Hollie McNish Meet the Author

much for joining us on the Papers. Stay with us. It is time for Meet

the Author. Poetry as performance is more

popular than ever and among younger poets who are sharp and sunny and

wise, holy McNish has made a name for herself. Dashmac

Whether on the page or on the stage, Hollie McNish has made

Her collection, Plum, is about the memory of writing

verses at school and how they seem now, looking back.

And so it's about all the fears, embarrassments and growing

You write very graphically about all these embarrassments of adolescence.

Do you still feel them or do you just remember them?

I still feel embarrassed about things now, though,

so I don't know if it's changed that much.

Well, I'm bound to say in this book that if you're embarrassed by them,

you're dealing with it by writing them out of your system.

Because there's no subject that you don't touch, here.

I think the only thing I wouldn't want to do

Although, having said that, there is a few about my school

friends but I have asked them for permission.

One of the things I should tell people about this collection is that

you publish lines that you wrote when you were very,

And then you write about what it's like to look back on them, in a way.

How much were you writing when you were seven, eight, nine?

When I was seven, eight, nine, not a huge amount,

but I started writing a diary when I was about eight

I don't know why, I used to just read a lot of kids' poetry.

Did you ever think that you would be a professional poet?

And you enjoy, judging by this collection, these short, pithy,

repetitive, very rhythmic poems that sort of hit you quickly?

I think this book has got those in it.

So this book, I specifically chose poems that I maybe

So I still write quite a lot and a lot of them are long

and windy but I kind of chose the shorter ones.

In short ones, do you often find yourself performing them before

Yes, I think of them and then write them down very quickly.

I worked with a brilliant editor, Don Patterson, which I've not really

done before with my poems, which is probably why they are a wee

bit punchier because he said you don't need to repeat

As a performance poet, I know that's a phrase that covers

a multitude of sins, but if we just use it for the sake

of it, somebody who comes on and delivers the poems in a very

punchy way as part of a gig, what is it that the audiences like?

Well, from what people have said, they like the honesty in them

and I guess they like someone saying things they might consider too

rude or that they maybe wouldn't want to talk about.

In other words, they want poems that don't seem too

artificial or contrived, but actually hit you

And I guess that they can understand.

A lot of poetry, you have to read it five times to understand it

whereas I think if you are speaking it, that's hard because you can't

just ask the person on stage to read it again and again until you get

In a way, what you're doing with these poems, when you said

that the embarrassments and fears and eruptions of childhood

and adolescence never really go away, you are trying to touch people

I don't think I'm trying to do anything, really.

I think you're stirring old memories among people.

I guess because most people don't write a diary,

most people don't record all these things whereas I did so I guess

You say you started writing a diary when you were eight

The last book I had out was just my diaries,

Yeah, so a few of them I haven't put in.

Let me ask you, how will you feel when your children are old enough

That is the main thing that crossed my head and I wondered

whether I should take certain things out of every book I have

And actually, if my daughter doesn't like me because I had some

strange sexual experience when I was younger, I hope she's

It's that they're the usual mixture of embarrassment,

failure and occasional success that probably most people go through.

Most people don't write them down, they're trying to forget them.

I think most people want to talk about them.

After gigs I find that's the best bit, when I 'm signing books

Yeah, they just want to tell me their stories.

They don't ask me, they just tell me their stories.

That this one struck home because it reminded them

Or the first time they tried on a bra or being shy

You're particularly sharp on that transition to adolescence

And I suppose you were writing in the knowledge that

in contemporary society, the pressures, particularly

on young women, young men as well, are enormous.

That's why I wanted to put those poems in this book, really.

I feel for young girls it's more complicated than anyone

because you're told basically at once to be sexy all the time

We've got this strange dichotomy, especially with young teenage girls,

If you look a certain way, you are teased for it.

I think it's tough for young boys as well, actually.

I don't know what it's like to be a young boy

With any good poetry, there's nowhere to hide for the poet.

I really don't know how people are going to take this book

but I think I'm probably prepared for people knowing

Well, you're exposing yourself in the sense that you're

going back to your feelings, some of which are very funny,

some of which are very familiar to people and for others it

Yet, but I think it's kind of important for me.

I don't think they're good, especially as young people

are growing up, taboos around your body, around sex,

around relationships, I think actually people feeling

that they need to keep secret about things...

Yeah, just stop being so ashamed of everything we do and everything

we feel and all the lust or whatever it is.

I'm just boreed of those things being the things

So you really want to just draw the curtains and let the light in.

Yeah, I feel like if I'm alright to embarrass myself then it might be

helpful for a few people, then I'll just keep

It does look as if you've enjoyed embarrassing yourself?

And now to end the programme, Hollie McNish is going to read one

of the poems from her collection, Plum.

We don't call on each other any more, we all live too far away.

And now impromptu visits worry - you might interrupt my day.

You do not wake me up on weekends with screams pitched

Do not ring my doorbell more than once.

You do not comb my hair for hours to practice plaits.

I count our meetings down like holidays.

The dream each time the doorbell rings -