For a while in 2022 I was involved with a ‘Neurodivergent Poets’ Network’ based in North West England, and was asked to write a poem for a Zine commissioned by The Portico Library. It was to contain a series of Manchester-themed Place Pieces, and I was allocated Elizabeth Gaskell’s House. On paper it didn’t make sense. I didn’t even live in England, had only ever written one poem in my life, and had never read any Elizabeth Gaskell. Plus, it would involve an overnight trip, which I hadn’t done alone since CFS.

But it was an opportunity. One with a deadline and an outcome, which as someone who serially doesn’t finish, or if finishes doesn’t show, her work, would be good for me. Plus, my sister Maria was commissioned to create the artwork for the Zine, so we could share the motivation. (Ha ha – or, more accurately, Maria could push me!)

So, I agreed and got stuck into the Elizabeth Gaskell novel Mary Barton. And, phew, I liked it. She wrote about Class, Poverty, Inequality – things I care deeply about, have written about, and she contextualised the position of women politically, within them.

I interspersed reading the novel with listening to it. I prefer the physicality of a book, but my CFS was high at the time and audio often more manageable, especially with the tiny print of those old classics. I arranged my trip to Manchester, staying overnight with my niece and her partner.

All I needed now was to get to Elizabeth Gaskell’s House with my notebook, soak up the space where she wrote, do some scribblings, and put them into poetic form.

However.

The thing is her House was closed. And would not be open during my visit.

Oh dear.

I stood outside: could I get a feel for it via osmosis? Could I write about how I had expected it to be remote, separate from the city but found it was central? Connect that symbolically to the fact that she placed herself right in sight of Poverty in her writing, when she could have stayed detached, living within her own privilege?

I didn’t know.

Back in Cardiff I let my intuitive brain decide and found myself writing about my journey to Manchester and the still living thread between what Elizabeth was writing in Victorian times and our reality 200 years later. Bearing in mind, we’d had 12 years under a Tory government in 2022, you can imagine that thread wasn’t hard to pull on.

Here in 2024 I revisited Dear Elizabeth to read at the Launch of The Lufkin Poetry Zine. I still tinker with it. But I shouldn’t and will share it as it stands in my next Blog post.