Hue

Writing from the space between things

In fourth class, I wrote a book of poetry. A4 pages, each poem with its own drawing: a crooked tree, a bird mid-flight, the dentist a felt-tip rainbow bleeding through the paper. I worked on them all summer, then tucked them neatly into a single plastic pocket. It felt like something whole. Something of mine.

My favourite poem was about the Titanic. It had a line that went: I’m all alone in this world of blue, watching the herring of silvery hue. I had eyesight issues as a child, and books had always been my safe place. That summer, I read great chunks of the dictionary for the sheer pleasure of learning new words. Hue was one of them. I remember thinking it was beautiful and trying to write the poem around it.

When I brought my poetry plastic pocket to school, I gave it to my teacher, a nun called Sister Pius. She didn’t look at it right away. Later, during a quiet stretch of the morning, I heard the crinkle of the plastic as she slid the pages out. Then her voice rose above the room. She held my work up in the air and told the whole class there was no way I had written those poems. She laughed, adding that I could never have known what the word hue meant. The class laughed with her.

That was my first clear memory of shame. Not the small kind you feel when you forget homework, but the deep, bone-anchored kind that makes you want to disappear. The kind that teaches you, in one sharp moment, that what you made was not enough.

Years later, in fifth year, I wrote another poem, this time for a Patrick Kavanagh competition. I worked on it for weeks, rearranging lines until they finally sat right. I was a finalist, and the poem was published in a book. My English teacher congratulated me, then said, “Don’t bother entering any more competitions. I don’t want to have to go down to those things outside work hours.” No cruelty. No drama. Just a clean, quiet dismissal that simply closed a door.

I did not write again, not properly, for nearly ten years.

When I came out in my late twenties, something cracked open. The words came rushing back, poems and essays and fragments falling faster than I could catch them. I wrote on trains, in cafés, on my phone in the dark beside my lovers before sleep. Yet I did not share them. Those old voices had done their work. My writing became something private, as if creativity was something that needed to be hidden.

Ireland has given the world endless creatives: poets, singers, musicians, actors, artists, sculptors… Creativity here is in our air, in our language, in the way we tell stories a well formed survival skill. Yet, in so many classrooms, creativity is treated as time wasting, something you do in the margins. We are told to be practical, sensible, and modest. To keep our heads down.

I never had the kind of teacher people speak about years later with gratitude. No one who made me believe my voice mattered. If anything, I learned early that my voice was a thing to be doubted, dismissed, or kept quiet. I think about how much beauty is lost because of that. How many children stop making art because it is not “good enough.” How many never see their creativity valued. How many grow into adults carrying the ache of something they could have done, if only someone had told them it mattered.

For me, writing has always been a way of noticing the world, myself, and the space between things. It brings me relief and joy, and joy is not meant to be hoarded. This year, I am putting my work into the world. Not because I am fearless, I am not, but because joy matters more than fear. Creativity is not just personal. It is connective. When we share what we make, we leave the door open for someone else to say, I feel that too. We create the conditions for community.

Community, real messy sustaining community, is what keeps us alive. That is what I want for this space, a place where words meet in the middle, between your life and mine, and maybe make something new. None of us were ever meant to make things alone.