Ten Minutes with Eleanor Rose Shaw
Eleanor is a historian of medicine living in Yorkshire. She writes about parenting, finding belonging, and the afterlife of other versions of ourselves. She has most recently been featured in the parenting anthology Songs of Love and Strength. You can find her work at @pushing.and.pining on Instagram.
When did you become a poet? How did you know it was the right medium for your stories?
I’ve written poems since I was a teenager, but I took a long break. I was told by an author once, before I went to university, that I shouldn’t study English Literature if I wanted to write. I did go on to study English Lit, it will always be a major passion, and so I really assumed that I was going to be the one reading other people’s literary work, not writing it myself. Then I had my children and the opportunity to take a free writing class for mum’s appeared and I haven’t looked back. I’ve always written, but my thoughts naturally come out as poems, it’s an effort to try to make them into something else, so I just go with it.
What are you currently reading?
I’m a PhD student, so all I do is read, and sometimes reading for pleasure can feel like a chore. So my solution is to let myself put down anything that doesn’t immediately grip me, and let it be purely joyful. This means a lot of abandoned books, but I’m okay with that. My current non-fiction read is The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts, which is just so evocative and readable. My current poetry read is The Actual by Inua Ellams, I saw him perform Fuck Empire at an event and was struck by its power, the rest of the collection really delivers.
What are some common themes you see in your own work?
I’m always circling around something, working it out in my own mind, so my poems tend to form little collections all their own, before I move onto the next problem. The themes I return to over and over are parenthood, in all its expansiveness, and what it means to me. Failed love affairs and their afterlife. And all the ways I think we all consider ourselves outsiders, whether that’s in society at large, at work, amongst our peers. I’ll always come back to these three.
How do you beat writer's block?
I’ve learned not to beat myself up about it. It isn’t necessarily that I can’t write, just that I feel like I don’t have much to say. Sometimes I’ll turn to prompt lists, or tried and trusted free writing techniques, but mostly I just wait.
Do you feel that sharing your poetry is a vulnerable process?
I have some poems that I don’t share, because the feeling is still something that I’m in at that moment. I’ve never minded talking about ‘taboo’ things, as long as I have finished working through those feelings or ideas myself. I almost never share, in poetry or life, things I’m still experiencing or working out. So as much as I want my poetry to resonate with people, if they don’t like it ultimately that’s up to them, because I’m confident in the conclusion I’ve reached before I share. That helps a lot, when sharing things others might consider revealing.
Do you take poetry classes or read books on poetry?
I’ve taken a Mothership Writers class before and am part of the Mum Poet Club collective. I’ve found after a certain point though, once you have the confidence to just write, if you know what it is you want to say, there’s a lot to be said for just going for it. I want to make sure I keep to my own voice and sense of self in my work, so community is important to me, but only in as much as it shows me new ways to write fully as myself.
Do family and "real life" friends read your work?
Some of them. Most are gleefully supportive. Some family members reacted badly to some anonymous discussions of our shared history and even though I really resent feeling silenced, I do keep those poems to myself, for now.
What does "good poetry" mean to you?
Recognition of self. I spent a very long time studying literature and was amazingly lucky to have Kei Miller as a lecturer during my undergrad degree. He really made me realize that poetry is about a feeling, about the magic that happens when you read things aloud, and that has stayed with me ever since. I have very little appetite for canonical epic poetry, and an infinite amount of time for people who write from their everyday experience. Good poetry, to me, shouldn’t be work, it shouldn’t be a display of erudition, I just want to read something that makes me feel heard, makes me feel at peace with my life, makes me laugh out loud.
What is your revision process like?
For a really long time, I avoided revising my poems like the plague. When you spend your working days writing and rewriting and rethinking, I really wanted poetry to be a fun hobby, and so I interpreted that as no rewrites. Working with Emylia Hall of Mothership Writers helped remind me that rewriting can be fun, it can help you figure out how to express yourself most clearly. I still try to avoid long intense periods of rewriting because I do enough of that in my day job, but getting someone else to look at my work, someone I trust, and helping it be the best version of itself is much less scary now.
What is your writing process like?
My best poems are always the ones that just spring forth, a few lines or words coming together in my head, and then the race is on to capture them before they skip away. Once I’ve got those few fragments down, a lot of time can pass before I come back and finish it off, but that purity of inspiration is important. I write poems from prompts a lot as a way to flex my poetry writing muscles, but they are never as good as the ones I write from the moment. Realizing this and doing it anyway, writing anyway instead of waiting around for something interesting to strike, really freed me up to experiment more.