Every Minds Shine Bright anthology tells a story and behind each anthology are the stories of the writers and poets that fill each page with captivating words.
Poet in Focus: Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Photograph by Adrian Pope.
Two of Suzanna’s poems, ‘The Shed’ and ‘Bushfires’, were published in Minds Shine Bright’s Light and Shadow anthology and her first full poetry collection Crippled was recently published by Red Squirrel Press.
‘The Shed’, one of Light and Shadow anthology’s ‘Top Eleven’ pieces, provides an illuminating and ironically sad interpretation of the light and shadow theme. What inspired you to write about Marie Curie?
I read an article about her that discussed her notebooks which are so radioactive that they have to be kept in a lead lined casket at the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris. That’s a whole other poem I will come to at some time. It’s such a poignant story.. She and Pierre worked jointly as a team which I admired though I think that she was still the one who cooked dinner and kept an eye on the kids. They worked in a manky old shed doing groundbreaking work that would change the world. They were literally breaking apart atoms, hacking them apart, which we couldn’t imagine doing today without all sorts of equipment. It was killing both of them and they didn’t know.
‘Bushfires’, the second poem selected for the Light and Shadow anthology connects our countries through adverse weather events and family connections, a strong theme in your work.
I wrote ‘Bushfires’ in 2009 for my cousins in Beechworth, Victoria and sent it out to various submissions, including in Australia, and no-one had ever gone for it. It’s just that the time was right. If you believe that a piece works, you need to keep putting it out there and it will eventually find a home.
It was before I had the kids, and I was watching the news online, and you could see flames side by side with footage of the floods we had in the UK at the same time; I wished we could put the two together. My cousin in Beechworth was telling me: ‘I’m spreading water, we’ve got the bags packed. It just depends on the way that the wind blows.’ I was feeling completely helpless on the other side of the world. There was nothing I could do. Thankfully they were okay.
You’ve recently published your first collection of poetry. What were the key things that you set out to achieve by writing Crippled?
I was unable to write about my mum’s illness with MS (multiple sclerosis) for a long time, even though in many ways, like it or not, it formed the person and indeed the writer I have become. I’ve been writing poems since I was five, but it wasn’t until my thirties that the poems about my mum started to come; probably because I had finally started psychotherapy to deal with the long-standing trauma of the situation.
I feel we live in a society which prefers to gloss over these things and keep people working and consuming. But we all live in bodies, and we all have emotions, and it’s only in accepting and understanding them that we can accept and understand ourselves as fallible, flawed human beings.
As a writer I strongly dislike euphemisms, particularly the ways in which human bodies – especially women’s bodies – are held as taboo and not to be discussed. This silencing is a form of control, and I want to write frankly about difficult subjects to take back that control.
During your mother’s illness where did you experience euphemisms the most?
When my mum asked for support, she was expressly told not to tell us children what was going on as that would be terribly ‘selfish’ of her. This breaks my heart because she wanted to tell us. We knew something was going on as children always pick up on things. She felt that she had to protect her children and couldn’t be selfish. It was unlike her as she was a very smart and confident woman. It haunts me to this day. Today she would be given support to tell us.
It was also the way people talked about my mother’s illness in very veiled terms. The headmaster at my primary school would say to her, ‘How is your condition?’ No-one wanted to say what it was. When mum became a wheelchair user in the eighties and nineties there was very poor accessibility. People often talked to us about her and not to her. One day she was writing a cheque to pay for something and the cashier said to me ‘Can she reach?’ and I replied, ‘Why don’t you ask her?’
Noone ever asked how we were as young carers. It’s very British to say, ‘I’m fine, everything is okay,’ even when it’s not. I ‘ve had to teach both my parents not to say ‘I’m fine’ at medical appointments. Medics can’t treat you if they don’t know what the issue is or what the symptoms are.
What inspired you to start writing?
As a child I loved Enid Blyton, particularly her fantasy stories, and the Narnia stories too because they were imaginary places you could escape to where nothing else mattered; but the thing that really inspired me to start writing was the natural world.
My class went for a walk into the woods one May to see the bluebells blooming. They form a really intense carpet of blue which is gorgeous. I wandered off into them completely transfixed and got torn to pieces by brambles. I wrote my first poem about how underneath the bluebells was the danger of the brambles – just before I turned 6. That’s what I like to do. The sting in the tail. Even before my mum became ill, I wanted to point out what was going on underneath the surface, underneath all the euphemisms. Later, writing gave me a voice when I felt silenced.
As a young girl you thought, if only I could find the right words I could fix my mum, even though you knew that wasn’t really true and much later you wrote about Isis the Egyptian Goddess who could work magic with words.
I’ve learned that’s an example of magical thinking – If I try hard enough, I can control it, I can make my mother better. This kind of thinking puts a lot of pressure on the thinker, and it drives me to this day. I’m okay until someone in the family gets ill and then I start flipping out. Magical thinking can be quite toxic.
Isis came about writing poetry at the Poetry School/University of Newcastle MA Summer School in response to artefacts in the Great North Museum there. Isis was kickass , she was more powerful than any other Egyptian deity. Her husband was murdered and chopped up. She and her sister found all the bits and put them back together and she made him a new penis so they could conceive their son Horus. She had all her power because she knew her father Ra’s ultimate name. In ancient Egyptian medicine, the words were just as important as the remedy: I know you. I know your names. Saying something for what it is and owning it, the anti-euphemism. I feel that, today, social media is the ultimate euphemism, filled with filters and ‘best versions’ of life, and the creative arts need to push back against that.
How did you approach writing about your mother and other family members?
As writers, we need to be very careful when writing about lived experience: it has to be our own; we cannot assume we know what it’s like for someone else, even a loved one. All the poems are purely my experience of a situation that was very hard for all of us in different ways; for me and my younger brother, and not least my mum and my dad, who loyally cared for her.
The first poem I ever wrote in the sequence was ‘Handwriting’ I didn’t set out to write a sequence; it was as if that one poem, which came to me as I helped Mum try to write a birthday card for Dad as her hands failed her, opened the way to the others. I kept writing them until I fell pregnant with my son, at which point it came to a natural end, and I moved to writing the sequence of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood poems which became Fledglings, my debut pamphlet, also from Red Squirrel Press (2016). This was published a few months before my mum died. Endgame, the second half of Crippled,was forged in the white heat of grief in the immediate aftermath of her death.
What was the significance of time in Crippled?
The sonnet sequence was written gradually, over a period of three years, and ranges backwards and forwards widely in time from the initial onset of my mum’s MS before I was born and also considering my earliest memories of how we lived with her illness, the years where my younger brother and I were what would now be considered young carers (no such recognition or support in 1980s/1990s UK), and final years of her life when I was an adult. The sonnets consider themes of chronic illness rather than chronological episodes: medication, isolation, symptoms. My mum had what is now recognised as progressive MS, but at the time no-one could tell us how it was likely to proceed. Even in its progressive form it is a very unpredictable illness, so in a way time has no meaning; there is only how things are on a given day. As a human and as a writer, I also needed time to process exactly what all this meant to me, and how it had affected me. Endgame, on the other hand, is chronological and has the immediacy of reportage, which is exactly what it is: a stark detailing of my mum’s final illness, her death and my grieving process.
Why did you decide on the sonnet form?
I’ve become a bit of a form geek in my writing practice, and the sonnet is often the entry level drug! I’d been writing sonnets anyway, and the first poem of the sequence arrived as a sonnet. I am also very interested in how poetic form can be used both to contain and express emotion,[1] If I’m writing about something emotionally challenging, I use form as a way of keeping myself safe: there’s an element to writing in form which is like a logic puzzle, and stops me going too far down the rabbit hole of difficult feelings. Equally, using form can make ideas work so much harder in order to fit the form: adherence to metre and rhyme makes me dig deep and really think about what I want to say. In ‘Dose’, I use the triple form of a sonnet which is also a list poem and a ‘found’ poem (a ‘found’ poem is a poem written entirely from existing sources like newspapers.) I used the list of medications my mum was taking at the time of writing. Getting this to be medically accurate but also rhyme was an interesting challenge and took me away a bit from the horror of just how much medication she needed in order, as I say, ‘to survive each day’.
Do you have a favourite sonnet? ( if so which one and why?)
I don’t have an especial favourite in the sequence, though I do have a soft spot for ‘Conversations with my Father’, as it focuses on my dad for once – as the poem notes, carers rarely get asked how they are – and went on to win the Poetry Society Hamish Canham Prize and be broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
In writing the Endgame pieces you shifted to writing freer and more experimental pieces. Was this part harder or easier to write than the first part and why?
If I say Endgame wrote itself, that’s not to mean it wasn’t crafted, but rather that it was crafted in a different way to the sonnet sequence. As mentioned above, the sonnets were written over a three-year period, were in a set form, and took time and consideration. The Endgame pieces emerged almost in real time. Things were chaotic: my mum was desperately ill in hospital, then died; my son was four years old and my daughter only nine months old and still breastfeeding; my husband and I were already on our knees as sleep-deprived parents of young children. I wrote these poems because I absolutely had to: I scribbled them down in odd five minutes here and there to get them down on paper. I realised after a while that poems I to XIX are short, sharp single stanzas, pure reportage of Mum’s death and its immediate aftermath, culminating in her funeral. They represent a period of life at the sharp end of coping: they could not be anything more than the bare bones of hard facts and hard feelings that they are.
I think of poems XX onwards as the “grieving sub-sequence” within Endgame. To start with they are without form, even ranging away from the traditional left margin to swirl in the white space. The poet Glyn Maxwell, one of my tutors on the MA in Writing Poetry with The Poetry School London and Newcastle University UK, reminds poets to consider “Whatever the whiteness is to you” [2] Here the white space is grief. I knew the only way through it would be to surf it, let it absorb me as I absorbed it, and the non-standard forms reflect this. I didn’t set out to write them that way: this is how they needed to be.
As the immediate chaos of grief subsides, I can now see that poems XXIX onwards resume a more standard form, like hysterical crying evolving from screams to more rhythmic sobs. I took the poems as they were written to a seminar group I attended – and still attend – with the poet Tamar Yoseloff, and the feedback I got there helped me to tighten things up and let the poems find their best selves, but they still remain pretty much as written. The sequence originally ended with XXXIV but didn’t quite feel finished. The final poem, XXV, arrived, as its epigraph says, four years later, and I felt: that’s it. Poetry, like grief, is a long game.
How did you bring two disparate parts together (with such gravitas, flow and power of expression?)
Thank you! It was only after Endgame was completely finished, four years after my mum’s death, that I realised it fitted as a companion piece with the earlier sonnet sequence about her illness. My publisher Sheila Wakefield of Red Squirrel Press had already expressed an interest in publishing the work but, tied up as I was with two young children and a grieving father, I simply didn’t have the time or emotional space to put everything together. By the time I did, Covid hit, and we were plunged into lockdown, homeschooling and a very nasty bout of the illness right at the start before any of us were able to be vaccinated. Publishing schedules were also put back!
As things eased, I eventually managed to sit down and look at the book as one work. Endgame was simple in that it is chronologically ordered as written and telling a specific story. For the sonnet sequence, ‘Gretel’ had to be first as it sets out the stall for the whole collection and also reminds the reader that all history is subjective, even—indeed especially—personal history: I am open about the fact that this is my telling of a situation also experienced by the other members of my family. I wanted this half of the book to end with ‘Crippled’, the title poem, as it sums up everything about how MS impacted my mum, me, and our relationship: I effectively lost a version of her to it when I was ten, thirty years before her actual death. As for the poems in between, I wanted to let them interweave various stories: life with a chronic illness, memories of my grandparents and their struggles through the Second World War, a wider family and social history. As I say in ‘Gretel’, we are all our own mythologists, but as writers, it’s our calling to broaden those myths outwards to include others. I do this in the hope that my readers will say ‘yes, that’s how it felt’, or even ‘no, it felt a different way to me’, because then, either way, they are understanding something of their own feelings. Poetry works best when it communicates something of us to ourselves as well as to each other.
A: When you were writing Crippled and grieving what supports were there for you?
The sonnet form—my mind can be occupied with the intricate form of the sonnet.
The ‘Endgame’ poems just came out; they were part of the healing process. There is no good time for grieving. The kids were so young. Everybody needed me. The poems were for me.
My grandfather died when he was 57 at home one night; his health had been ruined by being a Prisoner of War in Burma during World War II. My mum was only 17, but had to drop her studies and go out to work as they didn’t have enough money. Later, she started having panic attacks as a delayed response to her grief. My grandmother died in her eighties of an aneurism when I was twelve. Mum really, really grieved then and I’m grateful that she showed me how to experience grief as this supported me to grieve for her. It’s important to engage with grief early or it will surface later and come back to bite you.
How has Crippled contributed to your writer’s journey and your healing?
It has been almost 9 years since I started writing it in 2016. The book came out after I had knee surgery and I was the most limited physically that I ever have been. This brought back all the things about Mum, but I was expecting that. We still seem unprepared as a society for supporting disabilities, let alone for an ageing population and there must be a more positive approach. It feels good to have the book out there now. There’s a sense of relief and I feel like I can move on with my next projects.
Why poetry not prose?
I don’t’ think I want to create characters. I might come to it. People, including myself, fascinate and exhaust me. Sometimes I love being around people and hearing their stories; other times it’s too much. I like to work in intense units and poetry suits that.
What advice do you have for other writers and poets?
Be true to your own experience. I’m not a disabled person; I can only write about what it’s like to be the daughter of a disabled person. I can only write about my experience. But equally ,don’t sanitise it. Don’t be afraid to lean into the uncomfortable truth.
UK readers can purchase a copy of Crippled here and other readers can contact the publisher here, so postage can be included.
[1] S. Fitzpatrick, Safety in Chaos, Consilience Journal, Substack, July 14, 2025.
[2] Maxwell, G On Poetry, Oberon Books, 2012