Emgerging poet: An interview with Jackie Gorman

Two hundred years ago, people had no idea where birds went during the winter months. That started to change after a hunter shot a stork in Germany in 1822.

"When it landed to the ground, they saw that it had this huge brown spear in its neck. They realised over time that the stork must have come from Africa," explains Jackie Gorman.

"Somebody had speared it in Africa but it managed to survive and fly to Europe, and then was shot. This is actually how they figured out migration.

"Until then, they really didn’t know where birds went. They had loads of crazy ideas and thought they maybe hid for the winter… they didn’t know they went as far as Africa or anywhere else."

This remarkable story resonated with Jackie and inspired a prose poem, 'The Wounded Stork', which is also the working title of her first full collection of poetry, due to be published next year.

The collection is a result of Jackie's renewed involvement in writing over the last four years or so. Since then, the Athlone native has earned a series of accolades for her work, including the 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Award for her poem, ‘The Blue Hare'.

She was also part of the 2017 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and was commended in the Irish Poem of the Year Award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.

In her day job she works as an executive with Midlands Science, an organisation which promotes Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education in the region through outreach activities, events, and a regional festival.

The youngest of three girls in her family, Jackie grew up in Abbey Road, when it was a lot less built-up than it is today.

"Where I'm from is right beside the entrance to Priory Park. That estate would have been open fields and orchards when I was growing up," she says.

"The road in front of our house was a very small and quiet country road looking out into large fields where cattle grazed. Lots of wildflowers, birds and rabbits.

"Now I’d nearly consider there to be part of town, whereas a couple of years ago we thought we were out in the country."

English was her favourite subject in school and she began experimenting with poetry when she was a teenager attending Our Lady's Bower.

"I would have tricked around a little bit writing god-awful poems, probably about boys in the Marist and the end of the world. That kind of thing."

Her working life has had a focus on local development and community development. This led to an interesting spell living in The Gambia, in West Africa, between 1999 and 2001.

Jackie was volunteering with APSO in a role that centred on Fairtrade tourism around The Gambia's seven national parks.

"I was going around to all the different national parks and trying to start small Fairtrade initiatives around tourism and crafts and things like that. It was a good experience."

She learned a little bit of Mandinka, one of the main local languages, and had cause to use it a few weeks ago when she visited a friend in Iona Park, Athlone, and met a neighbour's husband who happens to be from The Gambia.

"As he came across the street I greeted him (in Mandinka) and he was stunned! So we had a good laugh about it... If I hear something in the news about west Africa, my ears do still perk up a bit."

Jackie can't pinpoint any one factor which prompted her new dedication to writing poetry in the last few years. 

"I was reading quite a lot and I was always interested," she says. "I wrote one or two things and started meeting other people that were doing it. One thing led to another and I started going to workshops and started to realise, this is fun and interesting. After about a year I thought, well why not give it a go?"

The inspiration for her writing can come from a wide array of sources. "Sometimes I’ll be like a magpie and I’ll just notice something or hear something somebody says – and it might be just the way that they say it or the words they use – and I’ll think, ‘oh, that’s really interesting’.

"A bit like a journalist, I’ll always have a notebook in my pocket so I can jot things down. You don’t know what you’re going to do with them but eventually you sit down and figure out which ones might be the start of something.

"And you don’t know where it is going to go, which is part of the fun of it as well."

She is drawn to poetry more than other forms of writing because a poem "can hold so much in terms of experience and emotion."

"You often see at occasions like wedding anniversaries or funerals people will turn to a poem. They’re not going to stand there and read a piece of fiction or a short story. A poem seems to have space for other people to have it as part of their experience as well."

Of the awards she has received for her work, she says the Single Poem Award at Listowel Writers' Week was particularly special.

"The judge was Harry Clifton, who would be a very well-known Irish poet, so I was thrilled he selected it. That one meant a lot to me. I really value Listowel as a festival and a place that nurtures creative writing."

It is fitting, therefore, that she plans to launch her full collection at Listowel Writers' Week, 2019. The book is due to be published by the UK poetry publisher The Onslaught Press next April, and there are plans for a separate launch in Athlone.

Over the last two years, Jackie has also been completing a Masters in Poetry Studies at the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies in Dublin City University. She is working on her thesis for the Masters, and intends to submit it at the end of August.

The course introduced her to new forms of poetry and books that she wouldn't ordinarily have chosen to read. "It’s expanded my horizons a little bit in terms of what I might normally pick up and read. That can only be a good thing," she says.

"The Longford poet Noel Monahan would have been very supportive and encouraging of me, and I joke with him about one thing he said to me very early on, when I was starting to write.

"I was writing a lot about nature and he was trying to get me to try something different. He said, ‘Don’t be looking into the one ditch the whole time!’ So I’ve adopted that now as a philosophy," she smiles.