*Molly Twomey.
AWARD winning poet Molly Twomey is coming to glór to facilitate the Clare Poetry Collectives Latest workshop.
The Clare Poetry Collective, a group established over 30 years ago aims to create a supportive and inclusive community for established creatives and would-be poets throughout Clare. Through open-events, live performances and professional workshops, the Clare Poetry Collective hopes to inspire and support writers and readers of poetry.
Cork-based poet, Molly Twomey (29) will be the featured poet at the workshop taking place in glór on Saturday (April 5th).
Molly found her love for poetry while completing an undergraduate degree in english literature. Although she was apprehensive about the medium, she soon fell in love with the creative writing style and published her first book “Raised by Vulture” in 2022 just three years after graduating from her Masters Degree in Creative Writing.
“The form of a poem is very small so it can hold a bit more of an intense feeling, more than that of prose if you’re working with something with an intense feeling in a larger prose than it can be really difficult to hold that,” explained Molly
Her award winning debut collection was inspired and informed by her own journey of living with an eating disorder. Throughout her work Molly tackles provocative and challenging themes of mental health and the pressures put on women in daily life.
“When I was writing ‘Raised by Vultures’ I wasn’t really thinking about enjoyment or accessibility. What was on my mind because of the topic, which was I had an eating disorder, trying not to do harm because people with eating disorders came across my book and the last thing you want to be doing is creating harmful material”.
Molly told The Clare Echo that she found poetry a helpful way to communicate her experience of going through the recovery process. “At that time I was quite unwell and I wasn’t really able to express what was going on with me. Poetry kind of just gave me another way of communicating what I wasn’t able to talk about so it really freed me and gave me back my voice.”
Molly is currently working on her second book. She explained that this book will still touch on the theme of mental health and eating disorders, she is eager to portray the reality that as it is a mental health issue although someone may look like they no longer struggle with an eating disorder they still may not be ‘recovered’. While incorporating similar themes to her first book Molly will also include poems inspired by a house fire which claimed her childhood home in Waterford. Although she will continue to write about serious topics Molly hopes to integrate more of her unique sense of humour into her second book.
“I am really hoping that this book is funnier it’s just a little bit cheeky a little bit more, not shocking but I want someone to be like ‘gosh I can’t believe you just put that in a poem’. It’s playful, I am hoping that this book feels a bit more playful. ”
While writing Molly also shares her knowledge and expertise with the public through events and workshops. She has established her own online international poetry . Molly also travels around the country facilitating workshops with groups such as The Clare Poetry Collective.
Molly amidst that her workshops can be ‘intense’. Through these workshops Molly hopes to help poets learn to trust themselves and to allow themselves to write without thinking critically about their work.
“What I want from a workshop is for the poets to come away with as much new material as possible. I generally would come in with some poems and lots of prompts and give lots of writing time.”
“For this workshop with glór i am hoping especially for the morning portion of it to be as generative as possible, for people to just kind of let themselves write in response to the prompts in response to the poems and to not be worried about the end material it’s much more about the process.”
These workshops are not only of benefit to the participants but Molly finds them just as inspirational and motivational. “What I love about mentoring and giving workshops is it gives me an opportunity to work with poems that I love and I adore and kind of rave about those poems and to bring those poems to new people, to new readers”.
“I get a great buzz. I always come away from a workshop like that really excited especially if it goes well because creating is so exciting. It kind of touches on a playful part of us that is so alive in childhood that we try to suppress as we go about our daily lives in adulthood.”
