Michael Rosen on writing to recover

Plus, the In Writing Creative Hour returns, and do you have questions about the podcast?

Michael Rosen, this week’s guest on the In Writing podcast.

Paying subscribers can listen to me read this newsletter aloud, here or on your podcast app.

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The In Writing Creative Hour returns on Sunday at 5pm London time. Here’s some more info on what this involves – I hope you’ll join me for a writing session on Google Meet. Look out for an email with the link.

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Well, season five of the In Writing podcast is complete. The end of a season is always bittersweet for me – it’s nice to regain some time to work on other things, but I absolutely love making it, and will miss it. I am really happy with the final episode, which is an interview with the poet and author Michael Rosen.

Michael’s been publishing poetry books for children and adults since the early 1970s, presents a BBC Radio 4 show, and has a huge Twitter following, and I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that he’s considered a national treasure here in the UK. I was struck, during our conversation, by how very knowledgeable, curious and well-read he is – if you listen to the episode, you’ll hear that he’s inspired by a surprisingly wide range of writers, from Sylvia Plath to Homer to Shakespeare to Raymond Carver. I think I cut it from the episode in the end as our conversation was so long, but he also talked about being heavily influenced by Peter Kay’s Hobnob comedy routine. So he’s democratic in his tastes, which I like.

(Here is said routine. If you’re American, it might be helpful to know that by ‘biscuits’, he means cookies… and by ‘brew’, he means tea… and by Hobnobs, he means… wait, do you have Hobnobs in the USA?)

What I particularly admire about Michael, though, is how openly he has talked and written about some of the very worst experiences we can imagine – not only for his grown-up audience, but for children too. He’s Jewish, and had family who died in the Holocaust; his book The Missing is about this. And here’s a sentence so sad I can hardly type it: in 1999, his 18-year-old son, Eddie, died suddenly of meningitis. He’s written about that a lot over the years – in his prose-poem memoir Carrying the Elephant, which appears to be out of print; in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book; and most recently in his memoir Getting Better, about how he’s survived the worst challenges of his life.

Another crisis covered in that book is Michael’s seven-week stay in intensive care (six of those were spent on a ventilator), when he caught Covid-19 in 2020. On that topic, I was really moved by his book Many Different Kinds of Love, which compiles journal entries and letters from the hospital staff who cared for him, with emails from his wife, and poems he wrote during recovery. There was a huge outpouring of concern for him in the UK during that period, which I think shows how very beloved he is.

Perhaps I’m making him sound gloomy; he isn’t, at all. He’s a cheerful, funny person. But I loved speaking to him about how writing can help us heal from trauma. His theory is that it’s good to give our feelings a form and an order, and that from there we can start to understand them better, to compare them to the experiences of others, and to see how our emotions shift over time. I hope you’ll listen to the episode and let me know what you think.

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Do you have any questions about the In Writing podcast, about my previous guests, or about podcasting or interviewing more generally? I’d love to hear them if so, and will endeavour to answer them soon.

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Also, and apropos of nothing, please go and read Tor Freeman’s latest comics, which have really made me laugh this morning (warning: the last one is *adult humour*).

IT help for mums

Hope to see some of you on Sunday! Until then, good luck with your writing.