Rory Waterman is a writer whose bow has many strings. As a critic and poet, his work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and the Poetry Review. His fêted first collection was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. We sat down to discuss the creative spark and where it’s taken him…
Rory - can you remember where your impulse to write first came from?
When I was maybe ten, we had to go out into the grounds of our little village primary school in Lincolnshire and look at catkins on trees, and then go and write poems about them. And whatever mawkish crap I produced as a result of this to some extent impressed my teacher, which was quite rewarding - I was a bit of a naughty kid. So I had a sense early on that I was quite good at playing around with words. I liked making up rhymes and daydreaming a lot, and maybe being an only child helped.
My dad was a poet - we didn’t live together. I was born in Ireland and my mum left my dad when I was two, and she moved with me to Lincolnshire, to her mum’s house. So I grew up with my grandma, my aunt and my mum, in a small three bedroom house, a lodge house of an estate. I was very much on my own in a way, but I was also aware of that world of writing from an early age. I’m not very good at anything else! So, writing and thinking about things was sort of my forte.
You’ve called your latest collection ‘Come Here To This Gate’ - what sort of things were occupying your thoughts as you wrote it?
My copies arrived in the post today - I popped downstairs to make a cup of coffee, and there they were. I’ve not really seen them yet. I mean, I’d seen the poems. I wrote them. And I’m quite glad to see that it’s not all printed upside down or something.
My last book was published four years ago - what normally happens is that I finish a book of poems and don’t write any for a while, until something shakes me back towards poetry. And for this book, that was becoming a writer in residence in Bucheon, South Korea, in 2020. The first two weeks were spent in quarantine in a hotel in Seoul - my duty was to write about the Korean border, in various ways. I had a fascinating time, and being in that situation kickstarted me back into writing poems.
The book’s title is a quotation from someone who’s certainly no hero of mine. It’s Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech - you know, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall’. Before that, he says ‘Mr. Gorbachev, come here to this gate’. The poem with that name moves from one part of the world to another, looking at people who are stuck behind borders - so, a kid in Derry in the 1970s, who’s inside the ‘peace rings’, they were called - it’s barbed wire, curfewed. Another part looks at two East Germans who designed and made a hot air balloon to fly across the border. They sewed together bits of taffeta and made a basket… then, eventually they told their children they were all going and they all climbed into this hot air balloon in the forest. The first time, they didn’t make it over the border. But the second time they did.
I had a sense early on that I was quite good at playing around with words. I liked making up rhymes and daydreaming a lot, and maybe being an only child helped.
How do you think the collection comes together as a whole?
The book has three main sections: it begins with a sequence called ‘All But Forgotten’, which is in memory of my dad, who passed away in 2022 - he had a terrible last thirteen months or so, he had cancer but also alcohol-induced dementia. The second section looks at borders, metaphorical and literal, some set in Albania and Korea, and some about the condition of England, you could say.
In the third, I play a bit fast and loose with the narratives of four Lincolnshire folk tales - I wanted to make things that were scandalous fun, I’ve moved them about a bit. I hope they piss off some folklorists! Who tend to be quite serious about preserving a tradition that I don’t think should be kept in aspic. Those are the three constituent parts, and the title speaks to all three of them, I think, in different ways.
You wear another hat as an Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University, where you lead the Creative Writing MA. How much of creativity is down to nature, do you think, and how much is nurture?
Hmm. You can’t inherently teach talent - you’re not God, you can’t make that spark - but you can cultivate it, and a lot of people have a lot more potential than they realise. It’s not wholly innate, because that would imply that for anyone with a bit of talent, that anything that comes out of their quill, their chalk, their fingertips will be golden, and everyone would be mad for not reading it, and that’s just not true.
You can be taught to harness and develop your own talent, to develop interests, to put together a manuscript so that it shines, how to be your best critic - which doesn’t always mean your harshest critic, although it can. And how to have confidence in the process.
What might you say to writers who are just starting their journeys?
Take yourself seriously, take your time. And take risks.
Rory Waterman’s collection Come Here To This Gate is available from Carcanet Press from Thursday 25 April, with a reading at Five Leaves Bookshop on Thursday 18 April.
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