Hello and welcome to issue 9! Something a little different today as we’re joined by the very talented Cardiff writer Susie Wildsmith, hope you enjoy!
Locked in to Lockdown with Susie Wild (AKA Susie Wildsmith)
Are you ready?
Here goes...
Can you tell us a little about your creative practice - what attracted you to this particular art form; when and how did you begin?
I couldn’t not write poetry. I have written it since I was a little girl, secretly, and then less secretly, and less secretly again as I have grown. I was rarely bored as I learnt poems off by heart and recited them in my head, I wish I could learn words quite so quickly now. My first collections of poetry and short stories concern themselves with relationships, human quirks and oddness, the strange and the magical in the mundane but underlying both are other important issues: abortion, consent, prostitution, abandoned children, what Brexit means for couples of differing European origin, gentrification, Generation Rent, my Gypsy heritage and more. Everything is political, of course, but I am particularly interested in how it plays out in our day to day, and with furloughed time to think over the pandemic, how the Covid situation has created further barriers between us, through confusion, misinformation and poor governing. Current research fascinations include the natural world and our impact upon it, division and opposition, power and injustice.
Poems have recently featured in Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project Write Where We Are Now, The Atlanta Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Poetry Wales. I placed second in the Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition 2020, was highly commended in the Prole Laureate Prize 2020 and longlisted in the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition 2018. A regular on the spoken word stage since 2006, my debut poetry collection Better Houses was published in 2017 and my second poetry collection Windfalls will also be published by Parthian in 2021. I also write fiction, my debut collection of short stories The Art of Contraception came out in 2010, and the novella Arrivals from that was also published as an ebook in 2011.
How has lockdown been for you?
Strange and normal. I do a lot of work from home and always have or from the nearest place with internet and/or printing facilities: libraries, cafes etc. I am lucky in that I currently rent a house with wifi, a printer and a decent garden and I grew things: marigolds, sunflowers, herbs, tomatoes but I have also only seemed to grow the leaves and flowers of squash and runner beans. Lucky that apart from a struggle to get loo roll, it wasn’t too hard to get to the shops, living in the city, or to even have a choice of parks for my daily walks. Unlucky that my husband is a keyworker who was mostly working 60+ hour weeks and mostly nights with the homeless because we were rarely awake at the same time, or able to go very far when lockdown rules eased.
It was lonely and frightening and then boring for a bit as I couldn’t focus enough to read the books I wanted or try to crack on with more poetry, or even try and maybe, perhaps, attempt to fix The Novel again, or burn it. I blitzed Netflix and felt listless and lost.
I agreed to be furloughed from work (as a publishing editor because our distribution channels closed up) which has been very strange as I’ve not been allowed to do any work at all. I’ve not had that long a break from jobs since I was 14. Furlough was preferable to the uncertain alternatives we discussed but all other paid work possibilities for me collapsed from performing over a busy summer season to teaching or grabbing a bar job. It was originally only going to be for two months but it stretches and even now and I am only back two days a week. But I returned to news of lovely successes for my authors and I’m glad to be back.
How has lockdown affected your creative practice, process and output?
In the first month I was very active, I painted and fixed things around the house and decluttered some spaces, I did some hard labour in the garden, planted seeds, and after all that procrastinating, I sorted all my poems ready to send out. And then I actually sent them out. As I look after so many books, even though I have a daily reminder to spend time on my own work, often I just click for it to remind me tomorrow, so not being able to work on other books has at least allowed me to work on my own practice, attend online readings and book launches and for a couple of my poems to place in competitions.
In June I got around to responding to lockdown with some new work that features on Carol Ann Duffy’s Write Where You Are Now pandemic project, I was commissioned by a Bristol-based artist Fra Beecher to write two pieces to go with her new photographic work and I even allowed a film and some audio to be made of me reading my poems with lockdown hair.
I got over my temporary inability to concentrate to read by starting with non-fiction, and have since ripped through a lot of essays, poetry and novels. I have made a lot of notes too but I have been tired of my square mile and my own mind. In terms of inspiration I’ve pretty much exhumed and exhausted my rented four walls, my marriage, my plant-all-the-seeds-in-the-shed garden for material. I miss afternoons eavesdropping in cafés and on trains. And, as I’d recently started singing again, I miss road trips to gigs, and music and spoken word gigs and festivals. And I missed my honeymoon.
Zoom helps for events and poetry workshops but it isn’t the same, and I find it much more exhausting. I’m an introvert so I like going out but only for set amounts of time, then I need to retreat and be quiet for a while.
Have you developed any new habits or practices during this time and if so do you intend to continue them?
Not in terms of daily routine. I think I have been better at saying Yes and No to the right things. I’ve always believed meetings are largely a waste of time, except when doing the crucial editing with my lovely authors, so having more of the world catch up with my thinking on this is probably helpful for timekeeping now. I think, given how quiet and mostly solitary my life has been over the period, I have reclaimed more time for my own work and for myself in general. Relearnt when to let all things domestic slide and make a prize or submission deadline, to sometimes put myself first. Oh, and my own writing admin and filing is now immaculate! I should attempt to keep that up.
What do you think will stick with you most from this experience?
How much I hate rules and not being able to travel anywhere. I want people to be well, I understand why lockdown had to happen, and I think the government completely failed us, but being tied down from travelling further to greener spaces and spending time by the coast does not suit my Gypsy blood. Or my writing. I walk and work. I swim and work. I can’t swim as far or work as hard in the bath, but I try.
What piece of advice have you found most beneficial at this time/or piece of advice you would like to share?
I think Natalie Ann Holborow wrote a good piece about not judging yourself by all the other productive-in-lockdown artists that applies to life and social media more generally too. I go through periods where I write more, and others where I ponder more.
For a while it seemed that every writer I knew had won a prize, set up a YouTube channel and virtual workshops and more, quickly adapting to our ‘new normal’ and even thriving. And then you can feel like a failure for taking ten days to spit out a short line of poetry that you don’t even like or grappling with new technology to send work. In that bubble where the only social contact is online. But we all get there in our own time and our own way.
On those days where I want to cry because the words won’t come I go outside and stomp it off, or I try to make something grow in the garden, or I make soup, or I clean (always best done angry I find). But if that’s really just procrastination I have a quieter word with myself.
Thank you for joining us, please can you tell us where we can see and/or buy your work?
You can buy my books from Parthian: https://www.parthianbooks.com/search?q=susie+wild
Read my blog: http://susiewild.blogspot.com/
Find me on Twitter: @Soozerama
Facebook Author Page:
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Susie-Wild/e/B004GHR9D4?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1601401897&sr=8-1
Links to new work:
Audio at the bottom: https://poetrywales.co.uk/product/poetry-wales-55-3-spring-2020/
Video: You can watch me read the poem from my garden here: https://www.facebook.com/pat.edwards.106/videos/10216605661115837/
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