An interview with Pippa Hennessy, Notts' literary linchpin

Five Leaves has been publishing since 1995 - Pippa, how did you get involved there?

I was a software developer for about 15 years, and then had a complete change of career and did a creative writing degree at Nottingham Uni, and through that I met someone who knew Ross Bradshaw, who's the sort of one man band, who is Five Leaves, and he gave me a part time job, and I've been there ever since, learning all about publishing and how it works.

When I left software development it was to write a best selling novel and live off the proceeds, but I soon learned that wasn't possible! But I’d learned how to do desktop publishing with QuarkXPress for a software development magazine which I edited for three or four years back in the 90s, I had the basic skills of how to do layout and typesetting. And then, apart from that, I learnt from Ross, learnt on the job by talking to other publishers…

That publishing experience is being put to good use publishing poets’ debut collections, with Five Leaves’ range of New Poetry Pamphlets. What was the spark of motivation to get that project off the ground?

I've had some poetry published, and I've always wanted to actually have a proper poetry series through Five Leaves. And then someone (Jane Bluett) submitted a manuscript to us who's been on the local scene for ages and ages. Ross said - ‘have a look, see what you think’. I was really impressed, and I said, ‘well, come on, let's publish it!’. He said, No, no…but if you like, you can start a series of pamphlets, and this could be the first one…’ I’ve been nagging for something like that for a while.

So it was a question of the sheer quality of what you’d been sent…

Yeah, there are huge numbers of really talented poets around the region, and it's really difficult to get anything published these days. Really, really hard. Once you've got something published, you can get more published, but getting to the first step is really difficult. So the idea is that this is a series of pamphlets for East Midlands writers who haven't published anything yet. It's to give them a starting point - we'll publish the pamphlet, but then it's up to them to take that and do something with it, a stepping stone for their career.

As well as being the main publishing bod at Five Leaves you’re the Writer in Residence at Writing East Midlands, and you're the programme manager here for the creative writing charity First Story. Is there anything particular to Nottingham that you think makes it better than other places in the UK to write - or gives us a particular character?

There's just something about Nottingham. When we put the City of Literature bid together back in 2015, so much came out of the woodwork. Back then there wasn't anywhere near as much as there is now, but there was still loads of stuff happening at grassroots level.

There was the Nottingham Writers Studio, which is pretty unique. I was Development Director there at that point, and we'd made contact with a couple of other organisations overseas, but there was nothing like it in the country! That was a grassroots thing, it was a load of writers saying, ‘Yeah, we want some way to get together to talk about writer things and not have people look at us like we're odd when we talk about our imaginary friends’, that sort of thing. City of Lit got so much support from so many organisations, big and small - that’s just huge, you know? It just felt like a really good place to be. And there's just a lot going on in Leicester and Derby as well.

So there's a collaborative attitude here - is that something that ties in with what you're doing at Five Leaves? For the first time, you’re opening up submissions for your new poetry pamphlets, seeking entries from underrepresented or marginalised communities in the East Midlands.

Yeah, very much. So the eleven writers that we’ve got at the moment,  they’ll all come to each other’s launches and read a poem, they promote each other’s writing. It’s a little sub-community within the poetry world in Nottingham - ‘we're up and coming, we're going to be the next ones published by Faber and Faber, fingers crossed.’

We haven't been open to submissions until now, it's just been people that we know deserve to be published - but we really wanted to open it up and get a much wider input, especially from other parts of the region as well. So it's not just Nottingham and Derby and Leicester, we want to widen the range of people that we're giving the opportunity to reach that first stepping stone. For example, I'm very much a page poetry person, but I know there's some amazing stuff going on in performance poetry, and I know that a lot of that is coming from underrepresented communities of one sort or another. So, we really wanted to highlight the fact that we're here and to attract people that we haven't managed to get to, so far.

What’s the message to those thinking about submitting to you?

I mean, send it in! There’s nothing to lose.

The next two pamphlets in the set are Nathan Fidler and Fiona Theokritoff, and they're just going to be launched as part of an exciting event at the Nottingham Poetry Festival - that’s on Thursday 13th of June at the new Central Library. What pulled you towards Nathan and Fiona's work?

Fiona writes really interesting poetry, she'll dive down rabbit holes and find out everything about a particular subject. A lot of the poems in her collection are about shoes in one way or another, she just had this fascination with shoes when she was writing those particular poems. She found out that by the Danube in Budapest, I think, there’s a sculpture made of lots of shoes that represents people who died in the Second World War. She's written about a preserved pilgrim shoe from the mediaeval times - it looks like a strip of leather, but it's actually a shoe that a pilgrim walked in from, probably, London to Canterbury. And there's also a found poem, which is the titles of exhibits in a military museum in Lincolnshire, but the way she's put them together is so clever - it sounds amazing when it's read aloud, and she does these incredible things with words that a lot of poets don't do.

Nathan, I hadn't come across before. He's very young and he recently graduated from University of Derby. Adrian Buckner, who used to teach there, recommended him to me. His work is almost unpolished, but the emotion that he packs into it…he writes about a lot of people that he's known, he writes about insects a lot, he makes you feel what a bee feels when it's making its honeycomb…He's going to go a long way, that one. What he’s written is absolutely brilliant.

And part of the process is the poets coming in and having their input into just what the collection is going to look like?

The poets get to choose the colours, but I work with them to choose the sort of image that they want. Elvire spent ages on her cover - she wanted a moth and a compass...and she wanted a specific moth. This was the only picture of this specific moth that I could find, and I had to edit all the background away. So I spent ages cookie-cuttering, and then we spent ages positioning it just right…

When you say specific, you mean a breed of moth, rather than one individual moth that you've tracked down.

It was a breed! It actually wasn't the breed that she was after. But she decided she liked this one better in the end...

You’ve got some really compelling collections you’ll be selling at the launch on the 13th. As we’re in the full swing of Poetry Festival now, have you got any particular fond memories?

The year before last, I did a performance with Sonja Dengler, who writes poems that are kind of based on mathematical principles. And I did my digital poetry, which is on the screen, it moves and changes and you can interact with it. That was so much fun. It was the first event we had in the bookshop after covid, the first time we opened the shop up to people for an event. Sorry - Five Leaves bookshop, I just assume that everyone knows which I'm talking about!

It's the bookshop.

I'm really excited about this particular phase of Nottingham Poetry Festival, because it's a group of people who've got together and got funding to do something really special. I'm involved with First Story as well for the performance poetry workshops that we've got at a couple of schools, and the event for that is next Tuesday - that's been funded through the funding that Poetry Festival has got, and they're doing some really fantastic projects.
It's not simply, ‘let's get poetry in front of people’. It's, ‘let's get poetry to people who wouldn't necessarily get a chance to work with poets’.

And your digital poetry – is that a big movement, or is that something you've tried to pioneer a bit?

It's a big movement, mainly in academia, because it takes a lot of time and effort to write a digital poem. It's mainly researchers who've got funding to put together amazing multimedia - fantastical things. I got into it when I did my Creative Writing MA, because I'd thought, ‘what can I do for my dissertation? I know, I’ll have a go at this…’ because I was a software developer, I can do the programming side of it. It just interested me to see what would happen to words if you took them off the page where they're sort of pinned down and static, and put them on a screen where they could actually do things and be active - and to see what that would do to the poetry. And it's really good fun. I just don't get enough time to do it!

A fascinating concept, we’ll have to have a gander. Thanks Pippa, it's been great to chat!




Five Leaves’ New Poetry range is available online here and at the Five Leaves bookshop on Long Row in the city centre.

For tickets to the launch of Nathan Fidler and Fiona Theokritoff’s new collections on the 13th of June, plus many more events, visit Nottingham Poetry Festival site.

You can find some of Pippa’s own poetry, plus more about her career, at serotine.co.uk