How many collections have you produced?
This is the second full collection and my first to be published by Turas Press. The title of the collection is “Back from Away”.
And how did that come about?
It came about over Covid. I came back to Ireland after having been away for a very long time and I really thought I was going to travel around the island and rediscover the country. Then three months later I was locked down in the family cottage.
So there I was, in a tiny bedroom of a cottage I’d never lived in, a cottage built for my great grandparents, now filled with 20+ boxes from the 3 other countries I’d lived in, places I’d called home for 25+ years. How do you fit the collections of other homes into a single little room who never intended to call home?
What did you do during Lockdown?
There wasn’t much I could do. Other than having the time finally to write, I would go into the garden and chop and plant and dig, explore all that my mother, grandparents and even great-grandparents had put down.
However, when you were adopted come the closer you get to the roots of your family’s tree the closer you actually become from your own undiscovered roots. No matter how deep you dig, you’re never going to unearth your own history in someone else’s yard.
And so the collection unfolded into questions about belonging, about the unknown elements of my own past, about what the word home means where you’ve had homes in so many other counties, cities and of course, how do roots connect – this is the only family I have ever know, they are my family, but also, bizarrely, there is another one out there, somewhere unseen. All this came together as I unpacked boxes, memories, moments, all during Covid when everything had stopped and there was time to ask and listen out for the answers.
Were these ideas which needed to be investigated?
I was still very much a child when I left Ireland at 21 and headed off to Paris, so when I came back at 45, having had my own home, my own independence, my own friends that had become family and then, because of Covid, I was forced to stay in the family home, returned to those ‘roots’.
It was a truly surreal experience. I was now the adult but felt like I had been transported back to my childhood. But I had all these boxes with adult things, my bits and pieces, collected for the apartment in Paris, paintings done for the flat in London, wood carvings from Amsterdam. Suddenly, there was this juxtaposition between juvenile, adult and all that had happened in between.
I came back with a voice having left as a very shy 21-year-old and yet, whenever you come home to your family, especially parents, you’re expected to slip back into the role of child, even when you are in your 40’s. But I returned with opinions and they required a certain amount of navigation for myself and for those around me, a period of readjustment, of relearning who we were to each other.
Your poetry is very expansive, very cinematic. Does this new collection follow that style?
I think my style has developed quite a bit. I didn’t study literature, I didn’t know any of the rules, way, structures. When I started writing I had a blog and I would write a poem and then publish it. It was immediate. I really didn’t think about a poem taking a long time, as much as a few months, even a year, to be completed. The idea that you had to craft a poem wasn’t something I was thinking about. For me, I thought you just wrote it down on a piece of paper and that was it, it was ready to be published.
Now, I love the editing process, the actual crafting. First drafts still come quite quickly but it’s the play element after that, the next steps, the following drafts and all its cuts. I want the poems to be much more of a piece of sculpture, and I think a lot about the importance of getting to the core, getting to the point.
Is that evident in the new collection?
This collection of poems, I think is much more pared back than ever before. The collection is split into two sections, the Away section about other countries opens the book and the Home section brings it to a close. It then gives the collection a clear structure, breaks it down into two manageable sections.
I would argue that while they have been carved out much more, they are still fairly cinematic in style. Every time I write, I think about what these poems might look like if I had to make a video to go alongside them, and I am usually inspired by very visual experiences, walking by the sea, seeing art, things like that.
I think it is inevitable that if you keep writing, you will keep evolving, and hopefully keep improving.
When Eat the Storms, the pamphlet came out, I thought that was it -I had a book, a publisher, I was set up. But straight away I was rejected a number of times. I had yet to learn that this is a journey. It is not about an ending; it is about learning along the way.
You seem to be doing a lot of readings of your work. Is that how you are building your audience?
Whether I am reading live or reading on ZOOM, that a huge part of the journey for me, while I love the writing part of the work, I also enjoy elevating the work from the page. I really enjoy reading my work, and sharing my interpretation of the work, with people. I love that performative aspect of poetry and I like to see how people react when you read the poems to them.
If you look at the reactions to the podcast, people really like to hear the poets reading, or in some cases performing their work. I think that resides within me and so I love taking my work to new places and reading to different audiences.
Where to now?
I have a new work in the background, a group of 40 ekphrastic poems all inspired by works of art. I am looking at the stories beyond the frame, the hidden elements within the brushstrokes.
I am working on a novel called “The Journey Home” which I am busy editing at the moment. I am working with Fiona O’Rourke who is my mentor. I received support for Fingal Arts their Artist’s Support Scheme, so I am working on that and I am enjoying seeing how this piece of work is turning out. It may be a novel or it may end up as a collection of short stories.
And there is the ongoing work with the Eat the Storms podcast and The Storms journal. Plenty to be getting on with at this point in time.
eatthestorms.com
