Are there any early memories of being interested in writing or poetry?
I always loved reading, right from when I was very small. I used to read constantly. My parents were interested in the arts in general, music, art, painting, reading, writing; they especially loved books. The arts were always around us, in our house.
When I was small, my mum would go out to a charity shop and get me picture books, especially if I wasn’t feeling well, and I can remember tearing through them. I read the Famous Five, The Chronicles of Narnia, all of those classic children’s series. We would go to the library on the weekend and I would go through the children’s section, and read as much as I could while I was there.
Did you get support at home or at school?
Both. My mum and dad were amazingly supportive. One of the best things was, that there were never any boundaries in the sense that I could pick up and try reading any book in the house. I would pick up Pride and Prejudice, and my mum’s attitude was, “see what you can make of that”. That definitely helped my vocabulary, and my confidence, in my early years.
They were always very supportive of any kind of creative activity. They both had real groundings in literature. Mum has an amazing knowledge of 18th and 19th century novels and she has an incredible knowledge of Oscar Wilde. She knows everything about Oscar Wilde, having just finished a PHD on that subject.
My dad was more into Beckett and Joyce. He took me to an event with Beckett’s biographer, I was about 15 or 16, and I really wasn’t very interested in Beckett, but later on I looked at his writing and realised what his draw was. I love his work now and go and see the plays whenever they’re on.
At school I had a really great English teacher called Mr Murphy who would encourage me to drop in my short stories so that he could read over them. He would let me know about competitions coming up and he would suggest that I should enter them. I had a lot of encouragement which really helped to develop my writing and especially my reading. He would point me towards material which was outside of the school curriculum. I was really fortunate in terms of support and encouragement.
Do you go on to write as a teenager?
Before that, when I was 9, I thought I had a great idea for a short story. It was about a young girl who really didn’t do that much, she went to the shop to buy an ice-cream, things like that, but I did write it up and I thought it was going to be the next bestseller. I thought I was going to be a short story writer or a novelist.
When I got older, English Literature was my strongest subject, and it was what I wanted to continue with. Even into my A Levels, I was writing a lot of short stories. I was quite obsessed with the murder mystery genre and I did try and write these kind of stories or I would write. “write what you know” short stories. I thought all you could do was write about the place you were from or your life generally, rather than topics which interested you.
How does an interest in poetry emerge?
I think that I knew how to work my voice into short stories, but I wasn’t writing poetry at this stage. When I went on to study A levels, during your A level course you do study poetry, Heaney, Shelley, Wordsworth and other classic writers, but I couldn’t see how I could write poetry. I was more interested in the novels we were looking at, so it wasn’t until I was in my undergraduate courses, it was a foundational course, and I encountered Anne Carson’s translations of the work of Sappho, and I thought that was wonderful. I found it really exciting.
I read a lot more of Anne Carson’s work, and that was the way into poetry for me, and at the tail end of my undergraduate degree I really started to write poetry and I was consuming a lot more poetry as well.
You go on to tertiary study?
I did my undergraduate degree at the University of York, the course was called “English and Related Literatures”, which was English Literature but included international literature as well. There was no creative writing element to that course when I was there. There were a couple of extracurricular activities, so I submitted a couple of poems to a magazine, and I went to Poetry and Pints events, but I spent most of the time reading as much as I possibly could.
When I came out the other end of that course I started to think that I really wanted to start writing much more seriously. I did take a few years between my undergraduate and my Masters to make sure that it was what I wanted to do, and I did spend a lot of time with people who were connected to the Seamus Heaney Centre, who were talking a lot about poetry, they were studying for a Masters Degree or a PhD, and that helped me make a decision. It lit a bit of a fire under me, and so I applied for the Masters at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens.