"Choosing someone you trust with your words is the most important thing you can do. It is also the most valuable."

The poetry mentoring relationship, by Angela Cheveau

I’ve never read Homer’s Odyssey, so it was a surprise to me to find out that the word mentor is derived from Mentōr, an old man and an incarnation of the Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Fitting, Mentor offered Odysseus and his son Telemachus advice – and these days, of course, “mentor” describes someone who guides a less experienced colleague.

I’m not sure I had even heard of the term before I was lucky enough to be given my own mentor. For six months, as part of my Arvon/ Jerwood Young Poets Prize, George Szirtes and I communicated by email where he shared his wisdom and insights with me. George is a prolific writer of incredible skill, grace and wisdom, and his role as my teacher is hard-wired into my brain - to the extent that I still ask myself “What will George think?” when I share poetry news or opinions on social media.

George set the bar high: becoming a mentor myself was a scary business. But over the last fifteen years it’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. A mentoring relationship is intimate and committed – like Anegla Chevaux says, “Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust”.

For the last year, I’ve been a pastoral mentor for four writers on the Writing Chance programme; a New Writing North scheme which supports new writers from working class and lower-income backgrounds. Instead of focusing on their written work, I’ve spent time discussing self-care and wellbeing, helping writers to develop writing routines and to explore career possibilities. It’s left me with an even keener sense of how various and complex our writing lives are; how the writing we produce is just the tip of the iceberg, just the quickest glimpse into personal, emotional and professional world of the writer.

But this is just half of the picture, and I thought you might like to hear the whole. I’ve been lucky enough to mentor the poet Angela Cheveau for the last couple of years. I first heard Angela at an online open-mic, and was immediately struck by the intense, mesmeric flood of her poetry. Angela writes like her life depends on it and the result is breathtaking … within a very short space of time she’s attracted attention and admiration across the North, and with her recently completed pamphlet on involuntary childlessness, that’s set to continue. For the rest of this exquisitely written article, you’ll be treated to Angela’s strong, articulate voice as she expresses what it’s like to be mentored.

‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’

Lao Tzu

For Clare

It is October 2023, and I am standing on the cobbled streets of Haworth in West Yorkshire, the birthplace of my literary heroine Emily Bronte. It is a bright and mild Autumn Day, missel thrushes trilling in the coppery canopy of the old churchyard, moss tumbling in clumps off slated rooftops, dropping onto the cobbles in soft thumps, wind whispering through the tombstones. I am standing outside Wave of Nostalgia, a quaint little bookshop, waiting for my poetry mentor to arrive. A person I have only ever met online, never yet in person.

Nerves twist in my stomach, my hands shaking so much I have to hide them in the pockets of my jacket. I’m a terribly shy, awkward person, who before I meet anyone, is already convinced that they won’t like me or that what I have to say sounds stupid, that I'll trip over my own feet, that kind of thing. It’s a different experience meeting someone in the flesh, even though you’ve met them numerous times through a screen, to meet them in real life is incredibly daunting and I was certain I wasn’t up to the job. My heart quivered like a frightened creature in the hollow of my chest. The urge to run back down the cobbled hill was almost overwhelming. I wasn’t worried about what I would think of them, but what they would make of me.

That was when the elemental force of Nature that is Clare Shaw came bounding around the corner; effortlessly cool in a long coat, boots and a red checked lumberjack shirt. They immediately swept me up in a warm hug with a smile as wide as the moors and I immediately felt my shoulders drop, my bones loosen. They were everything all at once; everything I’d hoped that they would be. They were skylark and curlew, moss and bright berried bramble, they were wind through the heather, they were brimstone and holly blue, they were sundew and gorse fire, they were peat bog and oak. They smelled of rain and fresh moorland air. I half expected them to whip out a flute made of meadow grasses, a stream of heathland creatures following behind them as if glamoured. I felt as if I was meeting Dickon from the Secret Garden, my favourite childhood book. I immediately felt myself relax in their presence, my ridiculous anxiety floating away, everything softening.

It had been sometime in early 2020 when I had first come across Clare during an online workshop for women who had suffered sexual violence. The workshop had been organised by a Writing Charity I had recently joined. I was coming out of a period of great darkness in my life and had decided last minute to put my name down and join. I was scared and I was fragile, a voiceless shadow drifting like a dandelion seed on the whim of every wind. I was vulnerable and I was almost certainly lost. Sometimes life sends you people when you most need them. Clare Shaw is one of those people.

During that workshop, Clare had asked us to write a line about whatever we could see from the window then write that line in the zoom room chat box. Next, she asked us to add the words ‘I am’ to the beginning of the line and post that into the chat. For example, if we had written clematis clambering over the trellis, we would then change it to, I am the clematis clambering over the trellis, I am the glint of raindrop winking from the leaky gutter. That sort of thing.

When everyone had written their line, Clare read them aloud to the class, one after the other, in a flowing sequence that suddenly gathered pace and picked up rhythm. I remember the deep and profound silence after they read out the last line. How it seemed to linger in the air, shimmering somehow. I remember the slow dawning awareness that we, as traumatised women, had just created our first poem. That we had taken our pain and made something beautiful from it. We had made art. I remember warm tears streaming down my cheeks. I remember Clare trying to speak through the lump in their throat. Women all around the zoom room wiping away tears, blowing noses with crumples tissues. Each locked behind our own little postage stamp zoom window yet suddenly it felt as if we were no longer strangers, it felt like we were a chorus, a community, a circle of women capable of much more than we had once thought. Something magic happened that day and I felt the first flutter of my own forgotten wings, something shift inside of me, something long and deeply buried beginning to awaken.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my teacher had appeared.

In 2021, after a year of writing, of being alone with my pen and my notepad, I decided to take poetry seriously, to try with everything I had to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a poet. I had lost my job in 2019, removed myself from abusive relationship, suffered a nervous breakdown and then became a full-time carer for my mother at the start of 2020 after she had suffered a traumatic fall down the stairs. When my mother gave me a small monetary gift, I decide to invest in mentorship with a poet who I hoped could guide me in some way. I had something to say to the world and yet I had no idea how to say it. I knew I wanted to help other women who had suffered similar things to me and to raise awareness of domestic abuse and the inconsolable grief of Involuntary Childlessness. I knew I had a story to tell, and I knew I wanted to tell it. But how? Who would listen? Who would care?

I had been attending free workshops, The Writing Hours run by the brilliant Kim and Clare, and courses run by a writing charity in my hometown. I’d managed to gather quite a few poems which I hoped would one day make it into a book, but I literally had no idea where to begin. All I knew was that I needed some help. Someone who was sensitive, someone who was kind, someone who would understand, someone who I could trust with poems that were incredibly raw and personal. That person was Clare Shaw. There was never a single doubt in my mind. Not one. I let my heart lead me to the right person and trusted that my intuition would choose the best person for me. It did.

Clare collects broken things, sifts through mud to find shards of things that were once whole, finds beauty in the broken parts. Sees treasure in the things that other people would discard as worthless. As a child I too used to collect broken things, pieces of shell, crockery, old buttons. I had angel on my shelf who’s wing had snapped off and I loved her even more because of her brokenness. Because of their own troubled life, Clare has an enormous amount of empathy for those who suffer, for those who hurt, for those who inhabit the shadowed spaces, the unloved places. Without Clare realising it, I too, was one of those broken things when I first came to her for help. Without me realising it I was drawn to someone who understood what it means to experience great pain and sadness. To be broken.

Unbeknownst to Clare, many years earlier at university, a tutor had spent many hours taking me under his wing because I'd been unable to speak in class. Literally unable to utter a single word. I would hide in the background, my face burning, hoping he wouldn’t pick on me to speak. Reading the essays I wrote for assignments; he realised the massive incongruence between what I wrote down on paper and the profound silence I inhabited in class. With a pen, I was a completely different person. The difference between the girl on the page and the girl in the class was vast. It was an ocean I didn’t seem to be able to cross and he’d spend hours with me, trying to get me to share my views on poems, to get me to answer questions, moving his chair to sit further away from me if I showed discomfort. Spent hours trying to coax the ideas and thoughts that he knew were there out into the air. He wanted to show me that it was ok to have an opinion, that it was ok to speak. His kindness, his genuine care, his quiet determination to make me realise that I had a voice and that what I had to say was important will stay with me for the rest of my life. He was the definition of what a teacher should be. So is Clare. I trusted in my heart and my heart is never wrong.

Over the last couple of years, I have worked alongside Clare as my poetry mentor, and they have helped me enormously. Much more than I could ever tell them. Much more than I could say in words. I often a complicated mass of insecurities and fears, I get overwhelmed, I stop writing, I feel a failure, that I’m not good enough, that I’m not a poet, that I’m out of my depth. I place enormous and ridiculous pressures on myself. Through all of that, Clare has been a steady and calming presence. Sometimes they tell me off, sometimes they get frustrated with me, sometimes I do their head in. I do my own head in. But beneath it all, they will never know how much their help, support and care have helped me.

Through structured sessions delivered once a month for around a year or a year and a half Clare helped me work towards my dream of becoming a published poet. A task that has not always been easy. They have counselled me when I’ve lost faith in myself, listened to my fears and worries, gone over and above what a mentor is required to do and been an unfailing source of support and guidance. During one particular session, at a time when I was driving myself to distraction because I’d been unable to write for several weeks, Clare told me that it is ok for a poet to not write, but it is not ok for a poet to not live. That advice has stayed with me and is something I use to console myself when the dreaded writers block hits. I hear Clare’s thick Burnley accent in my mind, and I smile. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once stated that ‘Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.’ Clare’s advice is like that, soft as snowdrift, it blankets everything, and it sinks deep.

Mentoring for me on a personal level has been one of the most enlightening and treasured experiences of my life. Showing my poetry to someone else has been like handing over my heart to another person and that person for me, had to be someone I could trust. Our words are personal things, they come from a very deep place of great sensitivity and vulnerability. Choosing someone you trust with your words is the most important thing you can do. It is also the most valuable. When I first met Clare, the only other person who had read my poems was my mum. It was a scary thing to expose myself by opening up, by being vulnerable, by showing someone else my work and yet my heart knew that with Clare, it would be ok. And it was. It is.

Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust. Clare reads my poems with the utmost care and consideration. They have regarded me as a poet from day one, even when I didn’t and still don’t, believe it myself. They have treated me as an equal. They have discussed their own work, their own fears, their own insecurities. They have treated me like a friend.

With my work they take time to think about every line and word choice. Even within their own hectic and busy life, they have never treated my work with anything less than the most beautiful care and sensitivity through close reading and detailed, insightful feedback with copious notes. They have been encouraging, thoughtful and honest every step of the way through this process and have the sharp eye of a hawk hovering over the moors for spotting too many conjunctions or adjectives, even when I have hoped they wouldn't spot them or tried to hide them well.

They are unfailingly honest and have told me when I have used too many words (which is a lot of the time), when the poem is not working or could be made stronger. They have gone over and above, helping me shape and reshape my pamphlet many, many times. To hammer it into the best shape that it can be. They have helped me with writing prompts when I have become stuck, they have inspired me with reading lists when I have asked for some guidance, they have made me notice and recognise when I am falling into old patterns, leaning into cliche, or not following the internal logic of the poem. They have made me see when I am being too hard on myself or being just plain silly. They have made me laugh, cry, and inspired me in uncountable ways.

They have turned up to zoom meetings, even when tired, even when suffering with migraines, even when snowed under with their own work. They have turned up still full of energy and enthusiasm and endless and boundless support. The poet Andrew Motion said that studying under Peter Way was like having ‘someone walk into his head and turn all the lights on,’, that is what Clare has done for me. A source of extensive knowledge about poetry, life wisdom, patience and inspiration. Clare has helped me to look at my pamphlet as a process, a living, breathing thing. Laying out my poems and forensically examining them, cutting and carving away all the unnecessary words, polishing them until my own images shine. One of the most important pieces of advice Clare has given me, is to let my images shine by careful pruning, editing away all the excess words. Let the images have space to breathe, let them gleam.

Mentoring has helped me to flourish as a writer. It has made me braver. It challenges me to be better. It has helped me to believe in myself and my own abilities. It has helped me to be more adventurous and truer to myself. To write whatever it is that I want to write. Not what I think that I should write. To find my passion and follow it. I would encourage anyone out there who is even tentatively considering mentoring, to take the leap. You won’t regret it.

To use a climbing metaphor, mentoring for me has been a process of placing my hands in the nooks and crannies Clare has climbed before me, placing my faltering feet in the giant footprints they have left behind. I know that even if I stumble, the way is forward and so I wander the paths they have already forged through the snowy expanse of the blank page; quietly follow the gentle glow of their lamp of guidance on through the dark.

by Angela Cheveau