Yesterday, I took this photograph by Cod Beck, a small river that runs through my home town of Thirsk. Twenty years ago, at the age of seventeen, I used to sit by this river and fill notebook after notebook with poems. The flowing of the water aiding the flowing of the ink.
The poetry was terrible. I can assure you this is not false modesty. It was the typical stuff you’d expect from a Sixth Form poet about death and the fleeting nature of youth. But I enjoyed writing it. It was a safe space, a blank space, set apart from the rest of my somewhat stormy life.
Shortly before my eighteenth birthday I stopped going down to the river to write poetry. I had my heart broken for the first time. It was broken cruelly and with very little room for closure on my part. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to write poetry. I couldn’t find the path back to the vulnerability that poetry demands, and I grieved for the precious, unquantifiable thing I knew I’d lost.
I still wrote. Nothing could prevent that, it’s a compulsion. But I wrote other things. Surface things. Articles. Blogs. Reviews. Non-fiction books. Nothing that risked revealing too much about the person behind the pen. Eventually, I wrote two romance novels that were as dry and sarcastic as I was. I was proud of them, and I still am but there is a certain evasive nature to them. My characters are all rather insistent on dodging precisely the same thing the author had dodged for many years: true intimacy, being seen by anybody for who you really are.
Ushering the characters in my romance novels back into an open-hearted lifestyle however, was the first step in me changing my own course and achieving the same. True healing began in the writing of those books, along with a conscious decision to start trusting others in a way I hadn’t for two decades. Within the safety net of a deeply supportive relationship, I was able to explore my romantic and sensual life again and through that self-exploration, I found inspiration for new stories, and the desire to write poetry once more.
In the year just gone I have had my poetry published in several journals and magazines. I’ve performed my poetry, out loud – my whole body shaking with fear – at several poetry events and I stepped in to lead a Poetry Masterclass at Keats House as part of my role at City Lit college. I have allowed myself to be seen. This stepping out of the shadows culminated last week when I published my first poetry chapbook and to my great surprise it topped two Amazon categories in the first few days and has settled itself at the top of the chart for hot new releases in Women’s Poetry.
The reviews have been dizzyingly positive. Did these readers somehow know, somehow see? That the page was a veil and behind it I was just a human woman at once both terrified and exhilarated? Did they sense that publishing this book was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life?
Last night I returned to the river. To watch the ducks paddle and squabble over nothing in the early dusk. There, I thought about how the last twenty years had led up to this moment of becoming and how even though life’s river winds and bends in ways we would not choose or expect, there is hope to be had in the idea that all those many currents are carrying us to the place we’re meant to be.
My first poetry chapbook Water Signs is available now. To purchase your copy, click here.
To listen to me read some poems from this and other collections, click here.
