Holly Hopkins on Creative Writing and Care

In this newsletter, the first in a new series on creative writing and care, we hear from poet and editor Holly Hopkins.

The poems in Holly’s much-lauded debut collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins, 2022) are witty, beautifully sharp-tongued – sometimes excoriating – sketches and observations of life in twenty-first century England. You can read a selection of Holly’s poems here. I first met Holly at a writing workshop in London well over a decade ago. She’s a true friend and brilliantly thoughtful reader of poem drafts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tensions and intersections between creative writing and care – parenting and also other forms of care, such as care for family members, friends, or others. There’s an attractive accessibility to writing. It doesn’t require expensive technology or lots of studio space. It’s portable, and you can do it on your own. But, of course, writing requires attention and creative energy and is often badly paid, especially at first. It can be a struggle to find time, energy and brain space for writing that doesn’t (on its own, at least) pay your bills, particularly within a culture that tends to undervalue and squeeze both caring and creative work.

I think it’s vital to have open and honest conversations about the realities of being a creative writer and a carer so that we can begin, even in small ways, to think about how to change things for the better. This interview series is inspired by US author Nancy Reddy’s Good Creatures series, part of her Write More, Be Less Careful newsletter, and also by The Care Collective’s book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence.

If you’d like to be interviewed as part of this series on creative writing and care, please email me at poet@katepotts.net.

Creative Writing and Care

Poet and editor Holly Hopkins

What kind of writing do you do?

I write poetry. My first book, The English Summer, thought about stories we tell ourselves, how national identities are (re)created and how climate change may disturb these ideas. I’m currently working on my second collection, which is about work, what types of work are valued and why, with a particular focus on care.

But your question was ‘What kind of writing do you do?’ and most writing I do is not creative. It is administrative – for me, for the people I care for, for organisations who pay me. My most important writing today will be the form that decides whether I have childcare for the next year. My sons’ school allocates wrapround care places annually on a first-come first served basis. Other care provision in the area is just not there. The form will go live at 12:00 today and my ability to work afternoons for the next year will depend on whether I get my forms filled in fast enough to make someone else lose out. In preparation for this high-noon I’ve used last year’s form to write the longer text answers which I will copy and paste to save precious seconds. I’m not feeling very poetic right now.

What difference has becoming a parent made to your writing and creativity?

I wrote parts of my first collection while my eldest son was a baby. I don’t think a person reading that collection would be able to tell the difference between poems conceived before I had children and those that came after. However, the collection I’m working on now does reflect the ways my life has changed.

Poems in The English Summer often hijacked histories or myths to think about today’s dilemmas. If I started writing a more directly autobiographical poem it would be nixed, even as I wrote it, by the knowledge that to publish this would be to disclose information about other people which they would not want disclosed. I didn’t get into poetry to hurt anyone. So, I had two types of poems, ones drafted and redrafted for public consumption, and more personal pieces which died as drafts in a notebook. Caring for children, I found I could write about my experiences more directly. That my babies did not sleep through the night is not a revelation of someone else’s secrets; babies are not expected to sleep through the night. I could use my own experiences as a lens through which to explore wider questions. This was amazingly freeing.

Does your creative and writing life impact on or influence your caregiving?

I feel like I ought to say something positive, perhaps about the play inherent in creative practice training me for play with my children, but I don’t think it really works like that. I suspect there are often times when the impact is negative. It is an extra spinning plate in the air. Instead of a work/life balance, I’m trying to keep up a work/paid work/life balance.

What would make juggling writing and caregiving easier?

Ha! How long do you have? I could answer that question with a few concrete suggestions, such as writing retreats with built-in childcare. That would help, but it wouldn’t solve the core problem.  

I’m thankful for the freedoms and progress towards equality that have been won for women in the UK over the past hundred years. However, a core demand, that work should be shared fairly and equally, never happened. Instead, the role of a middle-class man from the mid-twentieth century was treated as if it were a neutral position. Laws were changed so women could obtain previously male roles in employment, but that default role was never challenged. The length of the ‘working week’ is based on what that middleclass man could do when he had a wife at home providing care, domestic and administrative work. If a couple are both working these hours, domestic and care work needs to be both outsourced and squeezed into what was once time for rest and creativity. If one does not have a partner or has a lower wage, things look even grimmer. So, if you want to make things easier, you’d tackle the cost of living (starting with housing) and bring down the hours in the standard ‘working week’.

And, while we’re waiting for that unlikely utopia, let’s have a few writing retreats with childcare please.

What one piece of advice would you like to give your younger self about writing?

Make sure you read the proofs carefully. Check the really big things, not just the little ones.

Holly Hopkins is a poet and editor living in Manchester. Holly’s first collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Prize and won a Laurel Prize. It was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation and was named one of The Guardian’s ‘Best Poetry Books of 2022’. Work-in-progress, which will form Holly’s second collection, was awarded the Northern Writers Award for Poetry in 2023.