Zoë Walkington tells us how she eventually managed to merge her two identities as poet and psychologist
Despite an early love of literature, it was the pull of psychology that first enticed me into a university. Around a decade later, aged around 30, and inspired by Jodi Foster, the FBI trainee in the film The Silence of the Lambs, I signed up to study for an MSc in Forensic Psychology. At that time forensic psychology was still quite a newly formed academic sub-discipline. Its focus was on the application of psychology to the law, criminals and criminal justice.
At the time I had a naïve fascination with criminals, the more violent the better, and had set my sights on working in a prison environment. This desire, however, was pretty short-lived. I revoked my ambitions approximately one minute after getting through security at the young-offenders institute where I undertook my first research role studying violence risk in young men. Prison work, I realised, was not going to be for me. The walls were too high. Instead, I decided to study for a PhD on the psychology of criminal investigations.
The PhD led to interesting work. I worked on cold cases I still wish I could forget. I helped train detectives in the psychology of interviewing and the de-escalation of anger. I helped supervise and mentor students of forensic psychology coming up through the ranks. I had the kind of job that people were interested in at parties, but it was also the kind of job that sometimes made it hard to sleep at night.
I had the kind of job that people were interested in at parties, but it was also the kind of job that sometimes made it hard to sleep at night
I didn’t start writing poetry until I was about ten years into that career. The strange thing was, despite being immersed in such fascinating work in my day job, I found it hard to bring any of it into my poetry. At best I managed one poem about a murderer I’d met who was easy on the eye. I called it ‘If looks could kill’. Apart from that, every time I tried to write using inspiration from my day job, I’d either draw a blank completely or find myself drowning in draft after draft, none of which worked.
Perhaps part of the problem I faced in linking my day to day work with my creative side was the mismatch between the gravity and seriousness of my new profession and what was emerging as my own poetic ‘tone’. I was employed in an area that couldn’t be more serious. Yet I absolutely loved writing poems that contained humour.
If you’ll forgive me a bit of a digression, I have a pet theory about this. My theory is that the poems we can recite by heart might shape something fundamental in us, as writers. They may not necessarily be our touchstone poems; they may snag in the long-term memory for other reasons – a catchy rhythm, or a rote-learning task set at school. If you want to join in the thought experiment, you might at this point make a mental list of all the poems (by other poets, not yourself) that you can recite from start to finish. My list is astonishingly short. I have three. The first is ‘Silly Old Baboon’ by Spike Milligan, which I learned at school by rote in the 1980s (it’s from the wonderful Children’s Book of Funny Verse compiled by Julia Watson). My second is Philip Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’, memorised by accident as a sixth former when we studied it in the 1990s. My most recent, a good 25 years later, is ‘Fig Roll’ by Jo Bell, which I committed to memory perhaps only because of the claims made in its fantastic opening stanza:
Everybody knows that poets have a lot of sex.
They tumble vividly into the beds
of friends and peers, destroying marriages
and furniture, get claret on the linen
Wonderful, isn’t it? I wholeheartedly support the idea that poets have a lot of sex. Even more delicious is the notion that everybody knows it. And despite much evidence to the contrary (picture me late at night walking the hallways of this or that Arvon house, empty glass in hand), I choose to believe that Jo’s statement is entirely true. We poets might not be able to afford our own claret on the spoils of our poetic endeavours, but we make sure to move in the right circles.
Strangely, my way in to better merging my two identities as poet and psychologist came about only very recently through writing about BBC productions I have worked on
You will notice a couple of things about my memorised material. First, in committing things to memory I’m not a high achiever, having managed not even one poem per decade. Second, if you look at all three, their key uniting feature is a leaning towards humorous tone. Perhaps, therefore, if my theory holds muster, it was always destined that a tendency towards the comic would leach out in my own writing , polluting its waterways, no matter what the substantive topic. So that’s one theory. I couldn’t find a way to write about the day job, because it was too serious, too bleak, and too uncomfortable a bedfellow for my humorous side. The other theory, of course, is that I was writing precisely to get away from the day job. A form of escape through creativity, if you like.
Strangely, my way into better merging my two identities as poet and psychologist came about only recently, through writing about BBC productions I’ve worked on. The OU and the BBC have for many years collaborated on programme commissioning, and – as Professor in Psychology for the Open University – I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to act as an academic expert on some of their factual programmes relating to crime. During lockdown I had the grim task of watching rough cuts of one such hard-hitting series about the policing of organised crime gangs. I was also, at about the same time, interviewed for a True Crime Podcast on BBC Sounds called Bad People. Later that same month, while taking part (as a punter) in a workshop run by The Poetry Business, the writing prompt was “I have been asked to talk about …”. So I started to draft a poem about “being asked to talk about bad people”. I had found my way in. That poem ended up on the first page of my debut pamphlet.
Somehow, by taking the TV show and the podcast as a starting point, rather than my own experiences at work, I was able to include elements of forensic psychology without it feeling like an ethical quagmire. I could treat it more lightly, because it was one step removed. In short, I was able to relax a little, stop overthinking, and write.
Aspects of real characters, situations or evidence saunter through the poems, but they’re made safe by just being fragments
Recently I’ve been studying for an MA in Creative Writing, and my chosen project has been to create a set of poems about a fictional missing person case. A collection that the reader can solve. A kind of who-done-it and poetry collection in one. Is it based on a real case? No, but there are elements of real cases in there. Aspects of real characters, situations or evidence saunter through the work, but they’re made safe by just being fragments.
If I’m honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do anything with the drafts of poems based more directly on my own work-related experience. They’ll remain in the notebook. I’m confident that’s where they should stay. All the better for being blurted out and then held captive in a notebook, somewhere with nice high walls.
