Michelle Dennehy read English at Oxford University, and holds a Masters degree in Novel Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has featured in several Irish and U.K. journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, The Cormorant, Skylight 47 and The Stony Thursday Book. Her poems have also been published in anthologies from Dedalus Press and CAP Arts. She lives in the Sperrin mountains with her husband, Ray, and their three children. She is the 2024 winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. 

Moyra Donaldson: Hi Michelle. Thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions about your writing. Congratulations on winning the 2024 Seamus Heaney New Writing Award. A fantastic achievement. We’ll come back to that later but first I’d like to chat a little about how you started writing poetry. As someone who has also had to balance work and family commitments with a writing career, I was very interested to read that you began to write poetry, as opposed to novel writing, as it fitted better into ‘little pockets of time’. Could you say a little more about this? It seems to me to speak, not only to the difficulties of balancing creativity with the demands of everyday life, but also to the process of a poem; how poems evolve.

Michelle Dennehy: I suppose my first love was novels. I remember getting my library books on a Saturday morning and begging my mother to let me stay in the car reading while she went in to do the shopping. I always just assumed I would be a novelist. I signed up to do my Masters in Novel Writing while I was pregnant with my first child. The naivete makes me smile now. I chose that particular Masters course because you had to complete a full novel for your dissertation. Other courses ask for a sizeable portion of a book, but I wanted the demand of having to complete the whole manuscript. I remember breastfeeding my son and typing my book with one hand. It was all so much pressure. I’ve read of so many authors who used their maternity leave to write a best-selling novel. Sadly, that was not my experience. While I managed to finish the first draft of my book and get a distinction in the course, the whole thing just felt so overwhelming. It killed the joy of writing for me. Then, when I had my second child, the book got put on the back-burner, where it has been stewing ever since. 

During the first lockdown, I signed up to a poetry workshop with an inspirational poet (you!) and the rest, as they say, is history. I just knew this was my form. The intensity of it. The fact that so much of the work is thinking work. I could be making soup and writing the poem in my head, driving to work and writing the poem in my head. I didn’t actually need much time with the pen in my hand. I don’t know why it took me so long to turn to poetry. I’m an English teacher and I’ve always loved teaching poetry lessons more than any other form. Anyway, I’m here now, in the land of poetry, and I like it very much.

Moyra Donaldson: You credit your love of words and literature to your education, in particular, to some excellent teachers of English. You went on to study English at university. As a teacher now yourself, do you feel a desire, or even a responsibility, to try to pass this love on to your pupils, and how easy or difficult is it to do this within the restrictions of the curriculum?

Michelle Dennehy: Oh, my teachers were amazing. I feel genuinely blessed to have been in their classrooms. I know not everyone is so lucky. I run a Creative Writing club at the school. We have about thirty members. We've held poetry slams and other celebratory events where the pupils have read their work in front of an audience. We have also published two anthologies of their work. It has also been such a pleasure to welcome professional poets to the school to work with the pupils. Deirdre Cartmill and Cat Brogan have both been so generous with their time and talent. We have some amazing pupil writers. One of them was a Foyle Young Poet this year. Her poem was chosen out of almost 16,000 entries from across the world. Her name is Viktorija Zak, and she is also an incredible artist. She is a poet well worth looking out for. Just prodigiously talented and absolutely fearless in her choice of theme and use of line breaks and punctuation. I would be so happy and honoured if, sometime in the future, she were crediting me with inspiring her love of poetry.

Moyra Donaldson: As someone who has admired your poetry since I first came across it, I am struck by the unflinching nature of your voice and by the way your work speaks to heart, head and gut. How important do you think it is to allow poems to be uncomfortable places, to challenge readers? There is also a real sense of the magic of the everyday contained in your poems. Can you say a little about this element of your poetry?

Michelle Dennehy: I read poetry to find connection, to find a thought I’ve never had before, to find a thought that I have had and now someone is mirroring it back to me. I love feeling that soul connection with someone you’ve never met. I admire the passion and richness of Natalie Diaz’s work, and the zap and punch of Kim Addonizio’s. Their poems contain so much beauty, but the discomfort is there, too. Life is uncomfortable. We’ve got to write about it all - the beauty and the shitstorm. I don’t deliberately set out to challenge or provoke. I just write what I see, what I feel.

Moyra Donaldson: Your poem, For the Mothers, No Balm, which won the Seamus Heaney award, is a wonderful example of your ability to tackle difficult subjects. It is visceral, yet also beautifully crafted. Your use of slashes adds to the impact of the words and images. Did you do any research for the poem and how did you settle on this form for the poem? Is form important to you?

Michelle Dennehy: Thank you, Moyra. That means a great deal to me. I used the slashes because they looked so violent on the page, like a stab almost. They also reminded me of tape-splicing pieces of film together when I was at film school. It was this century, but for some reason they started our course with these ancient Arriflex cameras, and then we’d sit up all night at the editing machine splicing the shots together. I felt the slashes gave a similar effect, that they helped the reader navigate from one awful image to the next. When I was researching for the poem, I went back to stories that had haunted me over the years – the stories of Damilola Taylor, Stephen Lawrence, George Floyd, and of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old boy whose body washed up on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey. It was horrible looking at some of the images, reading the articles, but these things really happened. This horror is a real part of the world we live in.

As regards form, I am really interested in how the shape of the poem can interact with the theme and the words. Sometimes I like to have them working harmoniously – for example, using couplets when writing a love poem, the two-line stanzas symbolising the two lovers. Sometimes I prefer to have a tension between the two, to have them at loggerheads. That can be interesting, too.  

Moyra Donaldson: What has winning the award meant to you and do you have any tips or suggestions for those entering competitions like this?

Michelle Dennehy: Winning the award meant a tremendous amount to me. It gave me a much needed boost of confidence to take myself more seriously as a writer, and to start devoting more time to it. As for tips, I would advise to write the poem you are afraid to write, the one that seems like it’s pushing you a little past your edges, the one that is the secret scripture written on your heart. What truth do you know but are afraid to say?

Moyra Donaldson: You are working on a first collection. What stage are you at with that?

Michelle Dennehy: I have the poems. I’m in the process of finding the right order for them, so that they are all talking to one another, and so that the collection has the right rhythm and shape to it. It’s a lot more brain-churn than I thought it would be. 

Moyra Donaldson: I know you have written for the stage. Do you have any plans to go back to that - or to novel writing?

Michelle Dennehy: I am in the process of writing a piece of storytelling theatre to be performed at Samhain. I am totally hyped up about the project. I’m working with a group of storytellers, and all of us are producing something of a suitably eerie nature, which will be accompanied by music from a live band. Even just thinking about being back on stage gives me shivers of excitement. I am longing for November to come around. So far my story is about a fisherman who is visited by three ghost maidens who tempt him into making a mistake he will rue for decades. Oh, the drama! I love it.

The novel is always grumbling away in the back of my brain, like a little angry Caliban, my poor neglected child. You never know, one of these days, I may dare to open it up and take a peek.