Six weeks writing - what I learned

And a sneak preview of upcoming interviews with poets at work!

Dear beloved subscriber of A Poet’s Work,

I hope this finds you looking at a daffodil and thinking yes, you really could do a better job. Read on for what I learned from spending six weeks just writing (for the first time ever!) and a sneak preview of this newsletter’s upcoming interviews with some fantastic poets.

We now have 352 subscribers to A Poet’s Work. Some of you have even subscribed during the many months since the last issue. I am delighted each of you is with us. Those who have shared or recommended the newsletter have my heartfelt thanks and are extra beloved.

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Poetry love,

Rachel

P.S. If you haven’t already…

What I learned from taking six weeks to just write

I learned a lot from taking six weeks just to write. Everything I learned was incredibly obvious. In fact, I’d already known all of it before. All these lessons about practice had all been given to me already as advice by wise mentors and friends. I just hadn’t believed any of it when they said it.

I made these discoveries like a cat learning to open the cat flap for the first time or a Victorian gentleman “discovering” a “new” species of beetle. They are novel discoveries only to myself. I share them with you in a spirit of amazement that I had to (re)discover them at all.

MY DISCOVERIES:

1. Writing is actually supposed to be fun

And there’s no point doing it unless it is fun. Not fun all the time every second necessarily (filling in grant applications, for example, may never become entirely fun) but I benefitted enormously from just thinking about what I wanted to do every day, and doing that, and if there was something I really didn’t want to do, just not doing it. That’s almost the total opposite of a regular workday for me, which would always start with what needed to be done or what other people wanted from me. And, you know, dreaming of what I would make if I did get that grant and then scheming about what it could look like was kind of fun in its own way. Writing is not like a job that has duties and requirements and a specification. You don’t have to make things that you hate or find boring part of your practice. Nothing needs to be done any particular way. There’s usually a way round it. Duh!

2. How you feel when you write matters

I’d always been a bit sceptical of this one. I was more on the “set a timer, write anyway, even if you feel really rubbish” school of thought, which fit conveniently with how I was writing while working full time i.e. squeezing writing in around a lot else. Caring about how I felt when I sat down to write felt like an indulgence I couldn’t afford and didn’t have time for. Before I took the time off, however, I was finding that physical anxiety symptoms would sometimes stop me from writing. I’d feel almost frozen. Over the six weeks, I obviously had to figure this out or I wasn’t going to make any progress. Rather than trying to power through being frozen, figuring out little tricks and ways in to physically unfreeze all helped a lot. I also began starting my writing sessions by reading poetry for as long as it took (usually not that long actually) to feel in the right headspace. Shockingly, given I write about feelings a fair bit, attending to my own feelings during my process gave me more options.

3. Writing more frequently is easier than writing less frequently

I still can’t write every day. I like structure but not that much! And I like doing other things too. But there was something about being able to come back most days to the same body of poems or secret third thing and feel it growing in my own brain from day to day rather than pausing and starting again. Maybe like watering a plant, if some plants need daily watering?

4. I’m not the same as I was ten years ago

I wasn’t sure I was going to like having so much writing time My career decisions since finishing my English Literature degree ten years ago have been based in part around never having that much free time again. But I’ve changed. My anxiety, eating disorder and depression no longer monopolise any unstructured time. And that, again, creates options I only discovered through giving something new a go.

Coming back from sabbatical to into my working life, I’m going to try and take a few things to take the best of what I learned into my regular routine. Watch this space for hopefully more writing coming soon. I feel I’ve made some good progress on both a new strand of more fun poems and the secret third thing…

And if you’d like to read one more poem from the shelved and rather tortured collection about my family history, Ghost Furniture Catalogue were kind enough to publish it at the end of last year here.

Sneak preview

Next on A Poet’s Work, an interview series on poetry publishers is coming up! I am very excited about this. Most poetry publishers are poets too and the work of getting poems read is both noble and very interesting. Stay subscribed for interviews with:

· Arji Manuelpillai, poet and creator of the brilliant podcast Arji’s Poetry Pickle Jar, which I can’t recommend enough

· Rosanna Hildyard, writer and poetry publisher at Chatto and Windus

· Mary Mulholland, poet and editor of poetry magazine The Alchemy Spoon

These will give you a glimpse behind the curtain of three very different types of poetry publishing. All three are fantastic writers and lovely people and I can’t wait to share a look inside their brains with you.

Promises, promises

I’d like to send this newsletter out more often. But I also only want to send it when I have something to say. So I can promise only that each issue will be full of thought and care. Like a situationship texter or a passionate letter-writer in times of war, I make no promises about when it will reach you. That’s probably not very good for my Substack algorithm but it’s a promise I’ll keep.