This is Not Therapy

Let me tell you a story…

One rainy Thursday in March, I was driving my friend and fellow poet, Ciaran Hodgers to Oxford train station. He’d performed at my gig, Everything’s Working Out Poetically, the night before and we had stayed up too late, drinking whiskey and eating M&S Pistachio and Almond cookies.

We started the 40 minute drive by simultaneously saluting a single magpie and laughing at how we both did it without missing a beat in the conversation. A conversation about poetry and the seasonal nature of creativity. A conversation that made me brave enough to share a secret. Namely, that after my book, This Is Not Therapy, came out in 2021, I was unable to write a poem for about year, or if I did, it was a tired facsimile of an old idea. It was as if I had wrung everything creative out of myself and put it into that book. But this time, the spark was not coming back. I’d begun to believe that my time as poet was over. It felt like a death.

Then in early 2023, Ciaran sent me a poetry manuscript to edit. It was for his upcoming collection, Solastagia. In particular, there were three poems central to the collection that he couldn’t unwind. There was something about working with that material, around the intersection of mental health and the natural world and what it means to be part of that ecology, that started to bring me back to my creative self. I didn’t tell him that at the time - it would not have looked professional - but now, in the car, I could thank him for being the catalyst for me falling in love with the process of poet-ing again.

You know, he said, I had the same experience of creative grief after my first book, Cosmocartography.

How did you bring yourself back? I asked as we turned into the station car park.

It’s a bit of a story, he said. And I have a train to catch.

Hold that thought, I said. We should record this. I think there are other people out there who would find it useful.

And here it is. One of the best conversations I have ever had about dealing with the fallow times. Seeing creativity as seasonal, not a ceaseless conveyor belt of productivity. Seeing our creative selves as land that needs time to recover, and how to do that in our hectic, hustle-obsessed world.

May it bring you the hope and nourishment that it did for me.

Care to join us at The Mourning Pages?

More info and tickets here

More about Ciaràn.

Buy his books here

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