The Monthly interviews Scottish poet, Giovanna MacKenna – Part 3 – Developing the craft

How do you develop your craft?

I read and read and read. I began by scouring charity shops for poetry books and books on writing poetry. I went after all the poetry I could get my hands on and that was quite challenging because most of the poetry books available in charity shops are by dead white men! There isn’t a lot of diversity, so you really have to search around for it.

I also looked for a writing group to be part of; some just didn’t work for me. Some were very competitive, and not particularly generous, and others were quite cliquish, or I felt that there was a cliquishness about them, and neither of those approaches interested me.

Did you find a group which suited you?

I stumbled across one when I was actually looking for a Death Café. There wasn’t a space at cafe, but they suggested a writing group to me. That writing group turned out to be on a barge on a Glasgow canal. It was a small group of people – some of whom had never written creatively at all, and others who were published – and it was a place of real welcome. There was something about being on that boat, with a little pot-bellied stove chugging out heat, and coffee and cakes on the side. It was a special place to be, and you could try out things with no judgement. Each visit felt like being on another world.

Soon enough though, I needed more. I needed people to test me out, to look at my work and make me think harder about what I was doing.

What happens then?

I was invited to join a poetry collective. The people there had an astonishing level of experience and a structured way of looking work. The format was you would bring a poem and the group would look at the ideas, the writing and the form and make suggestions, if the poet was happy to hear them. The group examined what was working and what wasn’t working, and that helped immensely.

From there, I kept building an ever-increasing circle of poetry friends. That meant I was involved in more discussions about our work, what we were writing, our ideas – and that added to what I had already built.

What ideas or themes do you interrogate through your work?

I think, to begin with, the big thing for me was that I started writing after both my parents had died. I don’t think I could write the way I write if they were still alive. There were a number of themes which became quite insistent, and at first I needed distance in order to write about them effectively.

My poems begin as images in my head and I follow those onto the page. Often these are things I have seen or experienced. I tend to observe the world around me and respond to those situations.

As far as chasing definite themes, unless it is for a commission, I don’t really work like that. My work is very much driven by my responses to events that I experience or observe. I don’t want to be the writer in the shed who writes wholly for myself. My writing only makes sense for me if there are echoes in my work which other people can connect with.

My collection was written over a period of about four years and the poems in it are a specific response to experiences in my life including grief, family, and heritage. I think those are pretty universal themes.

If you want to learn more about Giovanna MacKenna’s work see the following links

giovannamackenna.com/

www.facebook.com/giovanna.mackenna

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