Ceri Morgan shares her poetic journey…

My love of writing really comes from my love of reading, which began at aged five, when I realised I was properly reading – rather than repeating words I’d memorised – for the first time. It was like opening a door to another world. Like many precocious teenagers, I wrote some poetry as an adolescent with some of my friends, but then turned to literary criticism and theory after studying English and French at university. I became very interested in questions around the spatial as a postgraduate student: my PhD considers how particular places like Montreal are represented in contemporary Québec fiction. I spent some of my PhD at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, where I was taught by colleagues who were both critics and writers, such as Louise Dupré. This model was really influential: as a junior lecturer in the early 2000s, I began experimenting with form in my academic articles, putting into dialogue literary studies, my travel writing on Québec, and, frequently, photographs. I’ve been lucky in being able to travel for my job, and make connections with colleagues, writers, and artists in Québec, and elsewhere. Becoming a member of the geopoetics group, La Traversée, marked another sea change in my practice, as I began to write some purely creative pieces (in French). I started writing creatively in English semi-seriously around ten years ago, after being asked by my employer to contribute to teaching in Creative Writing. Working alongside generous and talented colleagues, Emma Henderson and James Sheard, I learned so much about writing: technical accuracy, poetic form and imagery, creative risk, sharing and editing. After a couple of unsatisfactory attempts at short fiction, I tried my hand at prose poetry — a form practised by several of the Québec authors I’ve written about, such as Nicole Brossard and Josée Yvon. ‘San Francisco Sigh’ was one of the first collage poems I wrote after attending a geography conference in the city in 2016.

I like the collage form and its ability to repurpose words, allow for a layering of languages and images, foster openness and/or incompleteness. Although English is my first language, as a Welsh person with a strong Valleys accent, I have a complicated relationship to it. Incorporating words from French (my second language), Welsh (my third language), and other languages in my poems allows for a certain playfulness, and reminds readers that most people in the world are bi- or multi-lingual. I’ve led some lovely, fun workshops with participants for whom English is not the main language spoken at home, where we’ve written across languages. I like poetry’s capacity to foster a sense of inclusion and belonging, often with just a few words combined with images or other media. I feel as if the poetry scene is very exciting right now, on and off the page, with performance poetry, poetry film, stage adaptations of page poetry, etc.. I have a lot to learn, which is perfect for me, as like most people working in education, I love learning!