Greta Stoddart makes very good chocolate biscuits. She is also an award-winning poet, been a performer, teaches creative writing and lives with her family, including Juno the “liquorice allsorts” dog, in Devon, down a steep track with a huge view across the Axe Valley.
Over tea and biscuits we talked about words and silence, 2 big elements in her creative life. Words, she said, were an early love, her first “self-published” poetry anthology written aged 9 and illustrated by her sister but not she said like Jane Austen or the Brontes.
The collection, which included “Master Crash It All” about a particularly clumsy boy, “ was a bit tumpty, tumpty” – her description – but lines would arrive in her head as she awoke and wanted to be written down. The book happened just before a major riding accident which saw her spend 3 months in hospital and then several more on the sofa reading or looking out the window, in retrospect an excellent nursery for a fledgling poet who turned from a “an outgoing child into a more reflective one”.
Her road to physical recovery turned out, however, to be through ballet, almost on doctor’s orders, this leading to the other passion-dance and then theatre. Eventually after reading drama at Manchester Greta went to study with the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre in Paris specialising in clown skills. 2 years on found her and 2 female friends touring Europe with Brouhaha, their mime theatre company, which lasted for 5 busy years.
She says the experience “taught me to respect silence- which poetry also values in the white space around the text”, a “pressured silence, to not speak unless you really need to”. Space in both words and performance is certainly central to her writing and her teaching- her workshops are always measured, calm situations where listening is of the essence. It was while on tour in Belfast that the writing bug began to go viral in the form of “lines in my head” which insisted on being written down, as in childhood.
She took a year out of acting and never went back. Her timing was stage perfect- she booked onto an Arvon writing course led by Simon Armitage in the company of other then aspiring poets such as Kate Clanchy and moved on to be tutored by Michael Donaghy. She took to poetry like a duck to water and found an audience in sympathy with her work resulting in her first collection, At Home in the Dark, which received the 2001 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She claims “it was a bit of luck” but was actually the result of 7 years work.
She has since written 2 further collections appearing in a fairy tale way around every 7 years. Her latest, Alive, Alive O, published last year deals with death, a subject which has interested her since childhood and which came about after a series of personal bereavements. It is, however, not a depressing collection- sad, thoughtful, painful and also positive as she attempts to cover the complexities of this subject.
So with 3 books completed she is in quiet contemplation of her next writing challenge so we await with interest What Greta Did Next.
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