Developing My Creative Practice

On being awarded an Arts Council grant to develop my creative practice.

Artwork: from Stroud Scarlet Triptych by Henny Burnett

They say it was the most competitive round yet. 6,137 individuals applied to Round 9 of the Arts Council’s DYCP, five times what they would normally expect and all of us hoping to take time to focus on the development of our work. Of the lucky 1,300 who won an award to reshape and redefine their work, there were around 19 poets. I was one of them – and I feel a very English blend of embarrassment, disbelief and joy.

Hey Imposter Syndrome, my old friend …

Rationally, I know that there are many different reasons why awards are granted: decisions are made based on achieving diversity across regions, artforms, level of ambition, scale, deep/wide potential impact and many other considerations. I feel so fortunate to have somehow managed to occupy a niche where I ticked some of the right boxes, putting me in a position to get the grant and for that, I’m incredibly grateful. Thank you Arts Council.

But I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t been hard-won – I am passionate about poetry and work really really hard to make space for it in my life. I’ve been writing for years - I got my Creative Writing MA at Goldsmiths with distinction almost 10 years ago now, ‘training’ to be a novelist, got 2nd place in the Pat Kavanagh Awards, got signed by an agent after being approached by three separate agencies but prose never really made sense to me in the way that poetry does. I think I knew I was a poet in my bones when I wrote my first poem at age 7 ("Little Pink Flower Will You Grow", if you're asking) - it’s just that it’s only recently I gave myself permission to take it all seriously and accept that I really could be a poet.

So what will I do with the cash? £10k sounds like a lot but it soon goes and the year is going to involve a lot of (good) hard graft. My interests as a poet intersect around whiteness and imperial heritage, wildness and civility. Much of my recent work has focused on water (my Lake 32 pamphlet and associated residency, commissions for the local lido, Living With Water and Drowning Backwards). I am developing a linked interest in broadcloth, a major export (by canal/sea) from Stroud, fuelling the local economy, oiling the wheels of colonial expansion as a tradecloth and clothing the Redcoats that enforced imperial rule. Purely by coincidence, I recently discovered I have family history in the textile industry going back to 1570s Yorkshire, via Nottingham. I want to explore these personal legacies of broadcloth and globalisation past, present and future.

The grant will buy me time to write and the opportunity to be mentored by Pascale Petit one of the greatest poets at work in the UK right now. Never in a gazillion years did I think she’d a) be interested in working with me and b) be able to fit me in, but I dared to ask and Pascale said had a dream she was my mentor, so … that seems to have sealed the deal? (Thanks collective subconscious).

I am a mum to two young children age 6 and 7. I have a day job as a global education consultant and run a start-up called Dialect, a rural writer development network – I don’t have much time to write and when I do it tends to be late at night when I’m ragged from the day and can summon just about enough energy to get a line or two on the page. The grant will buy me some blessed time away from my day job to do some writing and some archive research exploring the threads of a national and personal heritage that have shaped modern Britain and set up a constructive refreshed dialogue with that past through my poetry.

My time as a DYCP grantee officially starts next week and I’m beginning it on a course with Fiona Benson and Jay Bernard. We’ll be exploring the use of archive material in poetry and I honestly can’t think of a better way to kick off this precious year of developing my creative practice. If anyone wants me I’ll be knee-deep in dust and parchment, following the threads back to my past.

Artwork detail from Stroud Scarlet Triptych by Henny Burnett (2010)