by Nik Shone.
Eleanor Hooker is an Irish poet and writer. She has published two poetry collections with Dedalus Press: A Tug of Blue (2016); The Shadow Owner’s Companion (2012). Her third collection will be published in 2020, she is working on a novel.
Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University, UK. Eleanor is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS). She is a helm for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as an Intensive Care Nurse and Midwife.
Her poems appear in literary journals internationally, including: Agenda, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, The Well Review, Banshee, Poem: International English Language Quarterly (University of Roehampton, London), Punch Magazine (India), Kalligram (Hungary), Other Terrain and Backstory Journal (Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia), The Ofi Press (Mexico), artPAPIER (Poland) and Blackjack – Revista Itaca (Romania), Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College (USA), The Interpreter’s House (UK), the Irish Times newspaper, the Irish Examiner newspaper, The North, Irish Edition (Poetry Business, UK). Her poems have been broadcast on RTÉ, Irish National radio.
INTEREVIEWER
What motivates you?
ELEANOR
With regards to poetry, it’s the compulsion to create. I love the challenge of putting shape, form and possibility to difficult or abstract concepts, with language as my medium. I read poetry every day and am constantly in awe of what poets achieve in their work. And by reading, and learning from my reading, I’m motivated to make the best art I can.
INTERVIEWER
What was your first experience with Poetry and how do you feel this influenced you in your writing?
ELEANOR
As a young child at home and at Primary School, poetry was for fun. As part of the English curriculum at Secondary School, we had to dissect poems and attempt, not only to climb inside them, but also inside the mind of the poets, all for exam purposes – a pretty effective way to suck the life out a poem and batter a love for poetry.
Our poetry textbook, Soundings, first published in 1969 and retired in 2000, was re-issued in 2010 – and though we had lots of copies at home during my schooldays, for reasons of nostalgia, I bought a copy when it was re-issued. It has a shocking dearth of female poets, something that didn’t occur to me as a schoolgirl, and yet I have a fondness for the poems in the anthology, and return to them all the time. But, being mostly male and dead, the poets I encountered in those early years didn’t influence my writing.
INTERVIEWER
What do you feel writing gives to people and do you think poetry has enriched your life?
ELEANOR
Charles Simic says that poetry is ‘three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley’, I love that, the sense of mystery. Poetry has enriched my life because it has allowed me to write my way into and out of the dark, and back in again. Simic also said ‘he who cannot howl will not find his pack’; I believe poetry reaches across and finds ‘other’, and, well done, it articulates the silences without exhausting silence.
Whenever friends or family have a major event, they reach for poetry that best expresses that deeply personal moment in their lives. Consider those occasions where a poetry reading has moved you, has shed a slant shadow-light on some truth or other, and connected every person in the room in an instant, that’sthe power of poetry.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to have a vast history in helping people, in your career in nursing and your volunteering with RNLI. Do you feel that this is also something you are able to do through your writing?
ELEANOR
When I’m writing I find the idea of an audience paralysing, so in the first instance, it’s between me and the blank page. I truly believe a poem is completed and often expanded by what a reader imports to it, but that process is entirely with the reader, and is none of my business. But yes, without doubt it is gratifying to get feedback that a poem has connected with a reader. The greatest compliment for any writer, is that a reader has read to last full stop because they related to the work.
INTERVIEWER
Notably, you have a wide variety of poetry works available as well as your collections, you’ve also (excitingly) noted a novel on the way. Can you tell me about your decision to branch out into fiction and if the process has been different for you?
ELEANOR
Writing fiction excites a different part of the brain to poetry. I thoroughly enjoy writing it, paring back language to see if the alien bones are strong enough to support their own fictional weight.
Some years ago, I won joint second prize (with Madeleine D’Arcy) in the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Award, and every so often I wrote ‘episodes’ in Lizzie, the main character’s life. A great friend, novelist Marjorie Quarton (who only started writing and publishing in her 50s) advised me to expand Lizzie’s story into a novel.
It’s fabulous not to have to count syllables, but then you have to consider sentences and paragraphs, which are like water balloons and can only carry so much before they pop.
There are different challenges and concerns. I made a terrible mistake last year and showed the story to someone who was desperately negative. I lost confidence in the novel, but I am trying again. I’ve no idea why I did that, I rarely show poems in their draft form, except to one poet with whom I workshop and who’s judgement I trust implicitly.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve mentioned before that poems are not a place for the sanitation of language. In saying this, do you feel that authenticity and honesty through poetry is always important?
ELEANOR
Yes, yes absolutely, I believe that authenticity and honesty in poetry is vital, and also that the artists’ role is not to operate inside an echo chamber, to be pleasing or to bleach difficult themes of their colour. There’s a different contract between fiction writers and their readers, and poets and theirs, I think – both genres are time, place and reality compressed and reshaped – they operate differently, according to their own literary tropes and rules, readers know this and understand that a poem’s truth is often to be found in the white spaces, in the silences around the words, and fiction’s truth relies on a readers understanding that the world and people described are imaginary, a fabrication first. A reader will follow a poem or story down into the rabbit warren if the writing is good, has authenticity, and is honest.
INTERVIEWER
Who are your main idols when it comes to writing? Do you draw inspiration from the people around you as well as other writers?
ELEANOR
My brother John Griffin (also a poet, whose first full length collection will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2020) recently gave me five collections of poetry by Linda Pastan, what a revelation! I adore her poetry and want to read everything she’s ever written. I love to read poetry by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ted Hughes, Tomas Tranströmer, Mourid Barghouti, Adonis, Mary Oliver, Raymond Carver, Ruth Stone, Yves Bonnefoy.
Collections by all of the poets below are on the bookshelf by my desk right now. I rotate the books every three months, and you can see, I don’t keep my books in alphabetical order – these are the poets I’m currently reading and find to be an endless source of inspiration: John Glenday, Martina Evans, Deryn Ress-Jones, Mary O’Malley, Nessa O’Mahony, Ilya Kaminsky, Tess Gallagher, Tony Curtis, Charles Simic, Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Paul Perry, Órla Foyle, Anne Casey, Ali Whitelock, Anne Tannam, Traci Brimhall, Jan Beatty, Leeanne Quinn, Leanne O’Sullivan, Laura Kasischke, Diane Seuss, Grace Wells, Emily Berry, James Allen Hall, Lorna Shaughnessy, Kim Moore, Elaine Feeney, Jane Robinson, Simon Armitage, Jessica Traynor, Pat Boran, Mary Noonan, Enda Wyley, Fiona Sampson, Eileen Sheehan, Mona Arshi, Chelsea Dingman, Ron Carey, Mark Fiddes, Zeina Hashem Beck, Geraldine Mitchell, Anamaria Crowe Serrano, Christine Murray, Geraldine Mills, Jean O’Brien, Penelope Shuttle, Amanda Bell, Sarah Hesketh, Jane Clarke, Maureen Boyle, Ranjit Hoskote, Kimberly Campanello, Sean Lysaght, Don Paterson, Imtiaz Dharker, Robin Robertson, Sasha Dugdale, George Szirtes, Ruth Padel, John W. Sexton, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar, Patricia McCarthy – the massive danger of lists are the omissions, there are so, so many more poets I could add.
Poets to watch who are writing incredibly inspiring new work at the moment are: Angela T. Carr, Julie Morrissey, Liz Quirke, Deirdre Daly, Jackie Gorman, Jennifer Matthews, Ilyana Kuhling, Tess Barry, Róisin Kelly.
INTERVIEWER
How did you first get involved with the Dromineer Literary Festival? How has your participation in the literary community affected your writing life?
ELEANOR
In 2003, Melanie Scott, Arts Officer for Tipperary County Council, wanted to create a new festival by Lough Derg (the lowest and largest lake on the River Shannon) and asked if any of the residents in Dromineer might be interested in forming a volunteer committee. The late Tom O’Donoghue approached me and I said yes, I thought it was an excellent idea. I wrote the minutes of our first impromptu meeting in the Whiskey Still pub in Dromineer, on a beer mat. From those first tentative years, the festival has grown into an event of international renown.
It was huge fun to meet writers whom we’d read and admired for many years, and to gather the community together every October to celebrate the written word.
In order to deliver the kind of festival we wanted, I worked full time as a volunteer, and we certainly achieved our goal, and the work was massively rewarding, however I was neglecting my own writing and was perceived more as an event organiser than as a writer. Very early on, Pat Boran, poet and Editor at Dedalus Press, warned me not to let my festival work make me invisible as a writer, sage advice. After the 2017 festival it was a good time for me to retire from the festival committee. It’s a joy now to attend events as an audience member and to see the festival I love, thrive.
INTERVIEWER
What challenges has your writing career presented in your life and how did you overcome them?
ELEANOR
I published late, my first book in my mid-forties, and though I’m not an ancient or anything, with age, I think, comes a sort of hiddenness, and the worry that others might consider you to be a hobbyist, or worse, a dilettante – there’s a persistent desire to do better, to keep pushing, to stop self-censoring. In my poems, as in my life, I grapple with notions of identity, inclusion (and its obverse, exclusion) with womanhood and collective memory.
INTERVIEWER
Your poems and collections have been widely published and shared online and in poetry anthologies and collections. What would be your advice to poets and writers just starting out?
ELEANOR
Read like a mad thing. Learn what it’s all about from what other poets do. I’m wary of poets who say they never read poetry, you have to, that’s just it, you have to read like the wiry old hare at the top of the book stacks. You wouldn’t sit down at a piano, and having never played before, expect to play Chopin – the same applies to writing, there mustbe an innate skill, but the nuts and bolts of craft can be taught and learned. It is incumbent upon you to learn your craft.
Be disciplined, switch off the internet, it changes the creative wiring in your head and it’s harder to write after the brain freeze that is social media.
Be collegiate. Be kind. Don’t engage in or with gossip, stay above all that stuff.Without doubt, ambition is essential, but don’t put it ahead of your humanity.
Live in the world, that’s where you’ll find your inspiration.
Hug someone every day, though perhaps make it someone you know, people get freaked out by hugs from random strangers.
Take advice from writers with a good dollop of scepticism and you’ll be grand.