The Monthly catches up with poet, podcaster and editor of The Storms journal, Damien B Donnelly – Part 1 – Eat the Storms

How did you come up with the idea of producing a podcast?

I moved back to Ireland in December 2019. I thought I was going to explore Ireland and settle back into the country and get to know it. Three months later Covid happened, and the whole country was locked down.

In August 2020, my debut pamphlet “Eat the Storms” was coming out. That was part of the reason I was coming back, because I was moving into literature. But Ireland was closed, the world was closed, and this dream of mine, writing poetry and holding my own poetry, even though it was just a pamphlet, in my hand, well no-one was going to know about it. And I was frustrated and irritated about that.

So Covid provided the impetus for finding a way to promote your work during the Lockdown?

I had been having panic attacks for three years prior to that, and they had continued through the early period of Covid. I was thinking that all these things were supposed to be possible but Covid was stopping everything from happening. During one of these panic attacks, about 4 o’clock in the morning, I grabbed my phone and started doing some research.

I have always been quite independent, since I was a child. I have an attitude of just figuring it out by yourself. I started looking into, “How do you make a Podcast?” I felt I needed to be on the radio, and I couldn’t just ring up RTE and ask them to platform me. No-one knew who I was.

I found a platform called “Anchor” which is now “Spotify for Podcasters” and I made an episode. I didn’t think about what might happen next, I was just trying to find a way to promote myself and my work.

You decided then to make another podcast?

The first episode was just me, forty-five minutes of just me. I thought to myself, I need to connect, I can’t just do another episode which only has me on it.

My pamphlet was coming out through Hedgehog Poetry Press and Gaynor Kane had a full collection coming out, “Venus in Pink Marble”. I asked if she wanted to be part of the second episode and she said yes and we followed that with a joint launch on ZOOM.

After that the podcast became a platform where poets could connect.

If you think back to that period, people were going for walks, they were sitting in their garden and they were tuning in to poetry, partly for company. Straightaway, the podcast became international because I really didn’t know many people in Ireland. I had been living overseas, so I knew people in literary circles internationally. I had a blog and some connections abroad. The point for me had been to come back to Ireland and find and connect with people in the literary community here but I used my international connections to make connections globally.

What do you think it was that “Eat the Storms” offered at that time?

Very quickly, the podcast became not just an amalgamation of voices in poetry, it became an amalgamation of accents. For me that was extraordinary to hear but I also think that the most important thing was that it took poetry off the page for non-poets.

I come from a family of non-writers, where sometimes they would be quite scared to read my work in a book.

Perhaps they feel the way poems are structured on the page makes it look difficult, makes people feel that they might not be able to understand it, but when they hear people read a poem, they realise it is just storytelling.

That initial episodes became 8 seasons with around 840 guests across 150 episodes.

The podcast has a wide range of voices and a very wide range of styles. Was that always the intention?

I was 40 when I returned to Ireland, I had been away, I had worked as a pattern maker in the fashion industry. I hadn’t gone to college to study literature; I studied fashion design.

When I entered the Irish literary community, later in life, I found it difficult, difficult to get a break. I know there aren’t enough publishers for people to get their work published. There aren’t enough journals to publish people’s work. There aren’t enough opportunities to get your work read or listened to.

I wanted the podcast to be open. I didn’t want it to be, “here is the best of the best of the best,” I just wanted the podcast to be somewhere where people could share their work. Whether that was a page hidden under the pillow, or a poet like David Nash who had just won the Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection and who was on the podcast this year.

I know the listeners like the variety. It isn’t just my choices, though of course I have opinions, I have my preferences, things I warm to, but what I like might not be what the listeners like, so it’s as wide ranging as I can make it.

I want Eat the Storms to be a community, and that community is for everyone who writes, reads or listens to poetry.

The last time we spoke to you, you were about to do interviews with maybe one poet, rather than have the many poets format. Has that happened?

When Season 8 was kicking off, I think I felt that I needed to change things up slightly. Listeners were asking me, when was I going to interview poets?

I always said I really wasn’t an interviewer that I was a writer, but then I decided to have a conversation with one poet per episode and so in Season 8, I have three writers sharing their work and then I chat with one guest. That becomes 30 minutes of the podcast.

This season has been the most successful season and that format has become hugely popular. I think it’s because the listeners are hearing two writers sharing an exchange about what it is that they do and the questions I ask other poets are the questions I am asking myself.

Where to now for Eat the Storms?

Well it a massive amount of work and I do need a rest after each season, and keep in mind it isn’t just one season a year. There might be three seasons of 15 episodes per year. There are also a lot of special episodes, so it is very demanding.

I am, as I said, looking to expand the range of what the podcast does. I am hoping I can do collaborations with publishing houses and other podcasts. There was a special episode with The Broken Spine Press which had published an anthology Untamed Nature, also another special episode with Arachne Press and their Joy/Us anthology and a couple of episodes dedicated to a particular  poet.

There are other podcasts, Susan Richardson is an American poet based in Tipperary, and she has a podcast which is called “A Thousand Shades of Green.” It is a different type of podcast in that she reads other people’s poetry. She is a fantastic interpreter of other people’s work, and I would like to do a collaboration with her.

I want to keep searching for ways to platform poets, publishing houses, other podcasts and journals dedicated to poetry.