Below is the blurred selfie of a writer who is about to do their last performance of 2023 and … breathe out, breathe in, breath outttt …
…a moment captured at the end of a series of readings throughout the seasons and a year of many midlife firsts when it’s felt like my work has unfurled on the wing at last.
Among all of these happenings, I did my first ever outdoor festival readings, my poetry took me to Sweden and France, I read at Kew Gardens, the Poetry Society, I jumped about in a river to have promo photos taken (cringe), did two intimate gigs in spring and winter at a magical venue called Two Bedford Street, did a wonderful full-house show performing the goddess and river poems of Glos Mythos with musician and composer Mara Simpson and comedy genius Emma Kernahan for Stroud Book Festival. The response blew us away.
The list here isn’t exhaustive, and it might not sound like much but for someone who used to be so frightened of public speaking and performing that they got married in secret, it’s been a lot. It’s been an inspiring, thrilling and challenging lot, but it has definitely been A Lot.
I have come to love reading and ‘performing’ and have worked hard to get to a place where I feel comfortable speaking to a room or a field or a hall full of people. For a long time, I knew that I wasn’t representing my true self on stage, my voice was in my throat and – frankly – with all those eyes upon me, I just wanted to sink into the white space of the A4 papers that were trembling in my hands. When I decided to apply for an Arts Council DYCP grant, I put in for some funding to pay for Linklater voice coaching with Ashley Howard, an outstanding coach who helped me to read off the page with close attention to each word and phrase, not to rush or turn the page before I’d finished a line, to breathe and avoid the dreaded poetry voice. I still get it wrong sometimes and I still make mistakes, but that training has helped me to stand steady and firm in my own shoes and be myself on ‘stage’ – a huge leap forward for me.
Or, perhaps I should say, be the part of myself that I choose to show. For all readings are performative, even if they are delivered in the most conversational way, as is the current trend (which I find a bit dull, as if the reader can’t muster the energy to lift the sound up off the font – c’mon! the voice is an instrument, the page is a score). Performative has become a bit of a dirty word – performative gender roles, performative wokeness (I get it) – a thing that is less than true, an antonym of constative, the opposite of authentic, real and meant. But, I ask myself, isn’t every communication that isn’t wholly interior somehow performative? How you speak to the guy at the corner shop, how you greet the mums at the school gate, the intimacy between lovers – all of these communications come in different registers and styles. These are precedents that are remade each time we utter them or as Judith Butler puts it ‘an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene’ (Gender Trouble). This isn’t to say we aren’t genuine when we read our poetry publicly … and I’m sure there are wise scholars out there who’ve written vast tomes on the performativity of poetry (that yet doesn’t claim to be performance poetry) … but rather that there is an act, an action, an effort in it that is in itself big hearted and giving and magical even if ultimately quite exhausting.
At the Poetry Society recently I had a chat with well-known and much loved poet who firstly I couldn’t believe was actually talking to me and secondly said, apropos of nothing, you give so much you must remember to retreat and step back from the world, to nurture your poetry and give yourself space and time away from performance to create new work in the quiet spaces out of the light. It was a beautiful, generous piece of advice and I’ve carried it with me as I’ve moved intentionally through the last few weeks at the end of the year towards not light, but darkness. This is a much anticipated and desired darkness where I can gather myself in like a perennial plant, a deciduous tree, preparing my soft tissues for the cold. I will cease to grow and save my energy, but my roots will still develop and thrive in the soil laid down by the year just passed.
"Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop." Ovid
A lot of writing, like performance, is about stamina and resilience. And rest. It’s often said that the successful writers are simply those who – above all - had the grit to stick it out and keep going. Those writers are the oaks of the forest, the bristle cones, the ginkgos and the baobabs. But they still need their dormancy.
I was reminded of this need for endurance lately with the sad passing of Shane MacGowan (now there’s a performer – and the dancing at his funeral! #goals) – back in 2008 I spent a week on retreat in the desert with his wife, although I didn’t know it was his wife at the time. I simply knew her as Victoria.
One night we rode with two others on camels to eat sweets and drink mint tea like the tourists we were and look at the stars. Relaxed by the darkness and somehow eased into openness by our very anonymity, we told one another stories and at the end of the night Victoria reached out to hold me by the arm and told me that I had to be a writer. And I believed her. She said it was my destiny (that really is how she speaks, by the way, not just me being dramatic – she says she’s got a direct line to the angels and who am I to question). As a child, if anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said ‘writer.’ An old visitors’ book kept by my late grandparents is full of my poems from the moment I could write. I loved stories and music and making magic and mischief until one day my form tutor at school told me it was a ridiculous idea to become a writer, far too unrealistic, that I should think of something much more lucrative and practical to do. And so I packed that little dream up in a box for a while (I mean, 20 years?) and it wasn’t until that night in the desert that I opened it up again and saw a tiny crack of light…
Look. I know you might be reading this and thinking, huh call yourself a writer, this is just a glorified diary entry goddamit! Yeah, this is not PN Review so I haven’t spent hours crafting this post carefully, this is stream of consciousness, OK?! Because the point anyway isn’t whether or not I can call myself a writer, it’s that it takes a long time, it takes stamina and determination and a lot of energy. The given and the taken. And rest – did I mention that?
That chance meeting with Victoria Mary Clarke in the desert took place 15 years ago. It took me 2 or 3 years to take myself seriously enough to apply for a creative writing MA at Goldsmiths (2010) and then on the prize giving night (2012) for that I found out I was pregnant, and writing again slipped out of focus. It took until 2018 for the focus to return (kind of) when both my kids were at school. And now, five years on from that, I am finally starting to feel like my words are finding their readers or listeners in the responsive and generous audiences I’ve met along the way this year. There’ve been one or two duds, I am not going to lie, but that’s part of it too – a reminder not to take the privilege of writing and performing for granted.
If this is you, if you’ve been writing and got sidetracked and held up by life, I’m here to tell you to keep going. Keep going! It’s meant to be. Believe me.
But if the life of a writer these days is so performative and out there and ultimately quite exhausting why do any of this anyway?
I think if you were to ask any artist why they do something it’s because they feel compelled. For me it has also become about bearing witness to experience, telling the truth with the sides of yourself that you choose to share, it’s about conversation and connection, telling stories that speak for those who can’t, showing love, kindness and care, being joyful in a darkening world, holding all the light and shade and telling about it because this is what life is. And while it may not be a lucrative career choice, it feels like a positive and practical act – almost a radical act amidst the horrifying days we’re living through - to go out into the world and stand on a stage and find people to laugh and be moved with, to share and join together and to feel that there are whole communities out there that hold fast to a version of humanity that is far more magnificent than our governments and news outlets and social media platforms would have us believe. That when we gather together in person we can see this just by being in the same room and in this there is uplift. And in that there is a mutual collective gift.
(falls off stage left, asleep)
Thank you for this Juliette; it’s amazing to me that you could ever doubt this destiny, with such evident writerly prowess! This encourages me, to help my daughter’s find and nurture whatever their passions might be, but also reminds me, I probably need to water mine! 🫣
Also still mulling your question about external communications mostly being performative… thank you for the Sunday stimulation!