Shelley Tracey’s poetry collection Elements of Distance was published by Lapwing in 2017. Her poems have been published in poetry magazines and journals such as Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, The North, Artemis, Skylight 47, Bray Literary Journal and North West Word, the Bangor Literary Journal, Write to the River, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Visual Verse. Other poems and stories have also been published in a range of anthologies. Shelley’s poems have been highly commended in the Bangor Poetry competition and shortlisted in An Culturlann Poetry Competition, Over the Edge New Writer Award, 2016,  Funeral Services NI Poetry Competition  and Bangor Poetry competition. Shelley has received several awards from the Arts Council NI and currently holds a SIAP to develop her current collection.  She is the author of a range of articles on creativity, creative writing, mentoring, practitioner research and poetic inquiry. Shelley is literature and verbal arts coordinator for Community Arts Partnership, Belfast and writer in residence in a primary school in Belfast.

Twitter @Shelleytracey  https://www.facebook.com/shelleypoet/  http://irishpoetrytherapynetwork.blogspot.com/

Moyra Donaldson: Hi Shelley. Thank you for agreeing to this interview. Your first collection, Elements of Distance, was published by Lapwing Press in 2017 and the title reflects one of the themes addressed; how time and geography impact on us. You moved to Northern Ireland from South Africa more than twenty five years ago and some of the poems in this collection speak of this dislocation in terms of both language and culture, for example in Speaking Liminality – ‘ My mind seeks words for/the taste of paw paw,’ or in Lost In Translation – ‘But I can’t keep pace with words here, taut, staccato and/declamatory as Irish dancing, or emphatic as a pipe band.’’ Would you like to say a little bit more about that?

Shelley Tracey: I am fascinated by the way in which language can express complex ideas and connect people, and also how it can alienate or be used in a destructive way.  On the one hand, there is the idea of belonging in these words of Anne Michaels’s: “Language is the house with lamplight in its windows,/ visible across fields”.  And on the other hand, there is the language of sectarianism and racism, which is designed to exclude and instil fear.

Moving to NI as an adult has made me hyperaware of the nuances of language. When I first came here, I began to notice how many words and phrases in South African English are from other languages besides English – and there is no direct translation for them. Having to drop these words from my everyday conversation made me think about the different ways in which we can be silenced, and also how we silence ourselves. I have been looking at these aspects of silence in the collection I am working on at the moment.

Another thing that strikes me is how many everyday South African English  words have different meanings and connotations in Northern Ireland English. One example is “bold,” which in South African has the meaning of “courageous.” So I was surprised to find that here its connotations are negative, to do with overstepping the mark. There is so much social and cultural context embedded in a single word.

And now of course we have all the new examples of language arising from the COVID19 era: track and trace, unprecedented, social distancing, amongst others. I am interested to see how their meanings evolve in years to come and the extent to which they become part of poetic discourse. I am also interested in the way in which fundamental concepts such as time and home are changing. I think that the lockdown and the uncertainty of the future in a time of pandemics are shifting our frames of reference. I am playing with the problem of representing time in my poems, thinking about how structure, spacing and layout could convey the intricacies of time and change.

MD: Family is also important in your work, with poems about grandparents, parents, siblings and children. I’ve recently had some interesting conversations with a couple of other writers, about memoir and poetry. How do you see the relationship between the two?

ST: Over the last few years, I  have come to see memoir and poetry as closely related. I used to think about memoir as primarily a prose form, but my experience of writing and teaching memoir has changed that. I think writing memoir raises questions about form and structure, such as: what’s the best way to tell the story? How do you incorporate the dimensions of history, environment and personal experiences into memoir? Is the traditional chronological narrative capable of taking the recursive and ambiguous nature of memory into account? 

I think poetry is an effective way of capturing significant memoir moments and exploring them in depth. After I lost my father, I found myself writing many fairly brief poems about him, each one focusing one aspect or specific memory or aspect of him. As someone described him, my father was a “hidden” man who revealed very little of himself , and in retrospect I think that each of my poems offers a small glimpse of him.

In the series of memoirs poems which I am working on at the moment, I am experimenting with form, and have found prose poetry particularly useful. That’s because this form is a fluid and in-between one which can accommodate stories, poetic language, facts and reflections. 

MD:I know that you are very drawn to ekphrasis and the relationship between visual art and poetry. I remember too, the poetry cards that you produced some years ago, pairing poem and image from your own photographic practice. Recently you were involved in a collaboration with the artist George Sfougaras , pairing your poetry with paintings. What is it about the visual that feeds your poetry?

ST: I have always been inspired by the visual in my  writing. I studied art history in my first degree, and although it was only a minor subject, it inspired me at Honours and Masters level in English literature to explore the art of a particular period in tandem with its literature.

I think that one of the essential qualities for writers is attentiveness: the ability to immerse oneself in something not quite understood or easy to grasp. I think visual art provides that opportunity. It demands that the viewer step into a space of silence or mystery. In this space, you open yourself to the artwork and its unique communication. The next part of the process is to and try to identify the learning from that encounter, and to find a way to convey that. I think of ekphrasis as an act of creative courage, an attempt to express the impossible.  Art and literature (and music and film and dance) speak in different languages from each other, and the attempt to translate the  experience of art into words is an impossible task, if you think about it. But it’s a task well worth tackling, because it illuminates the creative process – and empathy as well.

I have used art as prompts for writing with most of the creative writing groups I have worked with, from young children to reminiscence groups. I find that images spark off ideas and help to address the challenge of the blank page. When the lockdown occurred, I was facilitating three creative writing groups based in arts centres. These are now online groups. Some participants were struggling to write because of the huge impact of the lockdown and the pandemic. I found that prompts based on images seemed to work very well in breaking down barriers to self-expression. I recently created a new online writing course with the title of The Art of Writing: From Pictures to Words. This used a series of visual art prompts to inspire different forms of writing, including poetry, fiction and memoir. From the quantity and quality of the writing which the participants produced, the use of images seems to have been really effective.

As far as my own ekphrastic writing goes, it doesn’t only involve aesthetic responses to examples of fine art. I am also interested  writing about art works with a social or political content.  My poems in George Sfougaras’s book about the Jewish history of Crete responded to his paintings about the decimation of the Jewish population on this island. In my poems, I tried to honour the detailed research which George undertook for this book, as well as his passionate commitment to justice. 

In 2016, I was one of several poets tasked by Oxfam Ireland with responding to a photograph from their Write to Refuge collection. The photographs were displayed with the poems alongside them in the Make Them Visible exhibition, with a focus on the lives of refugees and displaced people from Burundi, South Sudan, Yemen and Syria. I was sent a photograph of a refugee from Burundi, named ‘Beatrice’, in a refugee camp in Nyarugusu. Writing a poem about this image seemed hugely challenging. How could I represent the plight of this refugee- and other refugees – adequately? What research did I need to do to inform myself about the situation? And there was another even more unanswerable question: what could I possibly have to say that is authentic about Beatrice and her plight?  While I feel strongly about the injustices and atrocities experienced by refugees and asylum seekers, what words could I find which would express my outrage in an authentic way?

This writing activity seemed to me a test of intercultural empathy: was it possible to put myself into the shoes of someone whose losses and tragedies I could not begin to fathom? These are ongoing questions for me.

In my research into the background to the photograph, I discovered that Nyarugusu Campis in Tanzania, about 100 miles away from Lake Tanganyika. Beatrice could have been one of the 150,990 people who crossed the lake from Eastern DR Congo to escape political and ethnic violence. I also discovered that the lake is over 420 miles long and covers a massive area. This led me to think about the arduous journey that the refugees must have made, and about other difficult crossings for refugees. The theme of water seems to be a significant one for my poem. The title is Waterlines.

     WATERLINES

     Response to a photograph of refugees from Burundi

    1)

     To give a presence to Invisibles,

     a camera must work a magic,

     capturing and shaping shadows.

     Landless ghosts with unborn futures, buried pasts. 

     2)

     Element of distance.

     From Burundi’s chaos in a wooden boat,

     Lake Tanganyika’s span.

     In the Nyarugusu refugee camp,

     Beatrice treads the same path day by day,

     backwards and forwards to the pump.

     Smear of wasted water over rusty soil.

    3)

     We used to speak of threads

     that stretched but never tore,

     songlines, storylines,

     trajectories of hope.

     Turn language inside out,

     strip it down to rags,

     words in thief’s clothing,

     strung across the desert in disjointed lines.

     Desperate journeys.

     Lineage of absence, loss, despair.

     Published in Elements of Distance, Shelley Tracey (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2017).

MD: You are very active in community arts, being Artist in the Community for the Arts Council NI in 2015 and facilitating creative writing classes in a huge range of community settings. You are also chair of the Irish Poetry Therapy Network and have worked as a writer in residence in a Primary School. Could you tell us a little about these activities? Is this work separate to your creative practice, or does it inform it in any way?

ST: I see all of this work as fundamental to my creative practice. I am always learning from it about creativity and the writing process. My social responsibilities as a writer and creative practitioner are very important to me: I see it as my role to make opportunities for people to participate in creativity, and to address challenges to inclusion. As Artist in the Community, I explored intercultural communication through a series of creative writing workshops in many community settings and libraries. I developed this work when I collaborated with Conor Shields at Community Arts Partnership  on a book on intercultural dialogue through the arts.   

It has been a privilege to explore and evaluate the Prison Arts Foundation’s innovative arts mentoring programmes in the criminal justice system. It has been inspiring to see the impact of participation in the arts on individuals’ sense of identity, confidence, wellbeing and professional practice. I think the benefits for isolated people of belonging to a creative community are immeasurable.

As a Poetry Therapy Practitioner, I have facilitated writing sessions in a men’s prison, and witnessed the impact of this participation on mental health. Poetry therapy is for individuals and groups in contexts such as personal development, self-care, grief, illness and mental health settings. It involves responding to inspiring poems, quotations and stories through creative writing, storytelling and art.  Poetry therapy can develop self-awareness, creativity and self-expression, and support wellbeing.

I apply some of the techniques which I have learnt from my poetry therapy training for enhancing self-expression to my creative writing facilitation. This facilitation work has been wide-ranging: it has included groups of people with sight loss, intercultural arts workshops, reminiscence work, a writing and poetry collaboration with animateur Jonathan Simmance from the Ulster Orchestra, and workshops in a range of educational settings.

Creative practice in education has always been a major preoccupation for me. As coordinator of the adult literacy and numeracy tutor qualifications programme at Queen’s (2002-2010), I explored the inclusion of learners in creative writing practices, and the role of creativity in developing learner identities and confidence. My doctoral research focused on teachers’ perceptions of creativity and their own creative identities. My creative writing facilitation, mentoring and training work all draw on the results of this research.  A key learning was about addressing barriers to participation in creativity so that each member of a class or group is fully included in a creative community of practice.

I am thankful for my experience as writer in residence in a primary school in Belfast. Exploring the power of the imagination with children in Primary 5, 6 and 7 has been really exciting. The children ask thought-provoking questions about creativity and the processes involved in writing poetry. The most rewarding aspect of this work has been witnessing how engaging in creativity has enhanced self-expression, confidence and wellbeing. 

I have always enjoyed writing articles about creativity in general and poetry in particular, because it makes me reflect on my creative practice and ask questions about how I integrate my ideas into my writing. My latest article will be published early next year in a book on poetry as research method (University of Auckland and Sage Publications). 

MD: Finally, would you tell us about what you are working on now?

ST: I have already mentioned that I am busy writing a collection. This includes memoir and the themes of trauma and the power of creativity. I am grateful to the Arts Council NI  for support with this collection. 

I have also been experimenting with flash fiction, and writing a series of poems in response to the COVID19 situation.

I have had a bit more time to do research these days, so I have done some background work for my long-neglected novel, and have written some character studies for it. The theme of social isolation in this book, although it is set in the 80s, seems relevant to these times, so I intend to pay more attention to this work.

I haven’t found the words yet to express my outrage at the death pf George Floyd and all the ugliness of racism that is confronting us. Watch this space.

Thank you Shelley, it has been really interesting to chat with you. I look forward to seeing your next collection.