Tell us a bit about your current job.

I split my time between museum work and writing. Currently I’m the Development Manager at Shandy Hall, a literary museum and the former home of the 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne. I’ve been there since July 2018, but as of 2019 I work there part-time, three days per week. The other two days I spend writing at home. I am a poet and have recently started writing long-form fiction, too, so a ‘writing’ day can encompass a number of things: I do a weekly writing exchange with a couple of other writers, so there’s writing feedback for that; entering competitions (a surprisingly time-consuming endeavour, necessitating the use of a complex spreadsheet in a rainbow of colours detailing where I’ve sent various poems); reading (this is, arguably, the most important activity of the day); applying for grants/residencies/general writing opportunities (again, time-consuming, but necessary, both on a practical level and because it gives me something to aim at and dream about); submitting fiction to agents… and then there’s actual writing, which actually represents a relatively small proportion of time in a writing day, but which makes that time behave strangely.

In the museumy part of my life, I fundraise and help the curator with exhibitions, events, and the general running of the brilliantly eccentric museum that is Shandy Hall.

What and where did you study after school?

I went to the University of East Anglia to study creative writing. An idea of my English teacher’s, and a very good one - I loved it. After a BA in English Literature with a side-serving of Creative Writing, I went on to take an MA in Poetry. A whole year thinking about, and writing, poetry - at the time I thought ‘what a nice idea’, but I think it’s only recently I’ve realised what a luxury it was.

How did you get from answer 2 to answer 1?

I should, before embarking on the circuitous, sometimes seemingly aimless odyssey of my CV, say that it’s all been rather jerky and unpredictable. I’ve never had a ‘plan’; with both poetry and museums, I’ve responded to my particular needs at any given time - and with museum work, that’s often been determined by a short-term contract coming to an end. I count myself very lucky that I’ve enjoyed every single one of my jobs, but there’s sometimes been little behind my decisions other than the panic of ‘I-need-a-new-job-within-the-next-month-or-I-can’t-pay-the-rent!’

Immediately after my Master’s I moved back home to York, where I volunteered at Fairfax House, an elegant Georgian townhouse museum, for a few months. That helped get me a year’s residential internship at the Wordsworth Trust, where I lived with nine other interns learning museum practice: giving tours of Dove Cottage, working in the shop (fun!), cataloguing William Wordsworth’s letters, and helping with the literature programme. The Trust had a fantastic year-long poetry residency at that time, and I’d meet poets whose work I really admire, alongside learning to look after historic collections, and taking lunchtime walks round Grasmere. We lived in Victorian buildings overlooking Silver How, a fell that was green in summer, red in autumn and white in winter. It was bliss. During this year I had my first poems published in a couple of national journals. I made some excellent, lifelong friends, and the documentation part of the role led on to nearly three years at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, working on the Eastern Art collection. 

I’ve always been fascinated by objects, so during this time I was writing about the stories of things I came across and people whose lives were hinted at in relation to those objects. I entered a poetry competition during this time for unpublished writers; I didn’t win, but the publisher was interested in bringing out my book. In 2014 my first collection, Ship of the Line, was launched at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. 

When the Ashmolean funding came to an end, I picked up the thread of the textiles I’d been working on there, and got a job at the Royal Collection, cataloguing and photographing all 300 tapestries in the UK palaces. This, again, was a fantastically inspiring job - though the two-and-a-half-hour coach commute (both ways) from Oxford to London was truly exhausting. I was too tired to read, and wrote hardly anything for this year; but as an experience it was absolutely worth it. 

In the familiar panic at the end of this job, I very unexpectedly ended up with a job at the University Church in Oxford. As a non-Christian (a non-anything), this wasn’t something I’d have anticipated - but I came to it by an unforeseeable route: the vicar was interested in the fact I wrote poems. Thus began three very happy and informative years, and some of my most creatively productive. During this time I was astonished to win a major poetry prize for Scottish poets - an enormous boost, both creatively and financially - and that led directly to a term’s lecturing on the Poetry MA at Oxford Brookes University. Around this time I was also offered two writing residencies: one at Gladstone’s Library (the UK’s only residential library - it is THE BEST) and one at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, which is perched on the side of a ravine, and where for a blessed month in the company of four other writers I was brought lunch every day in a wicker basket and allowed just to write, and read, and think. I came out of the castle with the first draft of a novel.

And when the job at the church finished (see the pattern?) I decided not to scrabble around for the next one straight away - instead, my boyfriend and I took five months off to travel in Spain and Italy. I read a lot, wrote quite a bit, ate an inadvisable amount of gelato, tacked a residency in a Swiss chateau onto the end, and came back to the UK for a friend’s wedding in Yorkshire. And while I was there I happened to go for a tour of Shandy Hall, got chatting to the curator, and ended up, a couple of days later, with my current job… This job marries the writing side and the museum side of my brain nicely, allowing them to be mutually compatible. My second poetry collection was published in September and I’m working on the third.

How does your formal education feed into your present career (if at all)?

Well, the poetry degree has ended up being very useful, slightly surprisingly - surprisingly because I know there’s some scepticism about the efficacy of writing courses, and certainly about the career prospects they can reasonably lead to. I’m lucky that I’ve a foot in two camps, so that sometimes museum work has taken precedence (at the Royal Collection), sometimes poetry has (at the church), and sometimes a job in a literary museum comes up, and everything fits rather nicely. The course at UEA is still a respected one, so I think in writing circles it interests people.

What things have you learnt outside of formal education that have been helpful to your career?

The year-long internship at the Wordsworth Trust was invaluable. Fun, located in beautiful surroundings, and just the right amount of weird. 

What are the really useful skills for someone in your job to possess?

You hear this again and again in both writing and museums, but that’s because it’s true: you need resilience. For every opportunity I’ve been granted there are nine or ten others that have turned me down. When I graduated in 2009, the economy was… well, post-2008, and I applied for over 70 jobs in the space of a few weeks before the Wordsworth Trust offered me a place. Most of those jobs I was laughably unqualified for, of course, but I still remember the withering feeling as each rejection came in. With the writing side of things, my ‘success’ rate is about 15%. That means for every residency or fellowship or grant application, every competition entry, every magazine submission I make, 85% will come back as a ‘no’. This is most difficult when you’ve started allowing yourself to hope for a particular thing. Most of the time I truly don’t expect anything, because the likelihood is I won’t get it - but sometimes I can’t help but think how nice it would be to (for example) spend five weeks living in a museum in Argentina with no obligations but to write poems… 

What does an average day at work look like for you?

At Shandy Hall: uploading contemporary artworks to our website; prepping press releases; putting together a grant application; advising visitors to avoid the bees in the garden. At home: ‘writing’ (i.e. reading, talking to a friend about writing, and occasionally actually putting some words down on the page). I don’t have the internet at home, which is a practical consideration - much less dithering about ‘researching’ things; if I really need to research something I walk the 15 minutes to the library and use their internet. The reduction in faff this represents is notable.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Freedom. I write because I love reading; whenever I read a novel or poem by someone and it makes me feel that life is a huge, frightening, hopeful, and above all communal experience, I want to write something that attempts the same - that creates a sense of communion. This is a slightly nebulous way of putting it, but I think it’s as close as I can get to it.

What’s your least favourite aspect of your job?

Financial and domestic precariousness. It can be exhausting, and it’s self-defeating: this weariness works away at the desire to, and ability to, write.

What (concrete) advice would you give to someone seeking a job like yours? 

Send your writing away regularly to magazines; apply for as many opportunities as you sensibly can. You won’t have success with most of them, but with some you will, and the resulting experiences might be extraordinary.

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