Week 4 begins with an early drive on a Monday morning – not the most auspicious of beginnings. I get to Inverness in good time and head immediately to Moniack Mhor. Very quickly the road becomes familiar though my last visit is nearly two years ago. The cows in the passing fields, the small loch that looks ideal for a spot of fishing, and, finally, the dark wooden sign announcing the destination: Moniack Mhor: Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre.
So many parts of my writing history seem to have come together by chance and happy consequence. I was first introduced to Moniack Mhor through their Young Writers’ Award in 2016, when I and five other young writers were awarded the accolade, part of the prize being a weekend retreat at the centre. And what a prize! I think all of us were astonished to see what the highlands were hiding; a cosy, welcoming and atmospheric steading amongst green fields and cow pastures.
When I was applying for the Carnegie scholarship, Moniack Mhor made sense as a research destination. Not only was it perfectly placed to provide me with ample creative inspiration, but it is also the location of the northernmost branch of the Scottish Poetry Library, tucked away in the charming cottage that usually houses one-to-one mentoring and guest speakers. And indeed, cup of tea in hand, I sat down in a room full of books in the quiet green countryside and thought: yes.
If the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh gave me the impetus to see my name on a spine, then Moniack Mhor increased that drive tenfold. To be welcomed amongst the shelves like a friend, not a student, should be a worthy end goal to this project.
The project itself deserves a mention here, of course. This week was another chance for me to examine new voices of mental health and produce my own work. In the cottage I met much familiar feeling: I rooted out books by the back pages, by name, by cover… I had no real way of cataloguing other than to get stuck in, and if the worst result is more poetry – albeit irrelevant to task – then I will gladly take that sword. I read quickly and slowly, I skimmed and stared, and found the hours going much too fast for me.
Some of the female poets I found were as follows:
Susan Batty, Julia Copus, Valerie Gillies, Vickie Feaver, Sarah Wardle – a mixture of older and new voices in the poetry world, all with something to say about the psychology of our thinking, if not directly related to mental health issues then at least in the vein of internal distresses.
It was a leisurely form of research. I focussed on books, slim volumes and thick anthologies, anything that my finger couldn’t quite pass the spine of without forcing me to take a second glance. I loved the physicality of it. Understanding the physical toll and experience of mental health is something that made it into my poetry this week.
My poetry really felt shaped by the physicality of my week; the new sensations of independence, shaping my day by choice and enjoying my own company, the urge to explore my surroundings physically, the lure of nature in the city, and the physical symptoms that always seem to announce my mental health’s incoming deterioration.
New to Inverness, I made an effort to seek out quiet places for a little al fresco writing. I shared my lunch with two crows on Tuesday (looking at you, Ted Hughes) and took a stroll down the River Ness. I spent two hours in the nearby Botanical Gardens and gave myself the time and space to think, clearly: about myself, my illness, my past experiences and the project as a whole. In times like these I allowed myself to ponder the question of what I was really doing with this research, and what I hoped to achieve.
I have never been particularly open about my mental health in the past and kept it on a need-to-know basis. I was ashamed, and still feel that sometimes. What this project is allowing me to do in a controlled way is access and express my experiences in a way that I am happy with, and learning to be more comfortable with. Mental health is a hugely stigmatised health issue. Today, there is a lot more openness surrounding the issue and I respect that, but there is so, so, much still to be discovered about mental health and so much still to be said. I hope that this project can add to this in some small way.
The poems I produced this week came in dribs and drabs, and then all at once. Being in Inverness and placing myself away from home with so many new experiences is something my anxiety would usually not allow me to do. This week I ignored any voice that said ‘you can’t do that’ and pushed myself to achieve. The one thing I have learned in tackling my mental health is the power of the phrase fake it ‘til you make it. It sounds daft until suddenly it isn’t. Like anything, if you can trick your brain into a new process then it very quickly becomes the norm. Practice and project confidence and you earn it. Question the voice in your head that says ‘you can’t do that’ because usually it doesn’t have a good answer.
This is not to say that it is simple. It’s not. The reason this blog is being uploaded on a Monday instead of my usual Saturday/Sunday routine is directly related to pushing myself far too hard throughout my Inverness week and arriving home with all the mental energy of a discarded sock. It happens. This week is another break week before the final push in editing and preparing the manuscript for a pamphlet, and then on to wherever that takes me…