Chloe Hanks is a poet, researcher, and co-host of the York Howlers, currently working on her PhD project – a blend of poetry and historical research, archiving the less-told stories of women pushed to extreme measures to reclaim their agency.

Chloe’s International Women’s Day event at York Literature festival left a real impression on us, so I felt very lucky to be able to catch up with her to discuss all things poetry, from writing an anthology inspired by Taylor Swift’s discography, to accepting the presence of ourselves in our work – no matter how hard we try and deny it.

What are you researching for your PhD, and what drew you to it?

It’s quite a weird topic. I’ve always had a bit of an interest in true crime, and also sassy and bold women as well. I came across the creative subject for my PhD about five years ago now, I watched a true crime youtube creator called Bailey Sarian and the that caught my attention was about a group of women in 17th century Italy who created a poison and disguised it as a cosmetic product so women could have it in the home, and they would slowly poison their husbands to escape their marriages. And the interesting context behind this is that marriage was obviously a very different legal contract compared to what we have now, and so women were often exchanged into these marriages for a political and social advancement for their male relatives rather than it being any kind of romantic exchange, so in many ways that was the only way of escaping a marriage with any kind of agency, and I just felt like that was such an interesting topic to explore in creative writing given everything that’s going on globally with women’s rights, it’s such a strange period of some of us feeling the most emboldened we’ve ever been contrasted with some of the most horrific things happening that you could ever imagine, and we’re globally aware of that at the moment because of how social media keeps us informed of everything that’s happening. And so I was like this is such an interesting time to write about this case but also what’s happening to me, what’s happening to women I know, what’s happening to women on the other side of the globe, and because of how fragmented that is as a creative concept, poetry became a perfect mode to explore that because a poetry collection can have these layers of different fragments of a story and it all comes together into hopefully what will be quite a cohesive project.

So I was finishing my Master’s degree at Birmingham around the same time I started writing this, so naturally the next step for me academically was a PhD and that was what I wanted for my career, so I ran with this idea that I had and, very messily in hindsight, navigated the PhD application process and the project has evolved with the natural structure of a PhD, so I’ve formed a critical backdrop to the piece which looks at creative writing as a way of investigating the absences in women’s histories and in the archives in general – the way we preserve history is always going to be flawed because you cannot recreate what has already happened, you cannot preserve what has already happened, so how do we use creative writing as a way of translating what history has to tell us and what the documents have to tell us into something that’s more digestible and that allows us to empathise with what was going on.

How has doing the PhD changed your relationship to poetry?

It’s definitely changed, but I think it was a natural evolution that I was already on. What I really like about having the opportunity to study an art form that you really love is that you almost have two parallel experiences with it, I can still sit down with a poetry collection and enjoy it and not think about it as work and then there’s almost a second shelf to my bookcase where I have all of these collections that I love for what they’re doing academically, and it’s almost like these two sides of my brain get to fuse together in a way that I appreciate it so much more, I can see what the poet is doing.

There’s a writer that I really like called Isabel Galleymore and what I really like about her poetry is she’s an eco-poet and she writes about the human experience through anecdotal poetry about animals and nature so the first time you read one of her poems you might think that’s a really lovely poem about a frog and then the next time you read the poem you realise actually I think she’s talking about this and then you read it a third time and realise that she’s making quite a nuanced statement about human life. I’ve come to know how to pull apart those layers and see how the poem’s working and what it’s doing. It’s been a really nice journey.

It’s really great that you’re able to switch off and enjoy poetry at times.

I think it’s something that you have to learn, and almost re-teach yourself how to do, and give yourself permission to rest. I also teach at YSJ and I keep saying to my students you have to let yourself enjoy reading – don’t feel that when you’re sat down to read a book at the end of the day it has to be the book that you’re studying, and sometimes the best way to do that is to have two books on the go at once. You do have to learn how to balance that when you study anything to do with reading and writing.

How do you switch off from thinking about academia and writing?

It can be really difficult especially for anyone that’s studying a creative vocation, we’ll have a very fragmented work-life balance because we naturally have to have a portfolio career […] I’ve had to become disciplined with my down time which sounds counterintuitive, but the best way for me is to try and have one day in the week where I’m not doing anything else, which can be really difficult, I did find myself having quite a bit of anxiety on those days, feeling like there’s so much I should be doing, but if you don’t take a break your body will take a break for you and it might not be at a convenient time. The most valuable lesson I’ve learned is if you don’t stop, the world will stop you.

How did the idea of a Taylor Swift inspired anthology come to you?

That was my Master’s dissertation. At the time I was really interested in the controversy with her masters and getting back ownership of them, and how that would impact how people view writing and ownership of what we write. The relationship between authorship and ownership has been a topic of discussion for a long time, and I think it’s something that’s on your mind if you write, but this is the first time we’ve seen a really vibrant pop culture event have everybody talking about it, not just writers or artists, but everyone was interested – whether it was in the legal side of things or the output, that she was re-recording these albums and putting them out again, everyone was interested in some way about this event, so I wanted to write about that for the critical part and naturally I started writing poems as well, so that became my Master’s project. Now that we’ve come to a conclusion to that story I’m re-looking at that, because I find the legalities of it quite complicated to understand, but I believe the reason she was able to her work in the first place was down to the fact she’d written everything, so the words were hers no matter what. I think there’s something quite symbolic in that – you can sell the legal rights to that work but the impact of the re-recordings was down to the fact that those were the songs she wrote, and her fans kept hold of that. There’s something so interesting in that and it’s an event we’ll keep referring back to for a long time.

It’s such a fascinating phenomenon to have seen and to be a part of, especially for you having written about it both academically and creatively.

That’s kind of what I was hoping for. I’m very interested in archives and writing as a way of preserving things and I was thinking that she’s putting out these re-recorded albums that are artefacts that represent that event in her life, there needs to be something for the fans response that needs to sit alongside them to explain how we were feeling. These were albums that I’d been listening to since I was 7 or 8 years old, so it did feel like we were all a part of that event happening, so it made sense to write about at that time. The way that I wrote the poems was to isolate a lyric and write in response to it, so for all of the albums that were out at the time that’s what I did, and it was a way of holding on to the lyrics and the poetry in them and claiming it back for myself as well as commenting on what was going on.

Do you find that poetry is your way of processing those feelings and moments in life for you?

I definitely do. I think I hid from it for quite a long time, especially with the PhD project, thinking I’m writing about these people, I’m not writing about myself and I think it was always a lie that I was telling myself. I feel like all writing has the writer in it in some way shape or form, however we disguise that, however it translates to the reader, even if you’re reading an academic article, you’re reading the interests of the person that wrote it. I think what I’ve found with this collection is there’s so many different ways and devices to tell this story whether I have a subgenre of poems where I’m personifying plants or I’m creating voices from imaginary artefacts, there’s many ways in which I can bury my voice, but it’s still there. I think that’s what makes poets feel so emboldened by their own practise – there are loads of ways that you can translate your voice so that the audience hear it in a different way or you’re somewhat removed from it, but you are always there at the centre of your poem, and I think that’s what makes me feel drawn to the art form.

You also do a lot of hosting. How important is it to get out there and facilitate these events?

It’s hugely important for me on a personal level in how surprising it has been. If you’d known me even five years ago and told me that I’d be hosting events at a literature festival I’d have said absolutely not, there’s no way I could do that, but when you write and when you put out your writing you almost can’t escape performing it in some way, because most writers sell their books at events. I was always reluctantly involved in that, and the first thing I did when I moved to York was find a poetry night that I could go to to network and meet people, and that was not a professional thing, it was more making friends with similar interests.

I remember reading in the first Howlers that I went to and I felt like I could hear my knees shaking, I really didn’t like it, but I just showed up consistently and the magical thing about Howlers is that it’s a very comfortable environment, it feels like a group of friends hanging out and reading what they’ve written, it’s not competitive, it’s not who’s written the best poem this week?, it’s all very collaborative – we’re all writing different things and sharing it.

I kept showing up, I kept enjoying it, and I kept feeling more and more comfortable getting up and reading, and then the first year that I was in York I wanted to dabble at putting events together because I really liked what I’d observed at Howlers, so I created a very rough around the edges International Women’s Day poetry event that I found a venue for myself, got some poets together, there was no microphone – we just got up and read our poems and it was a really nice evening, and I met some really great poets there, we had Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, both poets that have done amazing things, and I realised that I quite liked standing up and getting everyone together and being the person to make that happen. So when my co-host at Howlers, Steph, reached out to me a couple of months after that, I was a little bit out of my comfort zone but thought I’m just gonna say yes and see what happens, and I’ve loved it ever since.

Doing Howlers meant that I got invited to volunteer on the board for the literature festival, which meant that I could absorb all of this knowledge and information about how event programming works and how promoting events works and what kind of artist draws people in, and it’s just been such a great experience, and now two years on I’ve been more and more active with the programming and the International Women’s Day event has become an annual thing within the festival, so I’ve been able to host two more of those, and I’ve become so passionate about events and I never ever thought that would be a career path for me, but I really love it.

We did an event with Charlotte Shevchenko Knight and Misha Honcharenko as a celebration of Ukrainian poetry in the North, and that was one of the most inspiring events I’ve been part of, and I got to programme it with Charlotte and Misha, and I just remember sitting there and thinking I absolutely love this, and I never thought that I would.

You write a lot about wicked women. How important do you think it is to tell these stories, and our own stories of being imperfect?

I think it’s so important because we’re still in an era where women are being held to unfair standards. I’ve been thinking about this, I was talking about a writer that I’d met a couple of times that I didn’t think liked me very much because she didn’t seem very ‘nice’, and then I called myself out because she doesn’t have to be nice to me, we’re existing in a professional setting, and it actually doesn’t matter, and would I think twice about it if it was a man that was just a little bit cold when I saw them in a professional setting? Because I probably wouldn’t think twice about that. So this is something that I need to reflect on internally. We’re still in this era where there’s this unfair scrutiny on how polished or how kind or how nice somebody who presents as female is when they’re just doing their job.

We’ve just seen it happen with the Sabrina Carpenter album cover, where something that’s very clearly satirical and comedic – and you don’t have to know much of her work to understand the tone she puts out – yet she does something that’s very on brand and presents an album cover that I think really represents how creative and playful she’s being, and suddenly overnight the whole discourse around her work shifts to oh, no we don’t like that, that was too far in that direction, and you just don’t see that kind of commentary on people that are not female presenting, so the more we lean into allowing women to be immoral and allowing women to be complex in our creative work and presenting the realities of that and what drives us to that, and one of the things that I was concerned about in the early stages of my PhD project was how trauma was becoming almost the go-to for fleshing out female villainy. We couldn’t have a woman do a bad thing and explore that in any way other than she was a victim of this and therefore she did this. Why are we uncomfortable with the idea that a woman might just murder their husband because they want to? And we need to have both, we need to have space in the discourse for both of those things to co-exist because quite often women do retaliate out of this prolonged endurance of male behaviour, and I’ve done a lot of research into suppressed rage, and that has to come out somewhere. There are so many conversations about female rage at the moment, and there’s a huge amount of space for that, but we also need to allow women to just have moments of immorality and not feel the need to excuse that in order for there to be space for it, because we don’t hold men to that account. We’re very comfortable watching men do horrible things [in media] without there having to be a reason that cancels it out.

I think it’s really important to allow these moments where we might do a bad thing, and that’s what being a human being is. We’re not always talking about murder, but having someone be a bit cold to you is a perfectly acceptable thing if they’re having a bad day, and there doesn’t need to be a conversation about who they are as a person. The way to do that is sometimes through this hyperbolic exploration of very intense, immoral acts, and to become comfortable with that.

Are there any poetry collections or writers you find yourself returning to, or that you wish more people would enjoy?

So many. Isabelle Galleymore’s book Baby Schema is excellent, and that’s a collection that I’ve read cover to cover many many times. I’m also really inspired by Becca Drake, who is a York based poet. She’s just released her first pamphlet which is called Unstill Landscapes, but I’m very inspired by her work outside of her own poetry where she runs her own printing press using traditional printing techniques – it’s all hand crafted and it’s beautiful. That as a preservation of traditional techniques I think is a really exciting project.

I’m really inspired by a poetry pamphlet called Bella by Nellie Cole, it’s one of the texts that I write about a lot on my PhD but it’s using archive material from an unsolved murder mystery, and she layers her poetry on top of these artefacts to tell all of the stories of the theories of who the people involved in that case might have been, and it creates this really interesting artefact that sits alongside that criminal investigation to tell a more personal story. It’s really, really powerful. 

Interviewing Chloe was such a thoughtful and eye-opening experience. Her reflections on what it means to be a woman right now, and the value of showing up and making space for yourself, really stayed with me. I’m so grateful we got to have this conversation.

Chloe is currently working on her newest poetry collection – you can find her on Instagram for updates on her writing and hosting, and for links to check out her previous works.