Her Poetry Collection | Flash Fiction | & Life
[dropcap]E[/dropcap]leanor Hooker’s first poetry collection, The Shadow Owner’s Companion, was published by The Dedalus Press in 2012. Her second collection will be published later this year. In February 2016 she was awarded First Prize in Bare Fiction’s Flash Fiction competition in the UK, and her short story / flash fiction “Digging Holes” was published in The Woven Tale Press (VI:1). Eleanor is Programme Curator for the Dromineer Literary Festival. She is helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. For more details visit her website. This is our fourth National Poetry Month 2016 post—see the menu below for previous posts (links to future posts will be updated, too).
a nurse, a pupil-midwife and a lifeboat helm
Jo Ely: Eleanor, you started your career as a nurse and a midwife. Rescue work…I feel the reader is in safe hands with a poet who knows how to deliver a baby and could steer a ship through a storm! Rescues appear in your poetry, too. In “Old Harry,” boating know-how and midwifery come together with dramatic force: “At the command to brace, I locked the warp and brace-brace-braced … Wave lifting me clear and slamming me back on the deck.” The poem’s narrator is forced to “hold the line, our umbilicus to life.” You must have found that your work has informed and fed your writing, but has it worked the other way around, too? Does your writing affect how you see the work?
Eleanor Hooker: Only in terms of being acutely attentive, but my job as a nurse in Intensive Care Units, as a pupil midwife and as a lifeboat helm, have required me to be observant, in a vigilant, anticipatory way. Perhaps now I’m sufficiently confident to parse and articulate my observations. Have you ever had that experience of reading a poem or story and saying, yes, yes, I’ve thought that too, but have never said it aloud or written it down? Well, now I’m saying my version aloud, writing it down.
Jo Ely: Silence seems to thread through your poetry. In “Rain,” your poem’s narrator closes her mouth firmly and hummingbirds fly back into her throat. In “Doppelgänger,” there’s the struggle to find the words in a slurred voice. Is silence a dramatic device for you, or is there something about it that draws you back to it as a theme?
Eleanor Hooker: That’s an interesting point, and a new short poem is called “Silence.” In private, social and political situations, silence can be a powerful tool, used for and/or against people. For a writer, I guess the challenge is to interpret silence, to describe it in all its color and to be aware that silence has many sounds. Writing that works best for me as a reader, is the kind that doesn’t empty itself of silence.
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ave you ever had that experience of reading a poem or story and saying, yes, yes, I’ve thought that too, but have never said it aloud or written it down?
Jo Ely: This brings me to my next question. Is the first struggle, as a writer, to give yourself permission to speak?
Eleanor Hooker: Writing is a sort of utterance that anticipates a response, a response that arrives when a reader takes up the work and reads it. All over the world we hear of poets and writers being punished, marginalized, denied, for exercising their right to speak. These artists struggle against an external authority that denies them permission to express themselves.
At a personal level, the first struggle has been to give myself permission to speak, to get past doubt, self censorship.
When a piece of writing is accepted for publication, that permission to speak is re-inforced in the form of recognition and validation; my utterance has received its first response.
One has to serve an apprenticeship, rarely do writers emerge fully formed. I know that to play Chopin on my piano, I must practice and learn the score. To write and be successful, one must have an innate ability, but as well as that, one must read and write and practice, and fail occasionally. That’s another struggle, to allow yourself to fail occasionally.
the desire to find the magical
in the ordinary and extraordinary business of living
Jo Ely: Ominous presences and a sense of danger or menace make their way through your poetry, often taking on a magical form. For instance, In “Afternoon Tea,” your poem’s narrator is turned, piece by piece, into an object, until finally their soul is framed, tacked to the wall. What inspires this magical thinking?
Eleanor Hooker: My love of fairy tales, escapism too, I guess, and with that the desire to find the magical in the ordinary and extraordinary business of living. One of my favorite films of all time is del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. In the story, Ofelia’s magical thinking allows her an escape from her fear of abandonment. I read To Kill a Mockingbird annually. I love Harper Lee’s writing style, and the juxtaposition of stories—of the adult world of compassion, love and courage in the face of racism, against the children’s world of magical thinking, love and courage and the loss of innocence.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]riting that works best for me as a reader, is the kind that doesn’t empty itself of silence.
Jo Ely: The dead often have things to say in your poetry. Things slide out from the water, rise up from the dead or pass through walls to the past. And there often is an underpinning of profound loss. For me, as a reader, it sometimes feels as though you have found all the nuance, terror, all the magical thinking, in the bargaining of grief. Your work must have at times been dangerous, psychologically demanding. Are you, like the narrator of your poem “Fishing,” learning to “breathe underwater,” emotionally, through your writing?
Eleanor Hooker: Inevitably there’s something of myself in my writing, and real events do influence the subject matter; my first encounter with loss was aged about seven, when one of my best friends, Majella Butler, her mother and three siblings all died in a car crash. It was a tragedy of inconceivable proportions, and incomprehensible that I would never see Majella again. Such moments in my life, as they would in anyone’s life, have left an indelible mark.
Some of my real life experiences border on the surreal, and do influence my writing. Two experiences in my nursing career stand out for their strangeness.
One night, maybe six months into my nurse training in a Dublin city center hospital, I had to go to the Night Porter’s office to let him know we had to take a patient who had died to the morgue. The Porter told me to wait, and not to speak until he finished his cigarette. To my horror, he then began to eat the lit end. It was a bitter winter, and inside the morgue I said, “It’s cold in here,” to which the Porter replied, “what d’ya ‘spect love, a bleedin’ hothouse?” While I was busy doing my paperwork, he suddenly switched out the lights and locked me in. He must have had another call in the hospital, because he didn’t come back. I sat on the floor inside the door, petrified. The morgue was cold and dark and full, and I could imagine the dead people all watching me. After an hour or so Eileen, a third-year student nurse who’d taken me under her wing, unlocked the morgue and let me out. She said she’d noticed I hadn’t come back to the ward and came looking for me. She took me to the Dugout, the night kitchen down the back stairs and made me eat soup and a door stopper slice of brown bread.
The second experience, though less dramatic, was equally eerie, and one I found more distressing. I was a pupil midwife and I was sent to an unfamiliar part of the hospital to retrieve a patient’s files. I was given instructions and a bunch of keys to the door of a little room. Inside, it took me a few moments to register that the two dolls in identical dresses were not dolls.
telling stories since I was knee high to a grasshopper
Jo Ely: When did you actually start writing?
Eleanor Hooker: I’ve been telling stories since I was knee high to a grasshopper. When I was a child, I’d stand beside my Dad after supper and either sing or recite my day for everyone. It’s all I ever wanted to do.
Today it would probably have been recognized as dyslexia, but when I was a kid, if you couldn’t spell or took longer to finish a book than the rest of the class, you were considered thick. In my first school there was even a “bad row” and, for hopeless cases, single desks in the four corners of the room. With the exception of one wonderful, kind, generous teacher, my days at my first Primary School were hell, the teachers were Dementors. My parents moved us to a small country school where my Aunt was teacher and we excelled, but I lost confidence in my stories and my ability to write them down.
When our children were small, I read to them everyday. On our frequent car and sea journeys from the north of England to Tipperary, we listened to audio books or took turns telling each other stories, a special time.
I’ve learned that one creates opportunities, when I started to send work out, it was the right time for me to do so, a bit later than usual, but that’s okay, it has to be about the writing, not my age or my appearance. I don’t intend to always pillage my own life for material, but I will acknowledge that it’s a rich store from which to sow the occasional kernel.
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome of my real life experiences border on the surreal, and do influence my writing.
Jo Ely: You’ve branched out, really successfully, into flash fiction and the short story. Can you tell us a little bit about your flash fiction? And what are you working on right now?
Eleanor Hooker: It was huge boost to win this year’s Bare Fiction, Flash Fiction competition, Richard Skinner’s citation is manna.
At the moment, I’m getting my second poetry manuscript in order before my submission deadline to my publisher. I continue to write new flash fiction and short stories. I have years-old stories and flash fiction on a memory stick and I’ve gone back to them, to see if any might have worth.
I’d love to set up a program that records our elderly people’s stories, which I believe are being lost because nobody is listening or recording them. I’d call the project The Listening Post. I enjoy chatting to my senior friends and neighbors, whose stories describe an Ireland we’d no longer recognize, for good or ill.
Also, I’m really excited about a reading and lecture tour in the U.S.A. in April. Under their International Culture Programme to celebrate Ireland 2016, Culture Ireland have funded Clodagh Beresford Dunne and my reading and lecture tour in Pittsburgh. The invitations to read, give talks and interviews, and participate in workshops come from poets/Professors Tess Barry (curator of the Reading tour), Jan Beatty and John Lawson, at the Robert Morris University and Carlow University. Jan Beatty has also invited us to travel with The Madwoman in the Attic writers to Washington, D.C., to participate in the Split This Rock literary festival.
Jo Ely: Which poems do you find you return to again and again? Who inspires you?
Eleanor Hooker: “Working Towards the Edge: Finding the edge is the most difficult thing” by George Szirtes from his collection Bad Machine—a masterful example of “Cracked Verse.” “The Wood of Lost Things” by Robin Robertson, from his collection The Wrecking Light. And these:
photo by: Olly Griffin
- “A Difficult Colour” by John Glenday
- “Arrhythmia” by Hailey Leithauser
- “My Mother”s Salmon Skin Nightdress” by Pascale Petit
- “The Blue House” and “The Couple” by Tomas Tranströmer
- “My Guardian Angel” & “Explorers” by Charles Simic
- “Become The Lion” by Traci Brimhill
- “Ter Conatus” by Bernard O’Donoghue (video)
- “Woman of the Atlantic Seaboard” by Breda Wall Ryan
- “Death of an Irishwoman” & “Naked Surgeon” by Michael Hartnett
- “CAT Scan” by Angela Carr
Jo Ely: Thank you so much, Eleanor Hooker, for letting us have this glimpse into your writing life. I’ve loved The Shadow Owner’s Companion and I know that it’s a poetry collection I’ll return to again and again. I’m so looking forward to your new poetry collection.
Read “Digging Holes” in The Woven Tale Press (VI:1)
Visit Eleanor Hooker’s website.
National Poetry Month 2016 Features Schedule at The Woven Tale Press
Sun, Apr 3, 2016—Spotlight: Michael Dickel, Associate Editor, Poet
Mon, Apr 4, 2016—Essay-Poem Hybrid Writing by American Poet Charles Banes
Wed, Apr 6, 2016—Donna Kuhn, my lies have titles, video
Fri, Apr 8, 2016—Eleanore Hooker—Interview
Wed, Apr 13, 2016—In Paris—Charles Bane, Jr., Reading | Video
Mon, Apr 18, 2016—A Poem from Natasha Head
Wed, Apr 20, 2016—My Entrepreneurial Spirit | Video Poetry | Aaron Fagan
Mon, Apr 25, 2016—Poet Activists
Wed, Apr 27, 2016—David Loret De Mola — Guerrilla Poetry