Emily Cotterill

Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff based poet originally from Alfreton in Derbyshire. Her debut pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants (smith|doorstop, 2019) was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a part of the Laureate’s Choice series. Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of locations in print and online including Poetry Wales, The North, and The Waxed Lemon. Emily writes about place, identity, and pop culture and her poems feature appearances from such familiar names as Debbie Harry, Michael Sheen, Halle Berry, and Sonia from Eastenders.

Congratulations Emily on publishing Significant Wow, and thank you for answering some questions for Libraries Wales. Tell us a little about your background…

Every time I have to write a bio for myself it starts ‘Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff based poet originally from Alfreton, Derbyshire’. Alfreton’s the sort of post-industrial town that the media would describe as ‘left behind’ and coming from that environment has made a real impact on me which I started noticing at sixteen when I went to sixth form ‘further afield’ in Nottingham.

Quite often people interpret my writing as ‘working-class’ because I write about things like leisure centres and Wetherspoons, but I actually grew up very conscious of the fact that my family had more money than lots of people I was around at school. My dad was a police constable and my mum retrained as a primary school teacher when I was about 6 and that definitely made me ‘posh’. I’m middle class and the insistence of people from much more affluent backgrounds than mine that they are working class is something that enrages and confuses me more than I can explain. I actually went to university (in Cardiff) pretty convinced that I didn’t have a regional accent which I quickly learnt was not the case.

What influences and memories stand out from your childhood?

Literary wise I have a strong memory of learning to recite Spike Milligan’s ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ during New Labour’s recently invented Literacy Hour. I also remember my mum reading poems from Janet and Allan Ahlberg to me as well, there are a few moments like that where looking back I suppose I was quite drawn to poetry but just hadn’t quite figured that out. I can also remember being sent to the year 2 classroom to pick out a new reading book when I was in year 1 because I’d been ‘promoted’ to a level that wasn’t kept in that room. The fact that I remember that must mean I was really proud of myself at the time I suppose.

My dad used to read a Mervyn Peake book called Letters from a Lost Uncle to me and my sister – it was a really complete piece of art presented as typewritten letters and drawings from the uncle’s adventures (I have just this moment realised that generally I’m not a fan of epistolary novels but maybe it’s because I peaked at a young age with that).

I also remember sitting in the car and hearing the Dire Straits song ‘Money for Nothing’ – I was really intrigued by the lyrics about microwave ovens and colour TVs, clearly my interest in the poetry of the everyday was there even then.

As a young person, who or what influenced you?

At around 14 or 15 I started to read NME and became the kind of teenager who was listening through the history of rock music backwards – this was just before Spotify and my dad would have strung me up if I downloaded music illegally via Limewire so it was quite a slow process (aided by my dad’s own formidable CD collection). It’s basically impossible to overstate the impact Manic Street Preachers had on me from the age of 15. I listened to their album The Holy Bible after reading an article about them being awarded NME’s Godlike Genius Award and I have been a different person ever since.

Significant Wow is quite focused on how our ordinary lives interact with culture and so there are references in there to loads of things that influenced me from David Bowie to The Wild Thornberrys!

What are your influences now?

The Manics are still there, they always will be.

I became quite obsessed with The Beatles during lockdown and I’m still going through that. Despite what I said earlier about going backwards through the history of rock music I sort of avoided them for years, there’s actually a poem in the collection a little related to that.

I’ve been working on a playlist to accompany Significant Wow that highlights a variety of the music that’s influenced me over the years. Hopefully it’s a better playlist than ‘songs mentioned in Significant Wow’ would be, I don’t think there’s a real way to make ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, ‘Dirrty’, and the ‘Grease Megamix’ sit sensibly together.

The main thing that influences my writing is everyday life I think – I notice a lot of detail, normally when I’m looking in the direction that I’m not supposed to be and those things make it into poems. Chatting to my other poet friends is also a huge influence. I’ve been really lucky that since moving back to South Wales I’ve built up a really good circle of excellent writer friends and whenever we get together to workshop things I come away full of creative energy. In general I think having an inter-generational group of friends is a great thing creatively and just personally – something more people should pursue.

When did you become aware of wanting to write, did any particular factors play a part?

I always wanted to write although that didn’t always translate into doing much writing. ‘Author’ was always my answer to the ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ question. So far I’ve lacked the discipline to write a novel but I do remember writing a poem on a whim when I was about 10 and then really getting into that as an idea. In year 6 we went on a school trip to a place called Magna in Rotherham. It was an old steel mill that had been turned into a ‘science adventure centre’ and when we were back in the classroom we all had to write a poem about the trip and our teacher said he’d send the best ones off to them. The poem I wrote which supposedly ‘won’ this competition was really about the melancholy of de-industrialisation although I wouldn’t have put it like that at the time, strangely I can still remember it word for word. I’ve been coming back to that theme ever since. I suppose its easy to keep wanting to do something if contextually you seem quite good at it.

Tell us a little about Significant Wow, where did the inspiration come from, and what do you hope readers will take from the collection?

Parts of this collection have been around for years but the book really started to crystalise for me at the beginning of lockdown when I wrote a poem called ‘Michael Sheen keeps parking his car at my office’ (which was the working title of the whole thing for a while). It was after that that I started to really pursue the collection’s central themes of celebrity and story-telling.

The title Significant Wow was actually a phrase that I used when commenting on a Facebook post and I thought ‘ooo I like that’. I wrote it into a poem so that I could lift it out for the title of the book. The poem, which I tried to write in the style of John Cooper Clarke, wasn’t very good so it got cut but the title lived on.

I don’t think there’s any kind of ‘message’ that I am hoping people would take from the book – I really don’t have anything important enough to say! If anything I hope readers who aren’t used to seeing themselves in print might find something that connects with them. My friend Julie once said to me that she never thought she’d get to read poems about the sort of things I write about which I loved, so maybe I’ll help someone else feel like that.

What are your favourite reading genres, and what books are you reading at the moment?

I always feel like I am not reading enough. There’s a lot of social judgement about reading for its own sake and I don’t want to get involved in that but anyone who wants to write seriously really should be reading seriously too. I’m currently reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy who is a phenomenal writer.

At my heart I will always be a nerd and fantasy novels are a key part of that – my dad introduced me to Discworld when I was 10. If I’m ever in any kind of reading rut I find going back to some fantasy can help.

I find that I rarely re-read poetry and recently I’ve been trying to address – going back to things that I remember loving to revisit them. The problem with being a writer is that you are always working when you read the genre that you write – what’s done well, what would I do differently, how could this be better.

What experiences of libraries have influenced you during your lifetime?

My mum would take me and my sister to the library a lot as children. We’d check out our four books for the week to take home – I remember being jealous when my sister turned whatever age it was that meant she was suddenly allowed eight books all to herself. I have one specific memory of getting ‘lost’ outside the library, I don’t really know what happened but suddenly I was separated from my mum and just standing in the street. It felt like I was there for ages but I imagine it was less than a minute until another mum came over to speak to me and took me inside.

I also remember going to the library with friends in the school holidays to play games on the Internet, probably a memory very specific to people my age. Many hours spent on miniclip.com.

Like I said above I got really into the Manics when I was 15 and they are a band that pretty much arrive with a reading list. I wasn’t online shopping at that point and there wasn’t a bookshop in my hometown so the local library and charity shops were what I turned to to find the writers that they referenced, often easier said than done but I continuously tried. Thinking about libraries now I’m pretty sure I owe Derbyshire County Council some kind of very very dated library fine, sorry!

Manic Street Preachers, Cardiff 2010. Photo Andrew King

What suggestions do you have to encourage children and young people to read more for pleasure?

Who knows what children and young people do? I didn’t understand them when I was one never mind now. My poetry reading advice is always to not take things too seriously – people are scared off by poetry, they think they don’t ‘get’ it or that it is some sort of puzzle to be solved. My other poetry advice is not to think of ‘poetry’ as a thing that you either like or don’t like, no one is saying ‘oh, you like novels’ and expecting a person to be a fan of hyper-experimental literary fiction and super sexy page turning romances, why would the same apply in poetry? Find the poetry that’s right for you.

Thank you Emily.

Significant Wow was published 17 February by Seren Books.

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