I am a multi-award-winning Poet, Performer & Community Artist from Whitehaven, an area classed by Arts Council as one of the most in-need and difficult to engage with in the UK. This has served both as an inspiration and a challenge. I currently divide my time between West Cumbria and London. As a working class, Queer writer from a remote area, my passion is to share untold stories.
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I was first published aged 17 by cult North East poet, Barry MacSweeney. We met at Whitehaven library when I was 15, he was running workshops and I was bunking off school to attend. Two years later, with no arts provision in the town, and three notebooks full of poems, I asked the library if they had his phone number. I called him on the off chance to see if he remembered my work. He did, we began sharing lengthy daily phone calls.
MacSweeney added me to the bill of the places he was performing and relaunched his BlackSuede Boot Press to publish my pamphlet, The Hangman & The Stars, just weeks before his death. Correspondence regarding the publication is held by the Barry MacSweeney Archive at Northumbria University.
Despite the impact of Barry's sudden and unexpected death, I continued to write while studying for A-levels. I was approached by several organisations to read at memorial services for Barry and developed close ties with his family
A year later I was offered a place to study literature at the University of Liverpool. I put it on hold to train with Trinity Mirror Newspaper Group as a News Reporter, perhaps unknowingly trying to recreate MacSweeney's footsteps. I wrote for several Cumbria Newspaper titles as well as the Liverpool Daily Post and Newcastle Journal. It was during this time that I received my first commission and wrote and performed Sal Madge, based on the life of a gender defying Whitehaven woman from the late 1800s, for the first Words by the Water Festival in Keswick.
The office life style and small town reporting soon became monotonous. There were also no opportunities in West Cumbria for sharing and developing work. I left the job and went to Liverpool to complete a degree. It was a very non-creative time and university was not all I had imagined it to be. I found it difficult to know where I belonged and juggled a multitude of jobs - driving an ice-cream, selling double glazing , the graveyard shift on The Daily Post, bar-work , a tourist attraction featuring daily "sheep shows". I wrote very little other than academic essays over those three years. Looking back, literature probably wasn't the best degree for me, something to do with theatre, - performance and making, maybe, would have been more suited, but I didn't know that was a thing. I was constantly choosing the hardest modules on the literature course in some attempt to prove or better myself.
I entered some work for the first Northern Young Writer of the Year Award being run by the prestigious Northern Writers' Awards. I got it. It was a massive achievement but I was still hard on myself and wondered if maybe I had cheated somehow. The work I entered had been written a couple of years before and I convinced myself it should have been written that year. This was definitely not the case, they just asked for a selection of work, but I always had this feeling of not deserving it. It was my earliest experience of Imposter Syndrome.
Following graduation, with a vague idea that I wanted to do a Masters in Creative Writing but with no funding, I returned to West Cumbria. A three year government initiative called Creative Partnerships was being rolled out whereby artists were linked with schools to increase children's creativity. I signed up and over the next few months worked with a number of Cumbrian schools as a writer in residence running workshops. I had a talent for working with primary aged children and for a while considered going into teaching, however a lack of a maths GCSE stood between me and a course. I did a bit of freelance reporting and was signing on and off Job Seekers as there were not enough creative opportunities in West Cumbria to sustain a living.
It was then that I was approached by Tom Chivers who had recently founded Penned-in-the-Margins. Chivers had been a 6th former at Dulwich College when I had performed there with MacSweeney at what was to be MacSweeney's last gig. Tom was a a big MacSweeney fan and remembered me as the young poet with a heavy accent who was allowed to drink beer at the college bar despite everybody knowing I was underage. Tom had funding to create an anthology which would then tour the UK featuring six poets under 30 - Generation TxT. I loved it. The nerves, the exhilaration, the connection I could form with the audience. I realised that being on stage was where I felt most inside my own body. We toured the UK and it was in Bloomsbury Theatre that I was approached by Tall Lighthouse who published my chapbook Those Who Jump which launched at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. But I was living in Cumbria. I returned, spent time running workshops in schools, communities and teaching on the undergraduate programme at the University of Cumbria as well as freelanced as an advertising copywriter for local newspapers. I was sending out work and was chosen from an open call out to appear at the Glastonbury Poetry tent as well as having a major commission with Apples&Snakes, but I felt so removed from the people I had been touring with many of who were going on to do big things.
I moved back to Liverpool for a time and worked as a Reading Group Facilitator in Merseyside for a charity I'd volunteered with as a student. I spent lots of time reading Wordsworth to people in care homes. I remember one afternoon being asked to read to man I was introduced to as Ken Dodd's brother. I was writing scraps here and there and I would drive to Manchester to do open mic nights and started to make some connections there. But I was still lost, professionally.
Personally, my long-term relationship was under enormous pressure at the time, not least because I was in Liverpool and my partner's life was in Cumbria. Things went from bad to worse. I was in a terrible state mentally and lost a tonne of weight. My flatmate told me about Shakespeare and Co, a bookshop in Paris. A refuge for writers. I packed in the job, I packed a suitcase and bought a one way ticket to Paris. This was my plan for saving my relationship and focusing on my writing again.
Writers living at the shop were called Tumbleweeds. I was the last Tumbleweed to meet founder George Whitman and was asked to read at his funeral at Pere lachaise along with Jeanette Winterson. It was among the most interesting and strange few months of my life. I read a lot. I walked a lot. I smoked all the time. Bizarrely, this move did save my relationship, temporarily. So I ricocheted to back to Cumbria and signed on.
A disused mine building was being turned into an arts centre an performance space, they were looking for a programme manager, I got the job. We ran open mics for local musicians and even ran a couple of mini festivals. I focused on songwriting, played the guitar more and on running the open mic. At one point I had work played on BBC Introducing, but singing and playing guitar was just something I did at home, it was spoken word that really interested me. I was very lonely. I spent a lot of my time trying to make the mine building more usable and friendly. It was remote, industrial and absolutely terrifying if you were the last person locking up.
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My life took a sharp turn. The relationship ended. I left the job. I moved to a town that was still in West Cumbria, but this time it was different, it was place I would come to think of as home. I worked in a quirky little bistro as a barista, but it was so much more than that. The people there became family. I started taking myself more seriously and applied for Arts Council funding which I received and began writing a long play that used spoken word to narrate the action. I also started working closely with Rosehill Theater and was an Associate Artist working on many outreach and workshop programmes. The idea of the Creative Writing MA came back to me. I applied and was accepted at Manchester Writing school where I was taught by Carol Ann Duffy, the then laureate. I was up and down between Cumbria and Manchester. Ultimately I came away with a Postgrad Diploma rather than a Masters due to financial and mental health reasons. Just as I started the course I'd had a horrible bereavement, my new relationship hadn't been able to withstand it and that also came to an end. For a while writing the play felt like the only piece of stability I had. I was technically homeless for a few months, staying with my family, staying with friends, and then slowly things started to move again. I did a project with Cardboard Citizens Theatre group that was a transformational experience for me. I was on the project in a working capacity but, probably more than any of the participants we worked with, that project transformed me.
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I took some time to go back to Paris. I was known to Shakespeare & Co now and I was a writer in residence rather than a Tumbleweed. I stayed in the flat upstairs and spent time editing the play and making recordings of poems. I didn't really have a plan, but it was good just to be away for a little while. I returned to England about a month later. I knew I wanted to do more theatre, but didn't know where to start . I looked at Arts Jobs - Action Transport Theatre were looking for writer / practitioners to work on a project about gender - something that was of interest to me all the way back to my first commission on Sal Madge. I applied, went for an audition, where I used my own work , and was delighted when I got it. It was only a small project but I was so happy to be in the space. I was still doing some work with Rosehill Theatre's outreach team in Cumbria and even did stage management for Mahogany Opera who were working with schools on the West and East Coast. I was back at the bistro as well.
New Writing North announced the annual Julia Darling Fellowship. It was a travel bursary and I'd never had any ideas of what I would do so `I had never applied. But this year I'd been following a film called Rebel Dykes that was being crowd funded. From that I had been down the rabbit hole of the internet and landed on the `Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco. I put in for the fellowship with the idea of doing some volunteering at the festival. I never thought I would would get it. I was visiting a friend in London when I got the email. It was an amazing two weeks. I learned so much. It was on my return, jet-lagged, sitting in a greasy cafe eating English breakfast with my London friend that I had the sensation that it was being in London that was going to heal some of the grief I was still carrying.
A few months later an opportunity came up. I took a massive risk and moved with literally one suitcase. Around the same time I found out that the arts council were not going to fund the production of the play I had been writing for the last couple of years. It was a devastating blow during a very lost period of my life. I actually stopped writing for a good chunk of time and thought maybe it was all a waste of time.
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The project with Action Transport finished and I just had a few bits of freelance workshops here and there. I was doing back-breaking catering work for an agency in London as well as teaching kids with behavior difficulties for a charity in the afternoons. My living situation was precarious. I remember three months on a friend's sofa. I started doing open mics and got picked up a couple of organisations to do paid gigs. All the time I was applying to residencies, submissions, paid writing opportunities, all the time I was getting rejection after rejection email. Eventually one came through and I became the writer in residence with Creative Futures in 2019. It was a short term residency but a massive boost to my confidence which had taken a a massive dent since the arts council art rejection. I'd had other little pots of money from them, but something still stung about that rejection. I even got the play back out of the draw where I had abandoned it. A new character emerged and I started to enjoy writing it again. A few other commissions and gigs dotted around the country came in and I seemed to be getting out and about and picking stuff up. Then of course 2020 came, which needs no explanation here.
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In 2021 I was back in Cumbria when I applied for an arts council DYCP grant. It was a big chunk of money that allowed artists to change direction and develop. It took the pressure off. I debated if I should stay in Cumbria. Eventually I worked out a way how to divide my time between the two. Creative Futures, who I did the 2019 residency with, nominated me for a Jerwood Compton Fellowship, that's as far as it went, but just knowing people believed in me was a big boost.
That's how I spend life now. Traveling about a lot. I've recently been awarded a grant to fund an audio production of the play, I have several ideas for new pieces I want to write and I am always always sending work out to competitions and publishers. I have had hundreds of rejections. Then every now and then there is a little chink of a yes, a congratulations email, an acceptance
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