Poet extrodinaire, Jennifer works with groups, supporting a community approach to creativity

You can find Jenny on her instagram page pinkdinosaurpress/ here

Conversation with poet Jennifer Wilson- Sharing a Journey.

Andrew, “Hello Jenny, nice to see you.” 

Jenny, “Hello Andrew, nice to see you too.” 

Andrew, “I’m excited to talk with you about all the things you’ve created, and what your doing. So tell us how you started.” 

Jenny, “So it was Covid. I had climbed the greasy ladder in the NHS, and fell back down and had a bit of a breakdown after Covid. And then all of a sudden I met this student nurse, and she talked about doing an active course and going back to uni.

 “And I kind of just thought, I’m getting better mentally. I need to do something, and it is always, since I left school, my biggest regret in life was not doing an English degree.

 “I listened to my dad. He said, “no you’re not doing an English degree, go get a job. I’m not supporting you.” 

And like everyone else, millions of people, I ended up in a good job, a great noble job, But didn’t kind of… 

Andrew, “A nurse.” 

Jenny, “Yes as a nurse, but didn’t really like set my world on fire, you know. There’s a lot in me that I had, and that girl, like in a week signed up to an active course in the social sciences, and all the people, made some wonderful friends, went into psychology.

“It would have been so easy to go into psychology with them. But I didn’t like it. I’ve always been interested in creative writing. I did a creative writing project at college and did really well. 

“I have to go down this route, and I have to explore it because if I don’t I’ll become a really old lady with a lot of regrets, so I applied to uni. 

“I ended up at Huddersfield University, doing English Literature with creative writing BA arts, and enjoying it. It’s tough being the oldest in a bunch of eighteen-year-olds. That’s taught me something, that’s taught me not to care what other people think. 

“I just love, for myself, because I’ve got the inhibitions, not the lustre that the younger kids have. I can really enjoy myself. 

"I don’t like writing short stories, and I don’t think I’m going to be a novelist. But I really liked writing a play. But really, I love poetry. 

"I think it’s really good for someone like me to kinda like focus and this year, experimental writing that we’re doing. I’ve just loved and adored because I feel like experimental writing it’s more… cos I’m quite like Neuro diverse… I haven’t been diagnosed, but I’m one of those people who diagnosed themselves, like a lot of people do.

“For me it’s just given me permission to be the wonderful creative person I am. Because that’s what you have to do to be experimental, and it’s all okay because that’s what experimental writing is, and I feel like I’ve probably done my best work in the last three or four months. So I’ve really loved it.

 Andrew, “so your growing and developing.” 

Jenny, “Yes, I feel like the experimental module is the most me in terms of being creative and I love the other stuff that we’re doing academically, like James Joyce and Virginnia Wolf, and it’s like these people are quite like me in the way that they think and it’s like James Joyce wrote something truly amazing Ulysses which is kind of hard going and intense and I read Virginia Wolfs Mrs Dalloway and that’s more like a user friendly modernist novel. I loved that.

 “Some of the stuff that I have done, not everything, but one of my favourites called Madea, a Greek poet Euripedes, inspired one of my poems, called ‘Me and Madea.’ That’s inspired by the play, kinda a really unusual play for its time. Feminine rage, and getting revenge. 

"I wrote a play, personally found it hard to do, but Uni marked it a first. Don’t know if I’d want to do it again. 

“One good thing about going to Uni is…you think you want to be a writer and write a novel… I find it really hard, but writing poetry easy and the technical stuff comes in like editing, because you either add or you boil it down or play around with format. 

Andrew, “You share as well with different groups.” 

Jenny, “Yes, I put an advert on Facebook to do workshops with. I’ve done quite a few workshops with the Brownies. I’ve got one coming up in December, in a couple of weeks’ time… and I just loved that, loved being with kids. 

“Just doing, and what I love about it is that when you’re doing it, you don’t have to be perfect. Poetry, yes, there are rules in poetry and the traditional stuff, rules about syllables etc… but you don’t have to have rules for kids or anyone. It’s a great hobby and activity to do because there isn’t… you don’t have to do something polished or perfect. It’s about just doing it. 

So, I’ve done quite a few group sessions. “The other week… I have a cousin who works for another NHS Trust, and they were having a well-being day and me being me, she said, would I come along and give a talk. I thought it would be ten minutes… 

...but it was an hour, so I had to think on my feet, but actually it turned out to be a really lovely hour. 

So I did a little bit of talking; it was for the NHS, so I could empathise and get on people’s side. I wasn’t just some random who didn’t know what they were going through, or the stresses. 

“I ended up doing kinda like a big group activity. They were all split into groups; they’d brought some lovely paper and pens with them. 

Me and Medea
by Jenniffer Wilson

Me and Medea,

 Sitting in a tree,

 K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

 

 Kissing or texting,

 It is all the same. 

Hearts broken, lame, 

Shattering as you came.

 

 Me and Medea, 

Sitting in a tree- A float in a sea, of our heart's debris. 

You, adrift on your bent knee. 

 

 Boats painted in our blood, 

 Holding back the flood. 

A flood of lust, rust and dust. 

Hearts, encased in a lava crust. 

 

 Me and Medea sitting in a tree, 

Writing a homily or is it a manifesto? 

Of feminine gusto. 

Dagger in your heart, just so.

Born to Run to Graceland

Welcome to Pink Dinosaur Press. Sharing all things poetry and creative writing. I deliver poetry and creative workshops and tutoring services, run by myself, Jennifer Wilson, passionate about books, movies, and DVDs, I’m expanding my work to include educational services too. If your interested get in touch, lets chat, for more information click HERE

“The first ten minutes, I made them write, but they couldn’t use certain letters, certain vowels, because they’re the letters you use all the time. 

“I made them laugh, telling them tales of how I taught the Brownies and coped when the Brownies had got a bit rowdy. I gave them a ten-minute piece of automatic writing, using prompts because it can be hard, so I asked them what their favourite holiday was, and to write ten minutes solidly about that and then to bring it all together. 

I asked them to work in partnership with each other, writing on a big sheet of paper. To get the favourite lines from each other’s poems to make one big poem. And then I went round and got them to read it out. 

“Since then I’ve thought… I’ve done a lot for free… now doing it paid. You know I’m good at this. 

“On Sunday I met with a café owner in Horbury, which is a village near me. And I’m just in negotiations to create a wellbeing centre, and I think I’m going to focus it on adults. But I’ve also started putting adverts out for tutoring writing. 

“And I’m going to do a Masters in creative writing. On a personal level I started sending stuff out for publishing. Experimental, I love doing. I have some rejections but that’s fine you’re not for everyone, and someone will like it somewhere. And where the future will take me… I don’t know, but it’s exciting, what ever it is. 

Andrew, “Your interested in people getting in touch with you for creative writing in group sessions?” 

Jenny, “Yes one to one or anything really.” 

Andrew, “Your poems, is there any particular subject you write about?” 

Jenny, “It depends what I’m going through in life at that moment. I want to write about what’s in the news. I had a bad year last year. I went through therapy and stuff. 

“I write much more experimentally now, it’s quite reactionary. For example, whatever takes my fancy. I’m a bit obsessive about what’s going on in Venezuela. I did a poem about Nicolás Maduro dancing. 

“I think at the moment I’m focusing on style and technique. “I did a lot about music. I’ve done loads about Bruce Springsteen… which is really embarrassing. But I think it links to grief… about me dad. 

On my Instagram page I have a poem, ‘Run to Graceland’ and I think that anything about Bruce Springsteen is really about grief, because it is the last link I have to my dad, who passed away in 2019 and like the ‘Born to run to Graceland’ is a really interesting one.

 I took lyrics and song titles from the album. It links to my dad who had Springsteen albums and me and my brothers are obsessed with Springsteen and Paul Simon. 

“I use the lyrics and titles to make a poem and add my words spliced in to the titles, words in italics and that kind of thing, to separate them. 

But my writing about Bruce Springsteen is about grief. “I do feel like… {Jenny trails into silence} 

Andrew, “It brings you closer to your dad?” 

Jenny, “Yes, I have this big fear that when he dies, my dad will finally be dead. And awful fear of that… which is very silly… but he’s the last tangible link I have to him. 

“So grief is a big one.” Jenny pauses and smiles, “And cats and New York obsess me.” 

Andrew, “so basically anything that grips you any time?” 

Jenny, “Yes its interesting you bring that up because next term we’re going to have a session about how you put everything together. You know, how you get it published as a whole, because I often worry about that in my work… that it’s so diverse, would it go together. 

"But like to negate that , what I’ve done for my portfolio I’ve made experimental writing into a PowerPoint. Called ‘Song of the 13th Octobe’r and it’s all about how in the course of a day I had three lectures with three different lecturers, and as they’re talking any kind of little thing they said that caught my ear, caught my imagination, I wrote a poem about. 

“Like one of my lecturers, she said something about the oddness of poems, and I thought, that sounds really good, and I just wrote about what it sparked in me, and I’ve done that in a PowerPoint which I’m going to upload onto Instagram, as my way of trying to put stuff together. 

“That was inspired by a Walt Whitman song ‘Of myself I love’, and the Langston Hughes poems, are something else,” Jenny laughs, “which really resonates… never my response though.  

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