Deborah AlmaThe Poetry Pharmacy, Bishop's CastleThe Poetry Pharmacy is a centre for poetry and creative writing in the small market town of Bishop's Castle. Part café, part bookshop, with an active event space & extensive poetry reference library; Deb and her small team have been prescribing a healthy dose of poetry in one form or another since 2011.
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JR: So, Deb, I know this all started with the poetry ambulance. Could you tell us a bit about that and how that came about?
DA: Well, yes, sort of. Back when - you know, I’m very old - but when I was a young woman, I was a bookseller before I had children and then I was a sales rep for Random House for years. Then I was in Shropshire and I had children and ended up doing all sorts of things and have come back to it much later. But you’re right, it came, really, out of an arts practice and doing Emergency Poet and being fed up with driving around in a vintage ambulance. I think I did it for about nine or ten years.
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JR: Wow, okay. That’s a little longer than I thought.
DA: Yeah, it was quite a long time. And to start with it was a slightly crazy idea and then it ended up being my living, which was quite an odd way to make a living, and then there was a book from the work, but yeah, it went on for quite a while.
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JR: So, was there Arts Council funding involved or a Kickstarter to help you get that off the ground?
DA: No, actually, there wasn’t any funding for the ambulance. I was a single parent, low-income, and I did it on the overdraft facility on my credit card. I bought a knackered ambulance and it was still knackered when I was doing the work. So, no, I think about two years in I got a small Arts Council grant for the Emergency Poet.
The bookshop here - we live above and behind the shop - we have a really terrible interest-only mortgage on the premises and the shop had been closed for about thirteen years and had been neglected for a long time before that, so the Kickstarter was in 2019 for here and that was to pay for rewiring and putting heating in and things like that. And then a small Arts Council grant as well which paid for things like the tables and chairs for our event space and a photocopier and a printer, and subsidised - you know I do these consultations - so they sort of supported a few events here as well. |
JR: Yeah, I guess it helped with the nuts and bolts.
DA: Yeah.
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JR: For those who haven’t been to The Poetry Pharmacy before, can you give us a little bit of an introduction to your shop? Where can we find you and what are you all about?
DA: Well, it’s in the middle of nowhere, really. It’s in a tiny town on the Welsh borders with no train station and tumbleweed coming down the hill! It was a kind of active optimism and madness opening it in the first place. I kind of describe it as a poetry place - so, as well as a bookshop, the bookshop is unusually laid out by emotional states, so, it’s got a First Aid section - but the idea of the shop is writing or reading around wellbeing or good mental health and then the bookshop is laid out by, you know, there’s a section on broken hearts, or friendship, or grief and loss, hope - it’s quite weird. It also has quite a good children’s section and a traditional poetry A-Z as well, which like other bookshops, doesn’t sell as well as the books when they’re in their sections.
There’s a coffee shop which we call The Dispensary where we serve tea and coffee in medicinal boiling flasks to match the theme. What else? We’ve got an upstairs space which we call The Distillery which has a poetry reference library, it’s space for workshops, a few book groups, we have an open mic every two months, and we have book launches up there. There’s a courtyard out back where people can sit out in the summer. Sometimes the book groups meet there if the weather’s good. We have a Physic Garden with a writing hut that people can borrow free of charge just to sit and write and look over the Shropshire hills. So, that’s it really. Oh, yes, and we make our own products. We make our own poetry pills for different emotional ailments. |
JR: Yeah, I mean, I’m going to want to talk to you about every single one of those things you’ve just mentioned! I love taking a theme and running with it. I think, especially the pills and the coffee beakers and the things you do, I think that whole uniformity is just amazing. Obviously, it’s a great marketing tool as well for you but it’s kind of an almost holistic business where everything links together.
You’ve got an awful lot going on - as you say, you’ve got the garden, the Dispensary, you’ve got the events upstairs, you do workshops, you do book clubs.
How big is your team, Deb? It sounds like you’ve got an awful lot going on!
You’ve got an awful lot going on - as you say, you’ve got the garden, the Dispensary, you’ve got the events upstairs, you do workshops, you do book clubs.
How big is your team, Deb? It sounds like you’ve got an awful lot going on!
DA: That’s such a good question. Until about three weeks ago it was 2.5 members of staff including me!
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JR: Haha! Wow.
DA: Which is why I’m so exhausted, basically! And also, I mean, last year I edited a couple of books as well. So, yeah, we have a couple of volunteers - lovely Judy who works in the coffee shop on Friday, I don’t know why she would want to volunteer to work at the coffee shop but she does. Now we have a production manager who works full time, we’ve just employed him.
Did you hear the news? We’re opening a Poetry Pharmacy inside Lush on Oxford Street. |
JR: I did! That’s started as a pop-up, didn’t it?
DA: Yeah, well, it’s a bit of a long story with Lush, as well. But, yes. I’ve had a developing friendship with Mark Constantine who is CEO of Lush, who is a poetry lover himself and we’ve done quite a bit of work with Lush. Getting poetry into their spas, into their gift boxes, into bath bombs. Mark is very… He thinks this a wonderful idea. He’s much more ambitious for The Poetry Pharmacy than I am for myself.
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JR: Ha! You need friends like that though, don’t you?
DA: Well, it’s been a kind of mixed blessing, you know. Because you kind of have to step up. And because I’m curious to see where it’ll all go and what will happen I kind of go, ‘OK then!’ But yeah, we had the pop-up in their London HQ in Soho, which was wonderful and they were such lovely people to work with, as well. And then Mark just thought we should have a shop in London and we were terrified by the rents so he’s offered this space. We have to pay 10% on our turnover, which, actually, when you look at the number of staff is quite a lot, you know, we have to have quite a lot of staff so it’s quite scary. So that’s how it happened.
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JR: That’s an amazing relationship to have. And you have some poetry-themed bath bombs as well, is that right?
DA: Yeah, there’s a few bath bombs with poems inside them and we do for Lush every now and then they’ll want a few poems to go in a bath bomb. I think they had a Loch Ness Monster bath bomb for the launch of their Glasgow branch, I think it was, so there were some poems in there. So, yeah, there’s only two now, there’s one called Slow Down and there’s one called Wild Remedy and they’ve got poems inside them. And they’re sold worldwide by Lush.
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JR: Which is just incredible. Obviously, that takes your name and your brand globally as well. Have you seen that audience finding you that way, do you think, your customers are coming to you from Lush?
DA: Well, there’s something about the story about The Poetry Pharmacy, I think, the idea of it existing at all, that people seem to like. We get quite a lot of attention beyond our size but we are still in the middle of nowhere so it doesn’t necessarily translate into lots of money!
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JR: Sure, yeah.
DA: We were at the London Book Fair, Lush sponsored us to be at the London Book Fair a couple of weeks ago and we had loads of international interest about potentially setting up Poetry Pharmacies all over the world, but you know, we’ll see about that.
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JR: I mean, that would be so exciting but I think when you’ve got ambitious people on your side it can be a bit scary though, can’t it?
DA: Yeah, it is really scary. You know, I wish I was twenty years younger! The risks that you take, you know, it might be easier I suppose and you have more energy. I’m not particularly ambitious for the business. Although, I’m curious about where it can go if that makes sense.
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JR: Absolutely. Let's take it back to the shop itself and your part of the world. The Bishop’s Castle area itself is a market town, it’s fairly rural -
DA: - very rural, yeah.
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JR: What’s the bookselling landscape of the area? I see that you’ve got a couple of secondhand bookshops nearby.
DA: Yes, Yarborough House is a secondhand bookseller, and Simpsons. They sell more books than they used to because bookish people come to the town now, more than they did, but they’re predominantly a gift and card shop and they sell lots of walking books and natural history. But honestly, this town is so tiny most people describe it as a village.
There are lots of closed-down shops and it’s kind of rural, not poor, but there’s not a lot of money around here. |
JR: Sure. And do you feel like you’re the driving force for people coming to the area these days? It must be quite a tourist draw.
DA: We get quite a bit of media attention, you know. When we opened, we had BBC Breakfast come and film here and a few weeks ago there were some articles about us in The Times and The Sunday Times. So, yes, I’m sure. Most of our customers have come out of their way to get here and find us. It is very out of the way.
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JR: I love a good bookshop pilgrimage. I like going out of my way to find a shop that I’ve been following, you know.
DA: Yeah, me too.
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JR: I know that you’ve got a relatively small footprint, considering how much you’re doing - and I’m pretty terrible with square footage -
DA: - Oh god, so am I!
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JR: But could you give us an idea of the size of the shop by how many books you’ve got?
DA: I don’t know how many books I’ve got either, I’m completely out of control of everything! It’s such a tiny team here, I mean, it’s been largely just me and three part-timers, basically. So I have been overseeing everything, so everything I do I’ve been doing just well enough. Under the surface, it’s just terrible! So, I don’t know, it’s not a small bookshop. For a high street bookshop, it’s not big but it is big enough to have a coffee shop which seats, I don’t know, fourteen-fifteen people, and then there’s a whole room of children’s books at the back. It’s quite deep, it’s a double-fronted shop on the high street and it’s quite deep. It goes quite far back.
JR: You’ve already talked about the cafe and The Distillery space upstairs, but I’m also interested in the Physic Garden. Is that something relatively new or has that been part of the business from the beginning?
DA: No, it happened about two and a half years ago, I think. I had a member of staff, a part-time member of staff, Esther, who was also studying to be a gardner, a horticulturalist. As part of her course, she had to design a garden for the BBC Gardners World, the NEC, it was a part of what she had to do with a team of three other students.
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She couldn’t get any sponsorship so I suggested that we do a Kickstarter to buy the plants and get them to do the show and then the plants came back here to plant the Physic Garden. So, it was a kind of collaborative thing, largely to get them to Gardners World, I wouldn’t have done it otherwise, I don’t think. But yeah, we had sponsors, we have these lovely ceramic medicine bottles inside the Pysic Garden and the writing hut, which was supposed to be my garden shed but ended up being part of it - you can make a cup of tea, pick some herbs and write some poetry.
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JR: It sounds like a really lovely, organic way to grow the business and the space out from the business but it does sound like it is taking over your life!
DA: Oh, my god, completely! I haven’t got any space for anything else, you know, things are a little out of balance. But it’s fun. I’m just a bit tired!
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JR: Well, it is fun! It does seem fun, all of it. I love the little poetry pills. Can you tell us about those and maybe where that idea came from?
DA: The idea came from right at the beginning, I think it was 2011/2012 when I was setting up the Emergency Poet project and I realised it was explicitly for a poetry festival and I didn’t think it would go much further, really. It sort of took off. I realised when I was doing consultations in the back of the ambulance on the stretcher that people walking past needed something to engage in that was on that medical theme. At that festival, I ended up with two more bookings, and enquiries for other festivals, and it sort of grew. It’s largely for people who didn’t have the time or were too scared to come and have a consultation and they could ‘self-diagnose’.
They were just giveaways, basically, to slow people down, to engage them with the festival in one way or another. They used to write on labels or do some magnetic poetry or whatever, but it was so that people would encounter poetry in a small way without it being intimidating. It was fun. And then of course I was paid for by the festival or conferences or schools or libraries so they were give-aways for all those years. And then when we opened here I used them to explain the place, in a way, as a kind of prop. We put a price on them and then realised that they were selling, and they do quite well. I did it really badly on some app on my phone, you know, the little label. And then I remember talking to Mark [Constantine, Lush] and he thought they were great and bought some and I said, ‘Oh, I haven’t done them properly’, and he said that they were really good. So, I’ve left them alone, really. |
JR: Yeah, like, aesthetically, it really fits with the shop and with the brand you’ve made. I think they look great. And also, I guess, having that kind of a backup from somebody who is obviously very brand-minded and very aesthetically-minded is really great. Mark must know what he’s doing - but obviously, you’ve been doing this long enough now, Deb, you don’t really need anyone’s approval!
DA: But I did! I was slightly ashamed of it, I was hiding away in Shropshire. It was somebody on his team that was like, ‘Look, Deb, if Mark says they’re good, they’re good!’ You know, you get used to thinking they’re bit crap, but anyway.
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JR: I guess everyone will occasionally feel like, ‘Oh, maybe we need a revamp’, or, you’ve been doing it long enough and maybe you need to change things. And actually, sometimes just sticking to your guns is the right way to do it.
DA: Yeah, maybe…
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JR: I think a lot of people, a lot of bookshops, these days are doing one-to-one talks, whether it’s like book subscriptions, or as a way in. I know a lot of people are calling that or labelling that as Bibliotherapy. Now, I think of bibliotherapy as being something quite different and I think the term gets thrown around a lot and it’s not always rightly labelled and can be a little misleading. I think consultation is a lovely way to phrase it and obviously within the pharmacy setup is a really nice way to start a conversation.
How do your consultations work?
How do your consultations work?
DA: It’s interesting you say that, actually. It came, for me, out of work that I was doing with people with dementia using poetry and then I did some work in hospices as well, making leave-taking poems. That’s my sort of background. But in that process, I learned that people love being listened to or being taken to idealised places in question, so the consultations are clearly signalled as theatrical, for a start it was the ambulance, and now there’s velvet chaise-longue, so, you know, it’s light. The idea of therapy - it might have therapeutic value - but therapy is a dangerous word, actually, if you’re not qualified to use it.
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JR: Absolutely.
DA: And so, people lie down, the questions are all about the person at their best. Their favourite books, their favourite place to read, the last time they felt properly rested or reflective. They’re the kind of questions that are enjoyable to answer. They’ve got their feet up, also, which is important. I take them, they relax, and then right at the end of it, I’ll ask them if there’s something in particular they would like a poem for, you know, something to address with a poem. I’ve learned a lot about them, I’ve learned how well they relax, whether they’ve got time to read, their taste in reading, and at the end of it I’ll find them a few poems to address the thing that they’ve asked for or to recommend that they go out for a walk more often with a poem. It can be quite profound though. At that point, they might say, ‘I’m lonely’, or ‘I’m stressed’, or whatever, and sometimes they’ll cry. But I give them the gift of a poem to speak to it, I wouldn’t pretend to be giving them any therapy in any way. So, that’s how it happens.
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JR: It can be very personal, a very personal relationship that you’re forming, you know. I guess it’s quite intimate in that way. People do open up to you. And that just goes to show how engaging the work is, poetry especially, but I think out into the larger book world people take an awful lot from their reading.
DA: It’s very important, yeah.
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JR: You must have some regulars, you must have people who come to you on a fairly regular basis. Do they have multiple consultations or is this a one-off?
DA: It’s a funny thing, at the moment, because through lockdown I did a lot on Zoom and I do email consultations as well, but it’s a really different relationship from when I was doing it with the ambulance because that was free and now I feel slightly odd about it somehow because there’s a charge, you know. So yeah, people do come back. But because I’m doing too much, I haven’t made a lot of the consultations. The Arts Council sponsored quite a lot of free ones; the grant ran out about a year ago, I think. Every Friday to start with they were free but at the moment I’ve paused them altogether because I’m busy setting up Oxford Street in just a few weeks. The other thing that has been quite nice though is that I’ve trained four local librarians to go and do the work, some of the work in the same model, which is spreading it out. Which is quite nice.
JR: And it means it’s not all on your shoulders.
DA: Yeah. I’ve got a member of staff here who’s a part-time librarian who's one of the people who I’ve trained, so she does some of them, but she’s doing one day fewer than she did so we’ve just put a pause on them for now.
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JR: I mean, I’m not surprised! You’ve got an awful lot on.
DA: I have got a lot on, yeah.
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JR: So, tell us a little bit more about Oxford Street, then. Obviously, the pop-up is finished now, but I did see that you announced that you are hiring and that you’re going to be setting up permanently.
How did that come about? Tell us how that setup is going to be and how that might differ from the shop you’ve got already.
How did that come about? Tell us how that setup is going to be and how that might differ from the shop you’ve got already.
DA: Well, yeah. It’s been really interesting and a really absorbing thing to do. The pop-up was a really useful test about whether it works in London and how it might be different. I think, what we learned in London - I worked with Lush designers to design the furniture there -
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JR: - The shelving is beautiful, I must say.
DA: It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s like a high-end perfumer or something. And how lovely to lift poetry and books into something that looks lovely like that. So, that furniture will be the basis of the Oxford Street shop, but then they’ve also asked us to run the coffee shop there on the first floor. So you’ll walk into a coffee shop and books as well. I’m just kind of winging it, basically. We’re using local coffee roasters to help us set up the coffee shop there. And yeah, I’m going down to London on Thursday to talk to the store manager and some Lush designers to sort of figure out how we’re going to sort the layout and how it’s going to look, and things like that.
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JR: And in terms of nuts and bolts of the bookshop management side of things, who’s going to be in charge of stock, who’s going to be doing all that?
DA: That’s a good question. Again, the pop-up was really useful because what I’m going to do is, we have a lovely young woman called Mia Rowland is the daughter of a part-time member of staff here who came in just to do some cover, and I love her, she’s just fantastic. So, she’s going to be managing it. I did the ordering for the pop-up remotely - we’ve gone through Gardlink - and so, I think she’ll do repeat stock orders herself but I’ll stay with the new titles. Because it’s an odd bookshop and a specialist bookshop, I’ve got my own kind of systems and habits for finding out about new titles.
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JR: Of course, yeah.
DA: So I’ll carry on doing that and dictate the feel of the shop.
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JR: Exactly, yes. You need to maintain some consistency. If you’re delivering the same sort of atmosphere and the same sort of selection, that makes total sense.
DA: The customers are different, though. They were different in Soho and they tended to be young, thoughtful, intelligent women. Generally speaking, the customers here are older. And that’s been wonderful to have that difference. I think it’s an emerging book market, isn’t it? The sort of TikTok young women.
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JR: Yeah, definitely. And, I mean, breaking into a new audience is hard but I guess doing it in London might make it a bit easier. I don’t know. They’re coming to you, I suppose.
DA: Yeah, I think it’ll be fine, I mean they’re the same customers that shop at Lush, aren’t they? What I think is most exciting, for me, is to take poetry, and put it front and centre in front of people who might not necessarily go into a bookshop. So, that’s the best thing. It’s kind of bookselling by stealth, really. It’s sneaky and that’s what I did with the ambulance, it was taking it to people and putting it in front of them who didn’t think that they liked poetry and getting it to them in a different way.
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JR: That’s exactly what those poetry bath bombs do, right? They literally reveal a poem to you. You can’t get much more stealthy than that!
DA: Ha! No, no! Exactly - ‘What’s this that’s stuck to my toe? I have to read it!’
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JR: So, on the subject of audiences, then, let’s talk about your events. I know that you’ve got The Work of Gillian Clarke event with Jan Westwood coming up. How do your events usually work for you and what kind of audiences do you get?
DA: Lots of different people. There’s a kind of core group, but it depends. We do lots of different things, really. So, Jan Westwood’s a kind of classic learn about poetry through friendly discussion. In the last seven days, we’ve had two book launches - one was a local writer who’s written poetry and prose about the kind of nature in Shropshire and what you kind outside your front door, kind of poetic prose, that was on Saturday. Yesterday, we had a book club in the morning and that tends to be a little older but we also have a children’s poetry club, and that’s thriving. Then we have a queer reading group. Those are our three book clubs. So, they’re all quite different. Then, last Saturday we had the launch of The Butterfly House by Kathryn Bevis, by Seren Books, in paperback. Kathryn, terribly sadly is actively dying and she managed to get to her own first book collection launch, so that was an extraordinary, beautiful and sad event. Then, we’ve got Holly McNish coming in the summer, so a big, big name. We have events in the garden, we’ve got a marquee - we got a local authority grant for the garden that paid for a marquee thing, you know, an awning - so we can have events undercover.
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JR: You’re incredibly busy, I can’t quite believe it. Anyone who is reading this and works in a bookshop knows exactly how much effort goes into all of these things. Are you managing all these events by yourself or do you have some help for that?
DA: No, no. We just do it ourselves!
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JR: It’s such a juggling act and when you’re opening a new shop as well, you’re not exactly slowing down, are you?
DA: No, I’m not slowing down at all. My god, no. This afternoon I’m working on a book with Mark Constantine, as well. I’m editing a book. I’m talking to Macmillan about a series of little poetry anthologies, as well, that we’re doing. But, I’m at a really awkward point where there’s a kind of growth ahead, the team is really small, but there’s no money to scale up, you know. So, I’m just exhausted.
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JR: I was going to ask - I mean, I don’t want to get into money, I don’t want to get into figures - but obviously you’re getting such amazing recognition lately. You’ve been doing this for a long time now but there’s been a lot of great coverage on you in the press, even just recently you were number one in a list of favourite UK indie bookshops in The Times, and of course, you’re the regional winner for the Nibbies this year, already. Are these things helping, do you think?
DA: It depends on what you mean by helping. It means that the bookshop thrives and the bookshop works, you know, which is against all the odds. We know about the death of the high street, we know that poetry doesn't sell, and here we are. We’re a specialist bookshop in the middle of nowhere. So, yes, all those things mean that our bookshop does really well, relatively, because it’s still a really quiet town. People do come out of their way to find us but it’s not big enough to make us a lot of money by any means. It covers itself, it covers the staff, it pays the staff, but if you want to stretch up which is what I’m trying to do now, that’s tricky. And of course, Mark is brilliant, they paid for the set-up at the pop-up, and they’ll help us with the Oxford Street set-up, but at the same time there’s a lot of work and they’re not giving us money. It is quite tricky. It’s tricky to grow, monetise - I hate that word - it’s hard to monetise the attention that we’ve got, it’s difficult.
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JR: It’s a tough time for anyone, right now. I think for small businesses it’s very difficult to grow. But you’re right, poetry, generally speaking, in the book industry at least, is a very small part.
DA: It’s tiny! It’s completely overlooked, actually. You know, I was at the London Book Fair the year before last, last year, and that’s why I ended up there this year. I was moaning to Mark that there are two specialist poetry bookshops now, I think, in the country. There’s one in Hay and there’s one here and it’s no coincidence that we’re on the margins - and I had a meeting with Inpress and there was nowhere to meet, so we sat on the floor. The metaphor of poetry at the London Book Fair, of having to sit on the floor, was what I was telling Mark and he just waved his hand and said, ‘Right!’ So this year we had our own stand. And that’s wonderful, I guess. But underneath everything is me trying to ask people to consider poetry.
JR: I want to finish off by talking about your bookselling backstory and the books you love to read.
I read somewhere, Deb, that you were a Creative Writing lecturer and received an Honorary Research Fellowship from Keele University. Does that mean you came into bookselling after being an academic? |
DA: No, no, I did my degree in my forties and my MA in my fifties! And I didn’t really want to - I'm quite shy, really - so, I didn't really want to teach but I ended up teaching at Keele University one day a week to take up the slack in our increased mortgage just to keep my partner happy. I was saying, you know, ‘I really think The Poetry Pharmacy is a good idea and we should buy this crumbling old house’, and so I worked there one day a week as well as setting up the bookshop to help pay the bills. And then, when this did alright, I realised I could give that up. But no, I’m not an academic, the research fellow came about because universities - I don’t know if you know about their REF output, but the Emergency Poet and The Poetry Pharmacy are good REF output for the university, so that’s why I’m an Honorary Fellow, really.
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JR: So, prior to the bookshop you were primarily focussed on the Emergency Poet, then? That took up the majority of your time?
DA: Yes, well, it was my job, it’s how I made a living. I went all over the world with that, actually. I did lots of work with schools, and libraries and conferences. And I did that for nine years, I think.
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JR: Are you still the Emergency Poet now even after The Poetry Pharmacy, do you think?
DA: Yeah, oh yeah. When the ambulance was sold it broke my heart.
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JR: Now, let’s finish off by talking books, shall we?
What kind of books do you like to read? I assume it’s pretty poetry heavy but what do you read in your spare time?
What kind of books do you like to read? I assume it’s pretty poetry heavy but what do you read in your spare time?
DA: Oh, my god! You shouldn’t ask me that, because I have to read poetry quite a lot and I’ve been in the poetry community for a long time so lots of my friends are poets and, you know, you feel obliged to read either your friend’s work or the new collection by significant writers, or I get asked to do blurbs as well, and I’ve been editing poetry books, so I tend to read prose for a relief, actually.
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JR: That’s what I assumed! You do need some light relief, don’t you/ So, what do you gravitate towards?
DA: Well, I like literary fiction. I love it when I’m talking to someone in a consultation about books that they’ve loved and then I go off and look them up. Also, because it’s related to the work I do, I tend to read new books on the natural world or natural history, in some way. I like those. But yeah, it could be anything, just some Agatha Christie or… I also think if you’re in times of stress or too busy, go back to things that you’ve loved in your past or your childhood. So I might read the Moomins or something. The book I’m reading at the moment, I’ve got it here, is called Poetry and Consciousness by C. K. Williams, that’s a bit heavy, isn’t it?
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JR: Sounds heavy, yeah. A bit heavier than the Moomins.
DA: It is! Well, I don’t know, actually! Not necessarily.
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JR: Maybe as a quick recap, I was wondering if you could pick out one or two books that the shop has done well with so far this year.
DA: What have we done well with this year? We’ve done very well with Kathryn Bevis’ The Butterfly House, which was only just published a couple of weeks ago. Long awaited and she’s a good friend of lots of people in the poetry community and it’s a beautiful book, a beautiful cover. That’s sold really well for us. And… oh, gosh. I feel like getting up and going into the bookshop now! What do we sell really well?
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JR: I know, I know. It’s always a hard one to ask at the end, especially when you’re not in that headspace. And, frankly, Deb, I’m not surprised with everything you’ve got on right now!
This next question might be similarly hard to answer, but if we’re looking ahead at the next few months, other than opening a brand new shop, are there any books you’re particularly looking forward to?
This next question might be similarly hard to answer, but if we’re looking ahead at the next few months, other than opening a brand new shop, are there any books you’re particularly looking forward to?
DA: There’s a new one called Weathering [Ruth Allen, Ebury Press], I don’t know if you’ve seen that. That I’m really looking forward to. We’re having an event here in the summer and there’s a small publisher, Arachne Press, with a new anthology of queer poems, it’s called Joy/Us: Poems of Queer Joy [Jeremy Dixon], and I really love the premise behind it, it’s just joyful and I’m really looking forward to seeing that one.
There’s a new Jackie Kay in the summer. I love the Bloodaxe anthologies and there’s one that’s just published called Soul Feast [Neil Astley, Pamela Robertson-Pearce] and that’ll be a real good seller for us, Neil Astley is such a good editor that I trust him completely, so I’m looking forward to that. |
JR: That’s all amazing. Deb, thank you so much for your time and I just want to say good luck with it all. I know you’re juggling an awful lot. It’s just so great to see a bookshop like yours grow, especially in these weird times we’re in, and it all looks amazing. I hope you’re happy with it all.
DA: It’s just bonkers! I can’t quite believe what’s happening at the moment. Thank you so much.
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If you love the sound of what Deb and her team are doing, in Bishop’s Castle or Oxford Street, as well as all the recommendations, workshops and events, then head to their website or pop in in person to show your support! |