asked me if I would contribute a short essay and three poems to Arc Magazine. I chose to explore what working experimentally can bring to those of us whose work responds to complex materials, and was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce ‘her door is missing’, ‘and now came the ashes’, and ‘tessellation’ to evidence what I was saying in practice. Pragya and I also explored the topic further in a mini interview. The beginning of the essay is quoted below, and you will be able to read it in full, along with the other powerful material featured in Arc’s spring 22 issue if you follow the link at the end of the excerpt or here:

alice hiller in Arc Magazine: When I was growing up during the 1970s, England experienced intensely cold winters. Walking through the graveyard of the parish church with my mother, I would sometimes find small birds lying curled in the snow.  Seeking shelter within yew bushes, they had frozen to death overnight, then fallen from their perches. Although I could not articulate why at the time, the hunched shapes of their still, undefended bodies resonated with me. 

During those same years of unlocking the church, polishing its brasses, singing hymns on Sundays beside my mother, I was also being subjected to penetrative sexual abuse by her. We had moved together to Wiltshire from Brussels when my father died, the year I turned eight.  In the English countryside, surrounded by darkness and silence, my mother took me into her bed. I was not able to tell anyone what came to pass between us for two decades beyond the physical abuse ceasing. 

Writing bird of winter in my fifties, which gives creative witness to this crime, also on behalf of the millions who are subjected to childhood sexual abuse around the world, I knew the poems needed to exist in relation to the white spaces around them. I wanted them to communicate at a somatic and an instinctive level, through the shapes they made on the page, as the birds’ hunched outlines in the snow connected with me to suggest my own body when I was word-less.  I wanted the freedoms of more experimental poetry to open pathways to healing. 

Working visually as well as texually in bird of winter, I invite the reader’s conscious and subconscious selves to collaborate dynamically in the work of ‘reading’, conferring upon them an agency that the abuse denied me. Through this they become discoverers, rather than recipients of this complex material, and participate in the collection’s journey into meaning and resolution. They can also calibrate their depth of engagement, as I hope these three featured poems reflect. 

If you would like to keep reading, please follow the link below.

Link to Arc Magazine spring 22 with full essay by alice hiller, plus interview and 3 poems.

Letting new light in – setting your creative compass for 2022 and beyond with the help of a ‘Basque Whaler’

Letting new light in to set your creative compass: photo alice hiller

How can we resource our work in lean times? Where does inspiration come from when travel and and a wide range of live experiences are significantly curtailed, whether for financial, health or other restrictions? My steadfast belief is that we hold our own deepest and richest reserves within ourselves, accumulated through our lived experiences and interactions with the world at multiple levels. When more expansive possibilities are denied to us, to keep working, and generating new material, we therefore need to find ways to tune into this, both by nurturing ourselves, and also by finding new sources of ‘strangeness’ and intellectual and creative adventures to act as stimuli.

Basque poet Julie Irigaray Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Working with my fellow poet and cherished friend, Julie Irigaray, I set out to devise a solstice workshop, performance and conversation for the Voicing Our Silences collective that I founded. We wanted to deliver both these aims – of self-nurture and adventure. Core to the process were the two prompts we developed, which were designed to complement each other. Mine is a two-part process for setting your creative compass, which begins with a gentle breathing exercise, to clear your creative space, and then builds up your individual compass on the page – through a five stage guided prompt, which I lead participants through. There’s then a follow-up to be completed two or more days later. People who did it on the night we recorded the event have said how valuable they found it to be. This compass process can be used for a specific piece of work such as a poem or prose work you are developing, or would like to start. It works equally well for people looking to explore a new project, or simply to check in with themselves. Julie’s explores ways to expand your work dynamically through different forms of research and I found it gave me a breakthrough into a poem which had been hovering half-realised since the summer, so I warmly recommend trying it for yourself.

Frame for Setting Your Creative Compass to draw in central third of A4 page.

In addition to these prompts, we both performed two short sets of poems, and spoke to each other between them about how they came into being, going deep with where we resourced our work – whether from online resources including YouTube, books, museum catalogues, or other starting points. My poems came from my collection, bird of winter, and Julie’s from her pamphlet, Whalers, Witches and Gauchos. Because we were recording in the run up to the winter solstice, we structured our sets to rise from darkness into light, and both kept lit candles burning beside us as symbols of inspiration and resilience. The aim was also to share how although our poems appear to journey huge distances through time and space on the page, much of this travel is in fact realised without ever leaving home, whether we’re writing about Pompeii and Herculaneum in my case, or in Julie’s about the Basque heritage she explores in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, which she published this year with Nine Pens.

pistil by alice hiller from bird of winter

Julie also asked me about my practice of working with my childhood and adolescent medical notes, which have been crucial to my collection bird of winter, as with the poem ‘pistil’, given above. The poem is named for the female reproductive parts of the flower. It juxtaposes a quote from my medical notes when I was two, with a direct memory, which reflects how the grooming to which my abuser was subjecting me was already impacting my behaviour, and a photo I recall of myself at that age which my grandmother loved. I was very glad to have the opportunity speak about both the risk, and benefit, of working with documentary evidence such as medical notes if you have a complex history, as I do, arising from my experience of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, and finding my way towards healing beyond this.

As you will be able to hear if you check in with the video, I said how valuable, and painful it was in equal measure, to have factual corroboration of events that lived inside my memory. I explained how I had felt very apprehensive about engaging with my medical notes, for what I might find there, but was very grateful to see that events which my abuser had tried to deny, were in fact recorded in sober black and white. I also told Julie that reading these same notes had in fact provided a core source of motivation for my ongoing activism around changing awareness with regard to childhood sexual abuse. Driving this was how harshly the medical profession had judged my troubled teenage behaviours once the abuse had stopped. I wanted people to understand this adolescent acting out of harm done differently and more compassionately. In the questions which followed, Chaucer Cameron raised the query about notes being redacted, that is having sections blanked out, which has been her experience.

alice hiller Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Normally, when I record a Voicing Our Silences performance and workshop, I pause the recording at the prompt stops, and cut the audience participation, to keep the event around an hour. This time, however, we wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone who was joining us, and give the feeling of how the Voicing our Silences collective operates as a place of mutual creative nurture and adventure. Given that it’s a longer watch, I’ve therefore noted the minute timings of the different elements within the YouTube video, (which is captioned for accessibility), for ease of location. While they are managed safely, and there are no explicit references, this video includes discussion of grooming and childhood sexual abuse. If you need support with anything raised the Mind website is very helpful.

Youtube video: resourcing your work in lean times: setting your creative compass with Julie Irigaray and alice hiller

Please note, you will need a piece of paper and something to write with for each prompt.

0.00 alice hiller introduces
4.00 Julie Irigaray set 1: ‘The Basque Whaler’, ‘Six War Letters’, ‘Kreig’
12.00 alice hiller set 1 ‘bains de mer’, ‘pistil’, ‘three small shrines’, ‘in the vineyard’, ‘circular’, ‘joujou’, ‘libation’
21.20 Julie & alice discussion 1 including use of medical notes in poems
39.32 alice hiller prompt : setting your creative compass
1.00 audience feedback.
1.05.50 julie irigaray set 2 : ‘Red Card’, ‘Divine Seraphine’, ‘Via Domitia’
1.12.30 alice hiller set 2 : ‘the holly tree’, ‘vesuvius’, ‘benediction’, ‘o goddess isis’
1.20 Julie & alice discussion
1.35 Julie Irigaray prompt turbocharging your creative explorations
final questions from Voicing Our Silences collective

Julie’s poems include references to her Basque heritage, which is at the heart of her debut Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, published by Nine Pens earlier in 2021. In the spirit of expanding our horizons, Julie was kind enough to answer a few questions about Basque culture and history, which you can read below.

Photo of the Pyrenees in the Basque region of France by Julie Irigaray.

AH: Whalers, Witches and Gauchos opens with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson about Basque fishing in the Atlantic. From what he said, Basque sailors and whalers were clearly active off Newfoundland and further south from the 1400s onwards.  Could you (briefly) tell us something of the history of Basque involvement in whaling? It is partly the subject of the poem ‘The Basque Whaler’, which you perform on the video, but it clearly has deep roots.

JI: The Basques started hunting whales in the 11th century because whales were used to create a wide range of products: candles, soap, cosmetics, to fuel lamps. In the early modern period, Basque whalers spent between six and nine months per year fishing cod and hunting whales near the coasts of Canada and Iceland, in dreary living conditions.

AH: I know the Basque territory is currently ‘divided’ between France and Spain, and there has been political and other forms of activism, including formerly armed conflict, to reclaim and redefine this cultural, geographical and linguistic identity.  Would you be able to outline this for us?

JI: The Basque Country is divided between seven provinces: four of them are in Spain, three in France. It has never been a unified country because it was always split up between the kingdoms of France, Navarre and Spain. The Basque language is not related to any other existing language, so some academics theorised the Basques were part of the first wave of human migration in Europe. The pronunciation and dialects of Basque are different from one province to another, although a unified Basque has been created by scholars. The armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization ETA emerged in the Spanish Basque Country in the late 1950s, mainly as a reaction to Franco’s dictatorship. But they kept on carrying out terrorist attacks well after Franco’s death, especially in the 1980s. I think it was particularly difficult to be young in the Basque Country at that time. But this is my parents’ story, not mine. I’ll probably write about it one day after doing more research. When I went on holiday to England fifteen years ago, there were still some people telling me “Oh! You come from the terrorists’ place!”

AH: Am I right in thinking that both your parents’ families are of Basque heritage?  Your surname, Irigaray, has a sound which stands outside what I know of both French and Spanish, and I know the final poem ‘Exte’, in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos addresses this? Note – you can read ‘Exte’ at the end of this interview.

JI: You’re absolutely right – and that’s why nobody outside the Basque Country apart from you knows how to pronounce my name! Three of my grandparents are Basque, and the final one comes from les Landes, which is still in the south-west of France. My maternal grandmother comes from the coast and a different province from my father’s family, so there are differences of pronunciation and vocabulary between their Basque. My paternal grandparents used to speak Basque to each other or with their neighbours, and my father has a good grasp of it as well. 

AH: One of the ideas that our Voicing Our Silences collective works with is how our difficult histories and experiences can be creatively fruitful, because asking us to find new forms of language to respond to them. ‘Krieg’ in an incredibly vivid, and subtle poem, imagining two former combatants from World War I meeting high in a Basque mountain pass, and reaching a form of understanding which hinges on the title word, which only the German officer understands initially.  Could you say something about this poem and the idea of how poetry can open spaces for things we might not otherwise be able to say and also comprehend?

JI: I always knew I was going to write about this family anecdote one day, but I wanted to avoid certain pitfalls, like making it too overly emotional, or depicting my French great-grandfather as the good guy and the German soldier as the villain. These two men cannot communicate because they do not speak the same language, but also because they were conditioned to think of themselves as enemies for seventy years, and fought against each other during World War I. The memory of World War II in occupied countries like France is still sensitive since so many unspeakable things happened. My family did not suffer more than average, but a variety of things happened to them which are difficult to talk about or even taboo, like a great-aunt who fell in love with a German soldier, or a great-grandfather sent to Czechoslovakia to work as forced labour for the German war effort – which was seen as treason by some. During lockdown, I have written a few poems about World War II from the point of view of several family members. I hate black and white pictures of a character, or moralistic views, so what I try to achieve with my poems is a sense of balance. I want to give a voice to both sides of the story without judging, as I did in ‘Krieg’. 

AH: ‘Their Common language’ addresses your great-grandparents’ migration to Argentina, and subsequent return to France.  Could you say something about the Basque relationship to South America and how that came about?

JI: On my father’s side of the family, several great-grandparents emigrated to Argentina with their parents or siblings because they came from a rural area with little prospects. As I explain in ‘Etxe’, in the Basque tradition, the eldest child (either girl or boy) inherited the family house while the other siblings were left with nothing. One of my great-grandfathers who emigrated to Argentina had thirteen siblings: three sisters ended up nuns, one brother a missionary in Madagascar. Back then, there were not many opportunities to earn a living apart from entering the Church or emigrating to America… In the late nineteenth-century, many Basques moved to Uruguay or Argentina to work as gauchos, others chose the USA to become shepherds in Nevada, California or Florida. The great-grandmother from “Their Common Language” worked in an hotel in Buenos Aires, like the great-grand-uncle who inspired the poem ‘Amerikanoa’. Some of them stayed in Argentina, but many Basques have a sense of nostalgia and preferred moving back to the Basque Country after a few years. 

AH: A number of your other poems also lean into this Basque restlessness, and sense of not-belonging to any single place, which I know you and I both share for different reasons, as do millions of people around the world, who have left their places of birth to migrate for economic, political or other reasons.  Would you like to say something about this experience of becoming un-rooted, but also of carrying your roots with you?

JI: Since I was a teenager, I dreamed of living abroad. Either for my studies or for professional reasons, I moved back and forth between the Basque Country, Paris, Ireland, Britain and Italy seven times in seven years, which had its toll on my mental and physical health. When I moved back to the UK for my first job, I felt terribly homesick, and for the first time. I started a series of Basque poems that made up the greater part of Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, probably because I felt completely unrooted. I found it more difficult than the first time I lived in England to study to fit in.  I think it was because I had lived in so many countries, and picked up some bits of each of their cultures, that I didn’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m still processing this. My poems interrogate cultural differences because it is a subject that I constantly think of. 

AH: I know you have been back in the Basque region of France during the lockdown, able to travel both to the Atlantic and the Pyrenees, when free of restrictions. How has it impacted your work being back in these landscapes?

JI: Unfortunately, few good poems came out of my lockdown writing, precisely because of the anxiety generated by the closing of all borders. The border between France and Spain remained shut for almost four months, and I have spent a day in Spain since Christmas 2019 because things are still not back to normal. Even during World War II or under Francoism, the border could be crossed, albeit illegally. I wrote a poem about a friend being in lockdown in San Sebastian (where the lockdown was extremely restrictive) and my panic at the idea that I could not see him for months because the border was shut. I wanted to capture this claustrophobic feeling. It’s difficult to explain this to people who live on an island, but sharing a border with another country is for us a natural right and a source of enrichment. I have also written a poem from the point of view of the border, and all the historical events it witnessed through millennia. But in the end, I did not write much about the Basque Country. I write better about a place when I see it from a distance, ideally when I live in another country. I wrote almost all my Basque poems while living in the UK, and during lockdown I wrote many poems about Italy because I felt extremely upset about not being allowed to travel back there.

AH:  Some of your newest poems are following your interest in military history, addressed in a number of the poems in WWG, including the ways in which countries who have denied citizens their rights nonetheless require them to die in their wars. This was the the case for many soldiers brought in from Britain’s colonised countries during the first and second world wars, as Sathnam Sanghera has explored in Empireland.  It was also the case for Basque citizens resident in France.  Could you say something about these poems, and the new ones which are forthcoming?

JI: I was looking for books on this subject, so thank you for recommending Sanghera’s! I would like to address the subject of the soldiers who fought for the French and British colonies one day as they were completely written out of history, but I need to find the right approach. 
I normally write a lot about women, but these days I am interested in the values conveyed by the army, especially with regard to masculinity. France is still a very militarised country. With the rise of the right and the French presidential elections taking place in five months’ time, some politicians have suggested the return of the military service for both men and women, and I don’t see it in a good light. There was also the bicentenary of Napoléon’s death this year, and I’m not fond of the idea of promoting the legacy of a man who invaded and subjected a whole continent and killed around three million European soldiers (and God knows how many civilians) for his campaigns. 
I am writing a couple of poems about these themes and the toxic myths surrounding masculinity. My poem ‘Six War Letters’ tells the story of an underaged young man who is enrolled in World War I in spite of all and stops idealising war as a way to prove his manhood. One English teacher told me she’d taught this poem to her boys-only class and that one pupil said it made him reconsider masculinity. I couldn’t be prouder! 
I also recently talked to my parents about my father’s and uncle’s experiences of military service or hazing when they entered their engineering school, and I found these testimonies deeply disturbing. As someone who was bullied in school, I can imagine the psychological impact of hazing in elite schools and universities, and I am outraged by the mechanisms used by the bullies to make their victims believe this is perfectly normal, and even desirable.

AH: Finally, I know you are also working on a PhD about Sylvia Plath and her relationship with England and Europe at Huddersfield.  What does 2022 hold for you Julie Irigaray, in so much as it is possible for any of us to answer this question?

JI: A lot of travelling, I hope! If Covid does not come on the way, I should attend several conferences in France and the UK. I am co-organising an online conference on Sylvia Plath (https://bit.ly/3yHGIW0) on 11th and 12th March 2022, and I will be a volunteer for The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival that should take place in Hebden Bridge at the end of October. I also need to write a couple of academic articles, so 2022 will be more PhD-oriented. But I will try to assemble a poetry collection as I have enough poems that satisfy me to create one now. 

from Whalers, Witches and Gauchos by Julie Irigaray.

If you would like to read more of Julie Irigaray’s work please visit her brilliant website.

Multiple Ways into Words: Celebrating Being on the Forwards Prizes First Collection Shortlist of 2021

Caleb Femi, alice hiller, Holly Pester, Ralf Webb, Cynthia Miller

When you’re a debut poet, aged 57, you don’t necessarily expect to find your name on a prize list. I certainly didn’t.  I was overwhelmed when I discovered my bird of winter had made the first collection shortlist for the Felix Dennis Award of the Forwards Prizes.  Even more so when I found out that I had been selected alongside Caleb Femi, Cynthia Miller, Holly Pester, and Ralf Webb.  They are all poet-heroes of mine, whose work I had loved, and followed live, and online.  We have all been interviewed on the Forwards Prizes website, where you can also read about the poets selected for Best Poem, and Best Collection. The Best Poem list includes Natalie Linh Bolderston, who I interviewed on this blog talking about the family heritages and creative influences which shape her art-making.

Over the last week, in the run up to the Forwards Prizes Ceremony at the Southbank on Sunday 24 October, Wasafiri Magazine and The Poetry School have both published work about our Debut Collection shortlist as a group.  I wanted to take the opportunity to share it here, to celebrate us together as the shortlist of 2021. I also wanted to reflect my sense of how crucial Caleb’s, Cynthia’s, Holly’s and Ralf’s collections are, and how much they mean to me personally, as someone who has read and re-read them over the summer. No five poets can ever say everything, but between us we have a wide reach – geographically, creatively, and in terms of our subject matters – and share a commitment to making new work that speaks from deep places in ourselves and lives.

To read what Caleb, Cynthia, Holly, Ralf and I have to say about our work, please follow this link to the poet Shash Trevett’s insightful interview with us for Wasafiri Magazine.

By way of a taster, Shash’s questions throw light on how each of us wrote, and where we wrote from, amongst other topics. Physically – Holly Pester said in the bath, as well as elsewhere, and also from “My small intestine. My dreams. My lunch breaks.”  She also came up with a definition of making work which captures the experimental, provisional force of this adventure.

Holly:  “‘Tussle’ is a very good word for describing what writing poetry is; words, idea, time, speech, language, text, hormones, affections, all moving towards the recovery of a new thought in a barely held communion. It is a tussle! (It grew over about three years). “

Cynthia Miller spoke of writing from her mother’s Chinese Malaysian heritages – “I think of the long tradition of fortune tellers at temples. Star-charts and fortune sticks and divining the placement of the heavens.” She explained how this fed into work about displacements and migrations: “all the poems in my collection about stars are really poems about family, longing and displacement (such as ‘Scheherezade’, ‘Summer Preserves Haibun’, ‘Proxima b’), and how acute and destabilizing that feeling of disorientation can be.”  

Caleb Femi’s words bring out how his debut, like his film-making, speaks from a place of multiplicity and open-hearing:

Shash – “In ‘Barter’ you write ‘I was reaching for my voice box / I rarely use it to its full potential’. Can you talk about lending your voice to those who cannot speak anymore, or who are voiceless?” 

Caleb: “My voice is one of many that exists in my community. Each as intriguing as the other, we should all be heard. ” 

Ralf Webb made his explanation of the colour pink expressive of the range of tones and moods and slip-sliding transitions that his work encompasses – always with an eye to how our lives stack up ,and the social and political constructs which inform the shapes they take and make.

Ralf: “When I think of the colour pink I think of carnations, earthworms, anemic-looking plums; I think of the huge rose quartz crystals on my childhood bedroom windowsill; I think of pink moons and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon; I think of hematology and bone marrow biopsies; I think of Pepto-Bismol, pills, the skin under the nail; I think of how the sunrise would have looked to my parents, alone, driving to or back from work at dawn.”

Finally, I added some thoughts on “form” in its wider sense:

alice: “I use form to confer agency, even while navigating danger.  I drop the reader down, somatically, into the terror of my childhood, but offer ladders out…  Form also embodies childish play and mess. Some poems circle round. Within the erasures, white tunnels of words are dug out from smudgy, hand-blacked rectangles.  Elsewhere you have to puzzle out the links between the historical fragments as you jump from one to another – like stepping stones or hopscotch. Those sorts of engagements help generate active, empathetic readings.” 

Ralf, Holly and I also each wrote a ‘how we did it’ blog for the Poetry School, where I’ve taken many classes as my collection bird of winter found its wings.

My link is here, on writing ‘elegy for an eight year old’.

Ralf’s is here on writing ‘Love Story Discourse Goblins.‘

And Holly’s is coming shortly.

Romalyn Ante interviewed Cynthia and I on writing debut collections for the first episode of ‘Tsaa with Roma’, which also features chats over tea with Sasha Dugdale and Liz Berry. You can watch here.

Meantime, if you’d like to go deeper with any of the poets the shortlist, click their links below. Caleb’s includes links to his films.

Caleb Femi

Cynthia Miller

To see more examples of Holly Pester’s work at Granta.

Read Ralf’s Webb’s experience of writing here.

If you’d like to see the five of us live on stage together, on Sunday 24 of October at the Southbank, live and streamed tickets are available.

Book Livestream tickets here.

Book Southbank Centre in person tickets here.

Buy the Forwards Anthology here.

‘We know that the year – and more – of the pandemic was also the year of reading. And that means poetry as well as prose. It was a time when everyone was reminded how much we need to be exposed to the power of the imagination. And the short lists for the Forward Prizes 2021 are a reminder that the poetic imagination isn’t wholly introspective, although it cuts deep. It’s bold, limitless in ambition and it touches every part of our lives – our own hopes and fears, our communities, and the wider world that so often seems bewildering and over-powering. These poets find pathways into the deepest feelings and discover vantage points that take a reader (or a listener) to another place. In their hands we look at the world differently. This is a moment for poetry; and all these poets deliver. Read them, and take off.’

– James Naughtie, The chair of the 2021 Forward Prizes jury

Like spring after winter – growing and claiming life beyond disaster.

When I think of adolescence, the unruly rush of spring growth, that transforms woodlands after winter comes to mind. Trees burst their buds into leaf, and plants grow towards the light following months of dormancy. Walking with my dog Ithaca in Shotover woods, above Oxford, as the seasons changed this year, I observed and photographed this almost ecstatic transition close up. I saw it with senses made more acutely responsive by the restrictions of lockdown. Like everyone, my daily life through the winter was defined by ‘sameness’ – without access to the visual stimuli of museums and films in cinemas and the different landscapes that travel and social contacts can open.

And iridescent carpet of nettles in Shotover County Park, near Oxford.

At the time, I was getting ready to launch bird of winter with my brilliant fellow Pavilion Poets Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott in May. The collection responds to my childhood experiences of being groomed, and then sexually abused, by my mother. It also documents the difficult teenage years beyond this as I found my uncertain way towards reclaiming myself and living again. When I was writing the individual poems, I would necessarily be in a single emotional space or remembered time. It might be reconnecting with my late father and grandmother, whose love helped me come through, or finding ways to bring much more complex memories of the grooming and the abuse, and their aftermaths, to the page.

Ithaca in a field of buttercups

With the poems orchestrated into their structure by my brilliant poet-editor at Pavilion, Deryn Rees-Jones, what became uppermost in my mind was the movements between them. Divided into three parts, the collection flows together like waves rising up a beach to lift their tide of moods and images into the shore of creative witness. Then it rallies its forces to carry the darkness of the abuse far out to sea – revealing the gleaming seaweed and new sands of the healing with which the final poems close.

cover of bird of winter

Holding the sea-coloured book in my hands, turning its pages, I saw, and felt, how the way I was groomed set up and fed into the abuse, making it impossible to refuse. I also recognised with a new clarity how even when it was over, the abuse left me acutely vulnerable as a teenager, through having broken down any boundaries I might have had. But reading over bird of winter’s teenage poems, I also re-experienced the ferocious life force that puberty awakened in me, along with a hunger for the world beyond what I had known. This helped me reach towards my future like a plant towards the sun, in many different ways. These included forming new friendships, deepening my interest in books and the arts more generally, and beginning to travel alone. Adolescence also gave me the confidence to experiment, however awkwardly, with my reclaimed sexuality, and through this begin to separate myself emotionally from my abuser.

Foxgloves in June.

Once bird of winter was launched and out in the world, with many warmly generous responses from readers and people who watched the launch online, my thoughts kept going to my teenage self, surrounded by danger and possibility both at once. On my woodland walks with Ithaca, the foxgloves we spotted seemed like young girls, flamboyantly delicate, standing out from the foliage around them, but also susceptible to injury – as a flower can be picked and broken because it is not able to defend itself. When I turned sixteen, in the summer of 1980, I had a short white playsuit that I wore all the time. The bells of the white foxgloves in particular, cupped one on top of the other, brought back to me my own young body within that light cotton, and my unawareness of how I might be perceived.

White foxgloves growing up between the ferns and brambles.

During those teenage years, I faltered in my education, and was harshly judged by those around me as the impact of the abuse started to shape my behaviours and choices, as many young people are still today. Reconnecting with those times made me realise that it was not enough only to publish poems. I also needed to write and speak directly about the experiences held within them to expand the discussion. Children and teenagers who have been subjected to this crime deserve to be understood compassionately and respectfully as they work to reclaim their lives. Creative witness, and the discussion it engenders, are powerful tools for supporting this. Even, and especially, if recovery is necessarily messy and stumbling at times.

View from the path up to Shotover from Risinghurst

To further the work of changing awareness around sexual abuse in childhood, and help generate engagement, I wrote a performance text for Neptune’s Glitter House, which I also recorded as a podcast, exploring adolescence as a time of reclamation for those of us who have been subjected to sexual abuse in childhood. It features live readings of nine of my poems including ‘sea level’, ‘tessellation’, ‘wall painting removed from the house of the surgeon’, ‘mirror’, ‘when they begin to have feathers’, ‘sagittae’, ‘becoming your channel of pearl’ and ‘quadrant’. In addition to the poems themselves, I speak about their contexts, and the subject more generally. These words which are lifted from my introduction to the podcast:

As a bi-queer woman, club culture is something that resonates with me.  I love its strobed shadowiness, and potential for transformations, and discovering new selves through playing with  refractions of your identity.  And of course all that glitter, ironic and otherwise.  When I was a teenager in the late 1970s and early 80s, the time I’m going to explore, punk and two tone gave way to the ruffles and swags of the new romantics, and glitter balls were mainly synonymous with low-fi seaside discos in unfashionable towns, often along hot European coastlines.  There time slowed to a trickle.  Adventures could open into the night like strange flowers.

Poppy photographed growing on wasteland in London this summer.

If you would like to listen to the full podcast, please follow the link below. In terms of safeguarding, be aware that it contains references to the aftermaths of sexual abuse, but opens and closes with poems of healing. If you need support with anything the podcast touches on, the Mind website has valuable links.

Neptune’s Glitterhouse Performance on ‘Reclaiming Adolescence’ : https://t.co/D1WKymRpGu?amp=1

A canopy of new green covering the woodland floor

Following up from recording this podcast, I also wrote a memoir-essay for The Friday Poem website, published in August, which looks closely at four of the teenage poems in bird of winter. Titled ‘I think she is beginning’, (from a comment in my medical notes by the psychiatrist who treated me for anorexia when I was thirteen), this tracks how the poems enact my journey from the darkness of abuse towards the new light of healing. Again, it’s a journey that millions of people around the world are making every day. The essay begins:

Adolescence is seldom tidy or straightforward. Trying to locate ourselves beyond the lives we knew and lived as children gives rise to exploratory behaviours that outsiders can be quick to condemn.   For those of us subjected to the crime of sexual abuse in childhood, the challenges and potential dangers are inevitably greater.  This was my own experience.  My abuser was my mother.   Without appropriate support, the changes of puberty may push us back towards our places of injury, and emotional disassociation.  If we have not been able to articulate or process the original trauma, there is also often little to mitigate the destabilising impact of reconnection with complex energies.

If you would like to read on, the full article can be found here. As before, I refer to the aftermath of sexual abuse in childhood, and the Mind website is a valuable source of support should you need any.

Ithaca in rest mode with her ball.

While I write these words in London, beyond the city the woods are moving from the heavy, green vegetation of high summer, towards the very first intimations of autumn. In the next months, leaf fall will reveal the bones of the trees, and the shapes their branches print onto the sky, as their roots co-link underground. Working alone, but with Ithaca close by, I hope what I say here may speak to all of us making strong lives beyond sexual abuse in childhood, and give support to the larger societies within which these works of reclamation and transformation take place, as communities of trees share their resources in order to grow and flourish.

If you would like to buy bird of winter it’s available here: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/bird-of-winter/9781800348691

If you need support via the Mind website please click this link: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/

Reading with Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott introduced by Mona Arshi

I will be reading from bird of winter online on 9 September at 7PM UK time with Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott for Chener books. Tickets are free, but you need to email Chener Books in advance at chenerbookshop@gmail.com.

Flyer advertising Chener Books reading on 9 September with Alice Hiller, Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott

Voicing Our Silences : a free writing website combining interviews, performances and live prompts to connect and recharge us all through the last months of lockdown.

Maia Elsner with Arji Maneuelpillai from our first workshop

By the nature of how life is, sadly many of us will have been through difficult times – whether or not we work in creative fields.  While these experiences stay with us, they are seldom easy to talk about, as a number of the poets I have interviewed on this blog reveal.   Screenwriter Russell T. Davies, who wrote the landmark series Queer as Folk in 1999, and has just premiered It’s a Sin, remembers how when the first HIV/Aids infections were happening, and he was in his early 20s: 

“I looked away. Oh, I went on marches, and gave a bit of money and said how sad it was, but really, I couldn’t quite look at it.  This impossible thing.  There are boys whose funerals I didn’t attend.  Letters I didn’t write.  Parents I didn’t see.” [Observer 3/1/21]. 

Reasons for our silences around our difficult experiences may include that we lack the words with which to say what happened, or feel shame, or fear how others may react.  As time passes, these places of silence can lie within us like ice, or rock.  They may be heavy, unwieldy and painful to carry –  as if they were obstructing part of our growth, or even the evolution of our lives. But nothing is ever fixed, and change can always come.

In the same Observer article, Davies reveals how as the years went by: “I stayed busy, looking away, but I suppose I also looked down.  At the keyboard.  And stories began to emerge in my work.  Rising up.  Bleeding through the page. In 1994, I created a 15-year-old HIV+ teenager for Children’s Ward.”  [Observer, 3/1/21].  Queer as Folk then followed five years later. 

Having been groomed and sexually abused by a close family member in childhood, I recognise both that looking away that Davies describes, and the rising up that can follow.  From my 20s onwards, what had happened to me as a child and a teenager came into my dreams and nightmares – and then into my waking conversations in my 30s. 

At last, in my 40s and 50s, I began to voice my silences around the crime to which I had been subjected, within creative work.  Also in his 50s, Davis reveals of It’s a Sin, “Finally, I came to write a show with Aids centre stage.  I think I had to wait till now, to find what I wanted to say.” 

One of the processes that has helped me become strong enough to stay with writing bird of winter, my debut collection with Pavilion Poetry, has been the workshop community which formed with other poets saying ‘the difficult thing’ in their work.  This started life as a Poetry Society Stanza three years ago, and shifted to meeting online during the pandemic.

Collectively, we realised that there would be value in sharing the insights we are able to give each other, beyond our own group.  We wanted to support and connect with a wider community of people also trying to voice their own silences – whether on the page, or in their own lives. 

Our format has been to create a series of free, hour-long workshops available through our Voicing Our Silences website.  Two of our poets speak to each other about their work and perform it.  They also set live writing exercises for the audience to follow, to help spark new creative strands.  We have four workshops up so far, featuring Arji Maneulpillai, Maia Elsner, Isabelle Baafi, Romalyn Ante, Rachel Lewis, Kostya Tsolakis, Joanna Ingham and myself.  They are available as podcasts, or captioned videos. More recordings will be coming over the next months, with Chaucer Cameron and Jeffery Sugarman in March. 

While in-person meetings for live events are still a way off, we hope our website will offer a proxy community.  We aim for it to generate a creative boost to help get people through the last months of lockdown.  We also want it to make new connections between writers and readers, that we can follow up together into actual meetings, over the summer and beyond. To find out more, please click the link to go through to http://www.voicingoursilences.com

Isabelle Baafi.