Maggie Sawkins — The Mike Allen Interview

Text reproduced with kind permission of The News, Portsmouth.
http://www.portsmouth.co.uk

Poetry gave me new life

Maggie Sawkins tells MIKE ALLEN she grew up feeling she didn’t fit in, but the gift of a book of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems set her on the path to a creative new life.

She grew up with sad stories, she says, but those demons have been exorcised and she can laugh about it now.

She was the victim of a society that said girls who were good at English but didn't go to grammar school took secretarial work. But now she has a master's degree and teaches in the Leigh Park community where she spent her first 19 years.

So Maggie Sawkins has completed the circle? 'Yes, I suppose I have,' she says.

She once felt she did not fit in at Leigh Park or in a middle-class environment. Now at 52 she is a widely-admired poet, happy in her teaching role and settled in a leafy part of Southsea with third husband Ed and her daughter from her second marriage.

Maggie's father was a painter and decorator 'but he had been in the war in Burma and was a manic depressive,' she says.

'My mum was Irish and I still have some family over there. My maternal grandfather emigrated to America when she was eight, taking half the family with him. But he got cancer and the family were never reunited.

`I grew up with sad stories,' she says.

But her life was changed when she was seven or eight when an aunt in America sent her a book of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry.

'I read it all the time and still remember it. And I tried my hand at writing poetry when I was eight or nine.'

What did her school friends think of that? 'I didn't show them. But I showed Mr Parslow at Riders Junior School and he gave me a merit certificate and that spurred me on to write more and show them to him.

'I got about six merit certificates in about a year.  I guess he must have thought it was slightly unusual, and it was really good that he encouraged it.’

Because she was ‘useless at maths’, she did not take the 11-plus exam that might have won her a place at grammar school, going instead to the secondary modern that is now Park Community School.

But she continued writing and reading and in her final year won the prize for the best English result.

‘There were lots of things going on at home that were quite bad with Mum and Dad.  He left and took an overdose.  He didn’t die but a lot of horrible things were happening.

‘So writing was a sort of escape.  It was something I could do and enjoy.  I loved looking through the dictionary, finding new words and including them in my poems.

‘I wrote one about roses and remember sticking in “ethereal” and “azure”.  We had a brilliant English teacher called Mr Miller and he didn’t believe I had written it.  I didn’t know whether to be offended or proud, but I think it was a compliment really.’

Her work was first published when she was about 17 — she is vague about most dates.

‘I would have loved to do an English degree, but coming from Leigh Park I didn’t think it was an option, so I went to Highbury College and did a secretarial course.

‘But I knew I was doing the wrong thing.  I envied all the students doing A-levels and used to hang around them rather than the ones on my course.  I read their books just for pleasure.  I was into Dostoievsky — Crime and Punishment,’ she laughs. ‘and I started reading other poets.’

She later left Leigh Park for London ‘and everything went a bit wrong with my life’.

Meaning? ‘I got married, and y’know, hm .. it was a bad move.’

That marriage lasted two years, and just before she was 30 she ‘had a bit of a breakdown, I suppose’.

She says:  ‘I wasn’t in hospital or anything, but remember the doctor saying “It’s because you’re bored.  You should do something.  I could give you tablets but you need to do it for yourself.”

‘So I took A-level English at 30.  I had to force myself out of the door but I did it and got a good grade.’

She then took a degree and a master’s in creative writing, winning a distinction, at Chichester University.

Now she writes ‘about what moves me,’ she says, ‘and quite a lot of it has been about childhood.  You can make something good out of something bad, which is survival, isn’t it?

‘People say Sylvia Plath’s poems are depressing but I don’t see it like that because the act of creating is a positive force.  Even if the subject is negative, writing about it is life-enhancing.’

Maggie is now Mental Health Needs Support Co-ordinator at South Downs College, and it is an area that particularly concerns her.

She has written poems about problems suffered by her daughter from her first marriage.

Over the past 12 years, she has taught English and creative writing to asylum seekers, Bangladeshi women, people with mental health problems, head-injury victims, dyslexics and disaffected people.

She says: ‘I enjoy it.  I can relate to them.  I get on with them.  Even when there’s a language barrier you can always find the language to share a joke.’

And she has a creative writing class at the South Downs annexe at Leigh Park Learning Centre.

‘I tell students I come from Leigh Park because it encourages them,’ she says.

‘If you come from a background that’s not particularly privileged, writing is something you can always do.  It costs you only time, a pen, paper and imagination.

‘I’d like to go back to the schools I come from, and that’s the sort of message I’d give.

A bit of music helps to lift the occasion

This Thursday (7.30pm)  (ed's note: article appeared just prior to the Tongues and Grooves April 06 festival), Maggie will be among poets and musicians taking part in the Tongues And Grooves concert at the New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth.

She helped found Tongues And Grooves at the Florence Arms, Southsea, after going there originally in 2002 to launch her collection, Charcot’s Pet.  ‘I put on a bit of music because I thought it could be a bit dry just reading poetry,’ she says.

Now sessions are held there on the final Sunday of every month.

Maggie has also read several times at the Troubadour Club in London, where the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin performed.

‘It’s still one of the top places to read,’ she says.

And she has been invited to read and run a workshop at the Torbay Poetry Festival this summer — ‘and I’m getting paid for that,’ she smiles.

Brilliant style of humour

Asked which poets she admires, Maggie nominates Selima Hill, Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside — all contemporary writers.

And what does she think of the most popular of them all, Pam Ayres?

‘She is brilliant at what she does.  She is one of the best-selling poets who has actually made money out of it.

‘Her style of humour and comic verse is quite brilliant — and so is Wendy Cope’s.

‘People like humour.  They like poetry they can understand.  With someone like Selima Hill you would have to know about poetry or write it yourself for it to appeal to you.

Sometimes words can get in the way

Maggie does yoga and Zen meditation once a fortnight.

She explains: ‘I like silence.  It’s something I aspire to, I think, which is a funny thing to say,    isn’t it?

‘Sometimes words get in the way, don’t they? They arrive when you don’t want them to — like when you’re trying to get to sleep.’

© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site feedback welcome