Q1: When did you start writing and first influences?
Syreeta: I have been writing little stories, poems and riddles since childhood, exclusively for myself, haha. I only started sharing them with other people a few years ago. I was influenced by what was around me and wrote, maybe like a lot of writers, as a means of puzzling the world. They are my “workings out”.
Q2: Who are your biggest influences today?
Syreeta: e. e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Pinter, Beckett, Neil Gaiman, Tolkien, Emily Brontë, Jeanette Winterson, dot, dot, dot
Q3: Where did you grow up and how did that influence your writing? Did any travels away from home influence your work?
Syreeta: I moved around a fair bit. I was born in Germany, then we moved to a very small village in the South West U.K. aged around 2. Then Germany again aged 12. Then back to the little village aged 16. I left home at 16 and ran away to the Big City. Well, Manchester.
Q4: What do you consider the most meaningful work you’ve done creatively so far?
Syreeta: It’s all meaningful to me. Even the things I consider poor quality or that nobody ever sees. It’s all part of the document of myself, warts and all, in a riddled, metaphorical kind of way.
Q5: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Syreeta: I think I always wanted that, but lacked the confidence to name it. During a discussion with a writers collective I am part of online, we talked about the fear of what to call yourself if you haven’t been published yet. Should you preface with “aspiring” or “emerging”? I decided to just call myself poet, because that’s what I feel is true.
Q6: Favorite activities to relax?
Syreeta: Um. I’m fairly boring. I walk and take pictures of stuff. Weird, small, beautiful, sad stuff. Also, a lot of movies and tv. A lot. Currently I’m watching Sweet Tooth, Loki and rewatching Fleabag
Q7: Any recent or forthcoming projects you’d like to promote?
Syreeta: Not currently. Fingers crossed, though, I’m waiting on several submissions. Can I use this space to shout-out a few other artists and writers instead? From Twitter: @LionessPoet @whistberry @WindwalkerWrite @SeymourNPorter @duanetoops @MisterLeaves
All of these strange, amazing creatures have things, right now, that more people really should be aware of.
Q8: What is a favorite line from a poem/writing of yours or others?
Syreeta: Everyday, I’d tidy my room, pick up small, incendiary pieces of myself off the carpet, contain anything flammable in a diary; none of these measures were enough to prevent the fires from happening.
Q9: Who has helped you most with writing?
Syreeta: My English teacher, Mr Entwistle, who at 15 helped me hone a poem and then read it out in front of the class as an example of how to write one. Simultaneously the proudest and most excruciating moment of my writing life to date.
Q1: When did you start writing and first influences?
Sarra: I’ve always written short stories and poems. My mother’s garage in Wembley is choc-full to the rafters with old notebooks and scribbles on scrap paper, going right back to primary school. She is quite the hoarder. I started submitting pieces for publishing in the last two or three years. One of the best things about writing is that you can dip in and out, as infrequently as you like, at any level and at any age.
As a child I loved Dahl, Enid Blyton and The Worst Witch. Lots of the stories and poems I wrote as a child in those old scrap books feature an element of the absurd, mythological, and surreal, which has followed me through to how I write today. Later on, I became a little obsessed with Sylvia Plath and I still see some structural similarities emerging in my poems from time to time.
Q2: Who are your influences today?
Sarra: I’m an English and Media teacher, so it’s often very hard not to be influenced by what I’m teaching at the time! When I’m teaching three different Shakespeare plays simultaneously, sometimes I spontaneously write quotes or paraphrases of them into my WIPs. Right now, I love Kate Clanchy’s work and in using her teaching resources for poetry I have tidied up many of my own poems. For my hybrid prose poems featured in Fevers of the Mind, I experimented with a similar structure to Inua Ellams’ The Actual, as I wanted to emphasise a more fluid, stream-of-consciousness feel to the narratives. I’ve read recently, Elena Ferrante, Zoe Glibert, Alison Bechdel, and Bernadine Evaristo novels – each one resonated with me, and I’m struck by how many of us are telling similar stories from different approaches and perspectives.
Q3: Where did you grow up and how did that influence your writing? Have any travels influenced your work/describe?
Sarra: I grew up in Wembley, North London. In the 80’s and 90s, it was a very special place. I feel incredibly privileged to have experienced a completely cocooned, melting-pot bubble of normalised multiculturalism as a child. My best friends were Polish-Venezuelan and Scottish-Philippino, and West Indian-Welsh. Every family on our street and in our schools was of some mixed heritage or another, including ours. All the kids were a varying shade of tan, and only our hair texture might give a clue as to which continents may be in our DNA. I feel like London has always been this way – the Romans founded it after all. It’s not even a British city – it’s Italian! So, it’s exactly where we belonged, and actually we could never really belong anywhere else. I remember visiting our ‘white’ cousins in Hampshire and feeling “I could never belong here unless I pretended to be an English Rose”, but I never felt that way in London. So many race poets lament a dislocated self, displacement, and prejudice. Wembley was a safe, secure, wonderful place to grow-up as a mixed-race person, so much so, that when I left London as an adult it was a saddening shock. I’ve written many times in gratitude.
My father is Irish, and he dutifully imparted plenty of Heaney, folklore and myth on to us, and of course, plenty of rants about the Colonial injustices of the British Empire! Ties to the land, and descriptions of landscapes, manifesting in giants and selkies and banshees, reoccur as motifs in much of my writing. My mother is Persian, which is a culture seeped in poetry – the tombs of their poets are enormous tourist attractions. I remember her stories about how they would travel miles just to touch the shrines of Hafez or Saadi. I have internalised many of the humanist teachings of the Persian poets, and sometimes I realise their messages at the core of my own work. The Zoroastrian mythology from Ferdowsi’s Shanameh never fails to enthral me; the ancient rock reliefs depicting its heroes are breath-taking and are the inspiration for my work in progress.
Q4: Which of your work is most meaningful to you to date?
Sarra: I am most sentimental about my novella, Machina Ex Deus. At the time I wrote it, I was teaching my A Level class about Afrofurturism as a subgenre of Sci-Fi, reading about the abominations carried out in America’s ICE centres, and listening to Climate-Fiction podcasts from Alternative Stories. Together in my mind, these came to form Taima City – a post-apocalyptic Abu Dhabi one hundred years from now. The overall theme is of mother-child attachments, which is something of a recurring topic for me.
Q5: Was there a pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Sarra: A few years ago, I attended That’s What She Said, in Manchester, hosted by the formidable Jane Bradley. I’d been to poetry nights before, but this one is captivating. Jane’s kind encouragement meant I signed up for a five-minute slot and later started submitting work to publishers. Lockdown gave me time and focus, so that I could do this in earnest for the first time.
Sarra: Lockdown suited me very nicely… reading, cooking, sewing, painting, nature walks, music, yoga, yoga and more yoga! In more sociable times, I sometimes sing in an Irish band.
Q7: Do you have any recent or forthcoming projects you’d like to promote?
Sarra: My first book is out in November 2021, entitled Bonds: A Short Story Collection, with Caab Publishing. The book includes three short stories and a novella, exploring universal ties, cords, and attachments, examining what it means to be bonded as parent to child. I’ve often heard the advice ‘write what you want to read’. I’ve never found the important theme of infant/maternal bonding to be represented enough in my favourite genres, I hope I have filled a hole.
(insta handles for the following heroes) Jane Bradley @janeclairebradley from That’s What She Said, AndyN Poet @andynpoet from Speak Easy, Chris Gregory @stories.alt from Alternative Stories and Fake Realities, and of course, the marvellous David O’Nan @DavidLONan1 from @FeversOf As a teacher, I realise your encouragement and belief in a writers’ words, is the catalyst to them sharing it.
Bio: Sarra Culleno is a British BAME poet, mother and English teacher who performs her writing at events across the UK. She writes about children’s rights, motherhood, identity, gender, age, technology, the environment, politics, modern monogamy and education. Sarra is widely published. She has written fiction and poetry for publication, performance, print, audiodramas, podcasts and radio. Sarra was longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize, for Nightingale and Sparrow’s Full Collections 2020, and nominated for Best of the Net 2020 by iambapoet. Sarra co-hosts Write Out Loud at Waterside Arts, and performs as guest and featured poet at numerous literary festivals. Youtube.com/user/sarra1978 – YouTube @sarracullenopoetry – Instagram @sarra1978 – Twitter Sarra1978@hotmail.com – Email facebook.com/sarracullenopoetry – FaceBook
Q1: When did you start writing and first influences?
Alan:
I began writing in my teens. I wanted to be a songwriter, I was a songwriter. A bloody awful one, but one all the same. Through my late teens I got into The Doors in a big way, I’ve now a bunch of themed, Doors tattoos. I really dug Dylan, The Specials, and Frank Zappa too. I liked the anger, the rebellion, the demand for justice that they displayed. My early work had a lot of that about it. It’s not very good and much of it has been lost (Phew).
At school, I was very interested in the diasporic writers that were on the syllabus at the time, as well as Adrian Henri and John Cooper Clarke, who I met at a gig when I was fifteen. He just oozed cool.
Q2: Who are your biggest influences today?
Alan:
Well, I’m heavily influenced by what I’m reading, and I’ve not read lots of poetry recently, save for a pair of Andrew McMillan collections I was gifted in April.
It would be remiss of me to ignore the poetry community I’m a part of. Poets like Dave Hanlon and Eli Horan who write explicitly about personal experience have influenced my most recently finished collection. I wanted to mine my own life and be a little more introspective and reading their work and listening to them read helped that endeavour.
Q3: Where did you grow up and how did that influence your writing? Have any travels away from home influence your work/describe?
Alan: I grew up in Southport, just north of Liverpool. Half my family are scouse musicians. The music they play and talked about helped me learn about phrasing and I think my best work has a musicality about it, which is owing to that grounding.
I spent some time in Cuba which did much the same. I sat in the bar that Hemingway sat in, how could I not be inspired? Also, a lot of my more recent work is inspired by holidaying with family in North Wales, even if it is something as simple as the name of a hymn, or a jellied slate path I remember that finds its way into a poem.
ernesthemingwaycollection.com
Q4: What do you consider the most meaningful work you’ve done creatively so far?
Alan:
Well, in terms of my own work, putting out my debut collection Neon Ghosts was a massive deal. I learned a lot from the process, and I feel that it lends me authenticity as an editor to have been through that process. I’ve had other offers for more recent collections that I have turned down, because they didn’t feel right. But that first one was always going to be the hardest.
My forthcoming collection is more personal and means more to me, due to the people I write about, the places I go, and how I handle them. I hope I will be seen to have done them justice.
However, my most meaningful work is probably the work I do with The Broken Spine, where we are trusted with other artists work, and we give a leg up to young and emerging artists. https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/shop/
Q5: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a poet/writer?
Alan: Yeah, a barbecue with a friend from school. We were going to write a hit sitcom together and put on a production of Macbeth after school. It never happened. He had gone to uni and started writing with somebody else, I’d gotten married and had children. I went back to education on the back of that night. I took a creative writing module, developed a monologue for the stage and started writing poetry again. That was the spur.
Q6: Favorite activities to relax?
Alan: I love watching live stand up comedy, and live music. I could go to a gig every night and never get bored. Visiting new places is cool, swimming in the sea is freeing, but I can’t escape my love for the arts. For me that trumps nature.
Q7: Any recent or forthcoming projects you’d like to promote?
Alan: I have a forthcoming collection of twenty something poems, but cannot really say much about that right now. It is with a small press, who have promised me creative control and that was hugely important to me.
I cannot escape plugging what we do at The Broken Spine, it sort of defines me right now. Eating up most of my spare time, we’ve just released Stuart M Buck’s latest chapbook, Blue the Green Sky and reviews have been incredible.
I’m in the very early stages of creating a new series under The Broken Spine umbrella, with Stuart M Buck. BOLD Arts Zine will publish work that is centred on the theme of masculinity. It is inspired by my academic research and our mutual love of coming of age literature, especially The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Andrew McMillan’s work.
Q8: What is a favorite line from a poem of yours or others?
Alan:
Well, I think the best line I ever wrote is in a poem from a collection that is about my hometown, I worked with Paul Robert Mullen, Mary Earnshaw, and David Walshe to complete that project. It’s out for submission right now, that line is…
‘cars, abandoned by amblers& twilight photographers,collect like dead flies on a windowsill’
It says a great deal about my Southport.
My favourite line of somebody else’s work, well this is a toss up between this from Stuart M Buck’s ‘Maps’…
‘… the last time i saw guy taylor was yesterdayand my teacher says i will never see him againand if i am lucky i will be let back into schoolbut by god if i ever so much as touch anyonehe will throw me out and my mum is sad andmy dad is sad and i am sad because i do notknow if guy is sad…’
And this from Bukowski’s’ The Mockingbird’..
‘… yesterday the cat walked calmly up the drivewaywith the mockingbird alive in its mouth,wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,feathers parted like a woman’s legs…’
Jay Rafferty, Lizzie Kemball and Dave Hanlon deserve special mention for the advice they offered via our small community of poets. And of course David Walshe and Mary Earnshaw for their help improving my work in that hometown collection. Books to Read in 2021: Spectrum of Flight by David Hanlon
Q1: When did you start writing and first influences?
Isabelle: Probably about 13, and it was a mix of short stories, comedic comics and poetry! My Granny Olga inspired me to write and help me submit my work to young adult anthologies. At that age I was reading widely so I guess my first influences were writers like Malorie Blackman and JK Rowling. Poetry reading was something I got into after the age of 18. Probably because it is so badly taught in schools!
Q2: Who are your biggest influences today?
Isabelle: Probably Miranda July or Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, although I do tend to name book titles rather than authors. Both have a distinctive style and I remember their characters years after reading their books.
Q3: Where did you grow up and how did that influence your writing?
Isabelle: In New Mills, Derbyshire, although it is such a sleepy place I hope it hasn’t influenced my writing! Occasionally I write something about Stockport, the general area where I went to college, but I probably wouldn’t write about my school experiences. I don’t believe you always need to ‘write what you know’.
Q4: Have any travels away from home influence your work/describe?
Isabelle: My first poetry chapbook was Digging Holes To Another Continent, which was entirely written during the three weeks I spent in New Zealand in 2017. It was my first book publication with Claire Songbirds Publishing House in New York, and I remember that moment being so exciting, realising that my writing could be good enough to be published, especially by a non-UK publishing house!
Q5: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Isabelle: Anything that I’ve done writing wise has been for fun and so I don’t think there’s been a pivotal moment, it has just always been something I enjoy experimenting with. Same with becoming a publisher, I wanted to do something in which I worked with like-minded people, and fell into having an imprint and publishing other writers!
Q6: Favorite activities to relax?
Isabelle: On the whole, anyone who truly knows me knows I don’t relax… But theoretically salsa dancing, going on a walk with the dog, or going to see a play, maybe an art gallery! I relax when I chat with friends.
Q7: Any recent or forthcoming projects you’d like to promote?
Isabelle: I’m doing a publishing workshop for Cheltenham Poetry Festival in July which should be a lot of fun and I recently did feature slot at Dragonfly Spoken word night. It was great to feel supported by an international audience!
Q8: What is one of your favorite lines from a poem of yours or others or favorite art piece?
I find the work of Tracey Emin very powerful. Her quilt work arts is actually the size of a vast room and it’s really powerful to see in person.
Q9: Who has helped you most with writing?
Isabelle: I think it is Monday Night Group, which is currently an online feedback writing group based in Manchester, has helped me vastly because the critique allows me to keep myself on track (prepping my work to read weekly) and have an outside perspective on my own editing! Also Haley Jenkins from Selcouth Station is an excellent editor and I really enjoy her feedback service as she brings out elements which I have not yet considered developing such as character complexities and logic of the story world queries!
The Streets, Like Flowers, Come Alive in The Rain, (Steve Denehan, Potter’s Grove Press, 2021)
The first impression a reader may have when encountering Steve Denehan’s new collection is that the author has found his version of the good life and is unapologetically living it. There’s little poetic angst here – The Streets, Like Flowers, Come Alive in the Rain is quietly life-affirming and uplifting, but never corny or overly sentimental. Instead, it revels in the knowledge that joy arrives quietly, without fanfare, in small domestic moments. Take the poem ‘Rain’, where the author reflects that ‘happiness comes easy these days’, and that after searching for it for years, he realises ‘it was there all along/ hiding in plain sight/ in the folds of that old woollen blanket/ in the press filled with lunchboxes and Tupperware.’
That’s not to say that Denehan shies away from the difficult subjects, far from it. In The Tossed Coins of John Canning, the poet’s family meets a homeless man ‘a hard life behind him/a harder one to come’. Discovering that he is also a poet ‘of wrong turns/ and bad calls’, Denehan muses that ‘it could have been me/ could still be yet.’ This is someone who never takes his version of the good life for granted, who knows that everything can change in a heartbeat. Perhaps this is the key to the sense of quiet gratitude that permeates this collection.
Denehan is a humane, compassionate writer, but he also gives wry expression to some of the absurdities of modern life. In The High Cost of Breathing, Denehan recounts his disbelief at ‘The Oxygen Bar’, where he encounters a dozen people ‘smiling under oxygen masks/ breathing pure air/scented with flowers and butterscotch’. In Destination Restaurant, the poet can’t hide his revulsion at the ‘guffaw…of a truffle scoffing, oily-mouthed snob’. Denehan picks apart the absurdity and pretension of modern life with skilful precision, whilst reminding us of what’s really important – meaningful relationships with those we love.
It’s no surprise then that the most memorable poems are those written about Denehan’s daughter, Robin, who provides the foreword for the book. In One More Week, Robin writes a poem about her grandfather – ‘having read it/ I was quiet/ while I waited/ for the lump in my throat to subside’. In The Dance Class he muses that ‘inside her chest there are no corners/ her blood/ and some of mine/ dark fire dancing…with the only music that really matters.’
This is a collection primarily concerned with what really matters. It never sacrifices sincerity for artfulness but is nonetheless accomplished. As Robin herself says of her Dad’s writing – ‘his poems always make me think.’
Reviewer bio: Georgia Hilton is an Irish poet and fiction writer living in Winchester, England. Her poem Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize in 2018, and she has a pamphlet I went up the lane quite cheerful and a collection Swing, both published by Dempsey and Windle. Her short fiction has appeared in Lunate Fiction, Fictive Dream and the Didcot Writers anthology. Georgia tweets sometimes at @GGeorgiahilton
![The Streets, Like Flowers, Come Alive in the Rain: Poetry Collection by [Steve Denehan]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51kfkg9c9wL.jpg)
Fevers of the Mind 