Every month Rye News celebrates women’s work in Rye through portraits and recorded interviews captured in the HerStory Rye project. This unique online archive contains stories of women of all ages working in and around Rye.
This month: poet Alex Josephy
Alex and I met in her writing room in Watchbell Street to explore her writing life. Alex always knew she wanted to be a writer and her first job working with school refusers in an experimental truancy project in North London was an exercise in the imagination. The teachers negotiated each lesson with their students to encourage them to discover what they really wanted to learn. The results were positive, but nowadays, these pioneering projects have mutated into Pupil Referral Units, with less freedom to experiment. Alex subsequently became a qualified English teacher working in state schools for many years and getting her MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. In later life, love of Italy saw Alex and her husband, also working in education, living for 14 years part-time and then full-time in a small Italian hill town with many of the topographical and historic characteristics of what attracted them, after Brexit, to come back to the UK to Rye four years ago.
Our conversation, delving into the small particulars of Alex’s writing process, included inspirational references to some of her favourite established poets and writers; James Kelman ”If the lines disgust you…hit return and write another”; Keats description of “negative capability” a poem reaches beyond the literal, beyond what its words seem at first to be saying. So if you don’t think you understand poetry that’s perfectly OK. Try reading again and you may be surprised.
Alex loves the rigour and discipline of redrafting and trying different forms of poetry from free verse to Dante’s “terza rima” where the symbolism of the number three shapes an entire epic poem. She believes poetry is very political, often in indirect ways. “It’s not like oratory telling you a message but it sticks up for complexity!”
You can hear the full interview here.
Do come to Alex’s reading during the Rye Arts Festival on Monday 14 September at The George. She will be launching her book A Little Bridge with a gorgeous cover by local artist and poet Jim Northover.
There are many more fascinating interviews on the HerStory Rye website. Click here.
Image Credits: Susan Benn .