In Conversation with Emily McChrystal
This week on the Comics Youth x Where are the Girlbands podcast Ella is chatting to Emily McChrystal about all of the amazing things she does, from being the Youth Empowerment Director of Comics Youth, to a published poet, to Ella’s best friend! This episode covers creating safe spaces in the workplace, the importance of valuing lived experience within social action and how to use creative practices in a healing, safe way. The song of the week is ‘We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home’ by The Moss Farm, a beautiful wholesome tune that’s not one to miss!
Emily McChrystal Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Comics Youth x Where are the Girlbands Safe Spaces podcast, a space for discussions with organisations and individuals who are creating safe spaces within the North West, with a focus on Merseyside.
Today we have the pleasure of chatting to the wonderful Emily McChrystal!! Em is both a best friend, a colleague and a creative collaborator of mine, and I am SO excited to get to chat with them about all of the wonderful things they do to create safe spaces for herself and others. It’s hard to know where to start with Em as she does so much, but the way some of our audience might know her is that they are the Youth Empowerment Director at Comics Youth CIC – in this role Em manages members of staff, does important girl boss business with funders, oversees and develops projects, as well as spending direct time with young people! Alongside the full time work here, Em is a fantastic poet, writing about all aspects of their life from love to loss to grief to joy, encapsulating universal feeling through beautiful words on her personal experiences. I actually had the pleasure of illustrating Em’s debut poetry book, ‘Soul Notes Poetry’ which is available to purchase on the Marginal website! On top of all of this, Em also hosts workshops outside of Comics Youth. As you can probably tell there is TONNES to chat to Em about today, so let’s hop straight into the interview!
Interview with Em:
Ella:
So I’m here with the lovely girlboss herself (laughing) how are you today Em?
Em:
I’m good thank you! How are you?
Ella:
I’m good! I’m very excited to be chatting!
Since this is the Comics Youth x Where are the Girlbands Safe Spaces podcast I think it might be nice to talk a bit about Comics Youth to start off. For anyone who doesn’t know me and Em work together at Comics Youth and Em is actually my manager so I have first-hand experience of having Em as I guess like my superior in the workspace and know what Em does day to day to create safe spaces for people like me within the organisation. Would you like to start off by introducing Comics Youth and what your role is here?
Em:
Yeah! So Comics Youth was founded in 2015 and I joined in 2019 and our aim is to support marginalised youth across the Liverpool City Region and we work with ages 8-25. And the work that we do is very holistic and creative centred. So we use comics, zines, book publications, any creative outlet that people want to use to navigate their lived experiences or traumas or identities. We do that through workshops and sessions and programmes and it is just a joyous space to share creativity and wellness and to kind of equip marginalised young people with the life skills we need because often we aren’t given the platforms to voice our needs or you know often we don’t know what our needs are so it’s a place to explore that.
And my role is the Youth Empowerment Director so I’m one of three directors within Comics Youth and my role is to look at the development of youth voice and empowerment and being kind of that leadership role in terms of managing staff, managing projects and making sure that our ethos in terms of being youth-led and youth-centred is achieved.
Ella:
Yeah I guess what’s our unique selling point as an organisation is that we are youth-led and also lived experience led. So while we’re talking about safe spaces obviously Comics Youth creates safe spaces for our service users, the young people we work with but it’s also quite important that our workspace is a safe space too seeing as we’re lived experience led, and also just because work places should be nice and safe, and it’s not an element we’ve discussed on the podcast yet. I obviously know that you do a great job at creating safe spaces for staff within the organisation. Would you like to share some methods that you have for making the workspace feel safe?
Em:
Yeah! Erm I think the first thing that you said there was about having lived-experience staff and I think especially when you’re working with a team who has varying levels of capacities or energy levels or you know things that you bring the workplace naturally it’s important that you know that before you start working with someone. So what I do first is I create that space of sharing. Often I do that through the induction stage of where the staff member first starts with us, I’ll give them a personalised wellness plan. So this is basically asking the staff member questions of if you need support, what does this support look like, and what do you do that I’ll know means you need support. So something that I don’t expect is people to just tell me when I need help because that can be really hard, and something that doesn’t always come naturally, so if someone is maybe being a bit quieter in the office or someone is maybe not meeting their deadlines etc. then I’ll know that that’s a warning sign because they’ll have told me when they started. Other questions on the form will be things like what does great support look like for you and how do you best like to communicate because if someone hates meetings I will avoid meetings to the best that I can, if someone prefers to have things written down in to-do lists I’ll make sure to do that. So I’m very adaptable in my leadership and management, erm, so that everything that I do is very person-led, because I think the main methods is that the listening element, you know I never want to assume that I know how to manage someone because everyone is different so I try to be as adaptable as possible.
Some other methods that I try and use to create safe spaces within the workplace is making sure that there’s designated time throughout the weeks and months that we’re in the office and in work to discuss any of your needs or concerns and making sure that they’re addressed in a very specific space. So I do that through monthly supervisions and that is basically we just go through a form with our staff member and we just say you know is there any needs that you have that is not being met, do you have any reflections from the month which you want to change or discuss, thinking of whether you need more tasks to be assigned or whether you need less tasks, going through your priority tasks. So that’s just a monthly space, it’s usually about an hour, maybe less, to just centre ourselves and make sure that me as a manager knows where you’re up to and if you need any support. And you know some people don’t feel comfortable bringing up an issue at the time that they’re feeling it, so it’s often nice to be able to say well you’ve got a designated space at the end of the month to talk through this and discuss this so that it can be addressed within the time frame.
I think another thing that I do is I’m very transparent with my own feelings and my own needs, erm, because I would rather lead by example. I don’t think it’s fair for me to ask all of the staff “you tell me how you feel all of the time” because that’s unproductive and it’s not safe to do that. But often I will say you know I’m having a really bad day or I’m feeling stressed today, you know I’ve got loads of meetings today so if you’ve got any questions please send them over messages rather than coming in. So I think I’m very transparent with how I feel to create that space and say you know I am being vulnerable with you guys, and I think sometimes workplaces feel toxic because there’s that culture of perfectionism and that culture of professionalism and I feel like something that’s really important especially for our workplace is to reimagine what professionalism is. So for us, our ethos of being professional is showing up when you can, if you’ve got needs voice them, it’s not about emulating something that you’re not, it’s reimagining what the workplace can be and reimagining that through imagination. So as soon as a staff member starts another thing that we do is we run through our expectations of them but we’ll also ask them what their expectations of us are. Especially if I’m being their line-manager I want to know you know what do you expect from me and how can I meet those expectations for you and I think the mutuality of that relationship is very important.
Ella:
I think another thing that’s really good about how we work as an organisation is, like you said, showing up where and when we can and working to our strengths, even little things like you were saying how we keep each other in the loop every day even through Slack like if someone has a load of meetings letting everyone else know “I’ve got a load of meetings today, I might not be super quick at getting back to you like I’ll get back to you tomorrow” and that’s just so helpful if you’re the other member of staff who’s trying to get the message across and you’re like why aren’t they getting back to me, it just stops like stress from building up in that way because you have transparency between staff and I think that’s such a good thing to have, especially if you’re working with young people as well, I think that’s such a good precedent to set within staff, that then translates to how our youth work happens too because it would be completely contradictory for us to expect our staff to like you said emulate ideas of professionalism when the whole purpose of our organisation is to be youth led and to meet our young people on a level where we’re sharing lived-experiences with them, you know we’re not setting expectations of them to work in a way that is perhaps an industry standard of professionalism, it’s professionalism which caters to their access needs, meeting them when they can have meetings with us, and encouraging that culture of transparency and communication with them too. Like I know within the sessions that I do with young people, something that was really rewarding was when young people, even if they couldn’t attend sessions they felt comfortable setting boundaries with me about that, even saying things like I will be attending the session but I’m experiencing high levels of chronic pain today so don’t expect me to talk or contribute much, I am listening, but my capacity levels are quite low and that’s so helpful because then I’m not worried about them maybe losing engagement, I understand why they’re taking more of a back seat and I can facilitate them to still be able to engage with the project but to their needs and I think that’s great and it’s definitely something where like I feel able to do that and set that example with the young people because that’s the environment that I’m working in as well which is absolutely great and it leads nicely onto the next question which is why it’s so important for us as an organisation to create safe and sometimes separate spaces for the young people that we work with.
Em:
Yeah, I think often you know linking back to the type of audience and members that we work with, they’re often marginalised and they’ve got lived experiences of complex trauma and chronic ill health and all of these different elements that often, their needs are not being met in traditional super accessible spaces, so it’s very important that we meet those needs and we understand those needs, and I think what you were talking about earlier in being able to understand those needs and being able to voice those clearly is something that’s so so important. So I think having, first of all safe space for young people is so important because not everywhere is a safe space, and it’s so hard to identify what a safe space is. You know often especially topically with LGBT* history month, corporations often dip into the brand of being inclusive and being equity driven and it’s often not the truth and it’s not the case and so identifying safe spaces can be a really nuanced and complex thing to have to navigate, so I think making sure that you know the way that we lead and the way that we work is safe so that young people can have a separate isolated zone of I can just be myself here and I can just exist and breathe and be myself here and you can just turn up to spaces and exist or you can have a massive idea and a project that you want to develop that we can help with. So I think it’s most important, especially in terms of development of a safe space that is your kind of sanctuary that you can recluse to and just kind of be in and it makes existing in the spaces that aren’t so safe easier, because you know, you know, okay this isn’t what the world is made up of entirely, you know, you can have a break from all of that and just exist whether it be once a week or twice a week or whatever you can commit to. I think it’s important to have those safe spaces to make living possible and to make it more easier to cope with and I think it’s so easy to overlook the power that safety and security has, whether it’s that safety of looking after yourself or the safety of being able to share your ideas or safety to be heard. So I think the main reason I think that safe spaces and particularly separate safe spaces are important is that it’s a life line for young people and it’s important that we have those spaces to be able to just be.
Ella:
I think as well when we’re doing projects it’s fantastic that we have a safe space already set up within Comics Youth so that when we’re working with young people on like projects that go on for months and lead up to big outcomes, we already have those things in place of how we create safe spaces, how we communicate with our young people, because then it can translate into what is effectively another form of workplace with our young people and I think like something which I’ve definitely witnessed from the groups is that because we set up a precedent you know we have, not necessarily rules but sort of expectations of what the space needs to be, you know they need to be respectful of each other, we’re transparent about our lived experiences which again is great like I think we’re had a lot of conversations with young people that have been made possible because staff have the same identities and experiences that they do. So that could be anything from being Queer to being neurodiverse as well and being able to give examples when you’re doing workshops of like for me I work best in this way, maybe someone else will work best in that way because of their identity, their experiences, that allows the young person to then know that they can step forward and say you know I would work best in this way whereas before they might have just stomached that and gone with whatever everyone else was doing. So providing our young people with the fact that there are different paths to outcomes, and that they don’t all have to do the same thing, they don’t all have to have the same workload, we can work to their needs and also like what they want to get out of the projects we do which is really important, and I think again like that leads into that thing you were saying of having safe spaces here allows for our young people to thrive in spaces that aren’t necessarily designated safe spaces, so in the projects that we do like in the Safe Spaces Reclaiming Community Spaces (which we’ve had an episode on) I think what was great about that was that we had a big age range, and our younger members where really supported by the older members of the group and that is such a confidence builder to be able to go into the space with people who are a couple of years older than you and feel really heard, and not only heard but that like your voice had direct impact on the outcome, and you’re just as valid and have done just as much as those people who might be like working professionals when you’re like still in school and still like getting to grips with stuff.
So even for me like doing Soul Notes within Marginal, it’s a space where I’m not having to come up against traditional barriers of professional spaces because you know you can voice your needs and you can prove to yourself as much to other people that you’re capable of doing those things that if you do meet a brick wall of someone being inaccessible you know it’s because they’re being inaccessible and it’s not because you’re incapable.
Em:
Yeah.
Ella:
Because you’ve done it before, and you’ve done it really well, and that’s purely because someone’s done really easy things to allow you to have the capacity to do it and really it’s an issue on their half there’s probably things you can say to them or suggest to them and say you know these adjustments will allow me to get this finished by this deadline because you’ve had like the growing room and the learning within our project spaces to develop and understand what your needs are as well.
I think that’s a big thing, just learning to voice your needs. Like you were saying before, even as a member of staff like I’m quite lucky in that this is one of my first experiences of a workplace so it’s set a really good precedent for me in the future to know like I shouldn’t have to just box myself into assumed ideas of professionalism because I can get things done and also I know how to say when I need support. Whereas I think a lot of people will come from a lot of career paths where you know you’re used to being shut down or not given space to talk, and the fact that you actively say to members of staff this is a period of time where you can talk about how you’re feeling, no judgement, just tell me what’s going on and we’ll figure out how to best change the situation to suit you, and that’s just not something which you get in the world. Even in school, do you know what I mean! That’s why I think it’s so important for young people too because you spend so much of your early adult life unlearning stuff from school whether that’s stuff to do with your identity or like internalised shame around your identity or even just like if you’re a neurodiverse person learning that you’re not incapable that you just work in other ways to other people and that translates into the work place often.
Emily:
Definitely.
Ella:
And what our workplace does is it doesn’t set neurotypical expectations on its staff members. Which is just great and I think that’s something that you translate into the workshops that you do as well, because obviously Em is also a poet as well as working here, a creative in their own right, and as well as working with Em at Comics Youth I also had the pleasure of working with Em with my Where are the Girlbands hat on at our Open Mic Poetry Development Day that Em led for us and what was really lovely about that was I feel you set a really nice creative safe space for something that can be really quite vulnerable. Like not only writing poetry but sharing it with others. So it would be lovely to hear a bit about how you facilitate those kind of creative safe spaces which can feel quite vulnerable.
Emily:
Yeah and thank you first of all that was so nice! I feel like it’s always so rewarding to know that you know my aims of setting our safety and you know collaboration and creation has been met, so it was lovely to hear that. But I think the main thing is kind of opening up the space for that vulnerability because often you can say to people “be vulnerable, be open, share your trauma”.
Ella:
(laughing) Yeah.
Emily:
And that’s not creating that safe space you know. So I think often it starts with again me leading with example and saying look, I don’t know everything, you’re going to teach me things in this space too, and having that mutual appreciation of each other’s craft. And I know the first thing that I did was an exercise that was looking at just getting rid of the perfectionism that we hold within our craft and just saying like you know this is, it might not make sense, it’s just random objects, so I brought a little bag with me full of random objects for people to choose from, and you know just from the top of their head they had five minutes to write a poem. It didn’t have to be perfect, it didn’t have to make sense, just the first thing that came to their head when they looked at these objects. And that often rips the Band-Aid off of you know everything that I make has to mean something, and everything that I make has to be something that I want framed and shared forever, and it’s being able to just exist in your creativity and in making you know? So I think that’ something that led the space really well in opening that up. And other things that I did in that space was reminding people that when it comes to writing poetry as well as sharing poetry, you have to let go of what you want it to be interpreted as. It’s a poem and it will mean so much to me, and it will be so impactful to me, and I’ll share it with other people and it will remind them of something entirely random that was not my intention. It might be something that’s really sad to me but someone else finds it really funny or someone else thinks it’s really light-hearted. So it think letting go of how you want your work to be interpreted and opening it up into the space and saying “this is what I’ve made, this is now yours”, and I can share this with you in you know having a no strings attached method, and that really helped the people, especially when it was their first time sharing poetry, it helped get that, that level of anxiety of how is this going to be received, how am I sharing something that’s so vulnerable and not get really upset about it or not cry or you know not get too in my own head about it, and it’s just allowing yourself to exist in a space and say you know this is what I’m giving to you and I’m going to allow you to take it how you wish and take what you need from it. So that was something which was really helpful I think in getting people to open up and kind of let go of having so much ownership over their work that they don’t want to share it because they’re too scared of how people will interpret it.
And another thing is I’m really open with if I feel nervous too! Or if I don’t feel equipped enough about something, you know I don’t pretend that I know everything because I don’t and I don’t think anyone does really. So I often use my collaborative making spaces as a learning experience for me too and I open that up to everyone I say you know if they make something that is new to me I say oh what does that mean or how did you get to that starting point and you know giving people the space to be an expert in their own craft and to explain to people like this is what I do and I’m good at it, because often in the workshop that I hosted with Where are the Girlbands, it was often people’s first experience even sharing a poem with others, and you know there was often, there’s so much comparison in creative spaces and oh you’ve been doing this for years or you’re a published poet and that doesn’t mean that I’m any better or I know any more, it just means that I’ve been able to exist in creative spaces in different ways and I’ve been able to show up in different ways. So I think giving people ownership of you know empowering them to say this is what I’ve made and I’m good at it, and if you don’t get it, you don’t have to! So I think that was the main takeaways from that space I think for me, in that being able to exist in that vulnerability of your craft and saying it doesn’t have to be perfect, It just has to be yours and it has to be true.
Ella:
I feel like that’s really relevant to Comics Youth because that’s sort of like the whole premise isn’t it that it’s giving people ownership of their own narratives and their own experiences, and also recognising that we don’t know your story, you tell it, it’s yours to tell! And that goes through everything that we do like I think that’s a really nice thing about the staff environment is that we don’t have hierarchy that’s just like for the sake of hierarchy.
Emily:
Definitely.
Ella:
There’s definitely roles which is important for boundaries but they’re there to facilitate and support people, they’re not there to be like I have more power in this situation than you, and if anything we hand over the power to the young people because we don’t know their experiences and we’re really aware of what our lived experiences are and the limitations of our lived experiences and you know how we can’t talk for everyone in our office alone let alone all of the young people we work with. So when we’re doing publications or even with events, it’s so important letting people know that they’re experts in their own experiences. Like if you’re a young carer, and you’ve been a young carer for ten years and you’re ten years old, you’re more of an expert than any adult who’s looking in on the situation is.
Emily:
Absolutely,
Ella:
Like you know what the situation is and you should feel confident in taking ownership of that and you’re so right, if people don’t get it, that’s because they don’t get it and not because you’re speaking wrong and you’ve not got the skills to do so. Like if you come to a stage with something that is representing you, especially like poetry is such a good example of that where it’s such like a personal thing and often with poetry you’re speaking things that maybe you’ve not really articulated to other people let alone yourself, it is what it is. Do you know what I mean? It’s not wrong and people can’t be better at that than you. People might have more experience with form or the formalities of a creative practice, but, realistically that’s just a practicality and a way of delivering something which you’ve already got, it’s just packaging it in a different way.
Emily:
Definitely.
Ella:
And like at the event that you hosted in the summer, it was so lovely because there was like a real progression and a comradery throughout the day as well because everyone arrived and like no one knew each other and basically like the structure of the day was that Em led a workshop in the day and then there was an open mic in the night and there was an audience who came and there was a bit of an open mic section at the end too which the audience could join in on. And it was so sweet because the start of the day, the other people in the space were maybe like a cause of nervousness because they it was like were new people and they were the people who you were maybe having to like compare yourself to and you were being challenged to share your work with them. But by the evening the people they’d been in the workshop with were like support?
Emily:
We were all best friends it was so cute.
Ella:
Exactly like people to lean on! And again it’s like so revealing of like what creative practices do and say because it was such like a bonding experience to like sit with someone else and like read them a poem. Like one of the exercises Em did that I thought was really good and was a really nice way of easing people into sharing and letting go of their work was that we read a poem to someone else and got them to tell us like what they thought of it and what they thought it was about and how it felt to them and that was a really good way of just ripping the band-aid off and being like some people are just not going to get what you’ve written, other people are and it’s going to really move them and that can be frightening to to have like a strong reaction to something that you’ve written and like that’s like a really vulnerable thing to do to just sit and share something with another person. So by the time people were on stage and in front of an audience there was like a table of the people who’d done the workshop and they could lean on them as a support and you’d feel like you had a real knowledge of everyone who’d been in the workshop, and like I keep leading it back to Comics Youth but I think it makes complete sense in that we facilitate creative projects and through projects it definitely feels like that too.
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
Like maybe there’s a nervousness at the start of not wanting to speak up in the space, not wanting to share your contributions and stuff, to at the end like really like leaning on each other and having a real respect of one another and what you can each bring to the table.
Emily:
Definitely and I think often the key thing that’s coming to mind when talk through this is I think the main thing when it comes to vulnerability and safety and sharing and carving your craft and all of this lovely stuff is just meeting people where they’re at, you know?
Ella:
Yeah.
Emily:
So there’s no expectations, there’s no further you know questions needed at all, we will just meet you where you’re at and whatever you need we’ll give you, you know there’s no assumptions on what you know or don’t know, and I think that’s something which really harvests like healing and safety within spaces is just meeting people where they’re at.
Ella:
And like that was a thing that I got a lot of responses from people when I was more generally asking what safe spaces mean to them, a lot of people said like no judgement and I think that’s what no judgement means is acceptance, really, and just accepting people where they are and that allows people to grow and to learn and to thrive and that teaches people acceptance as well because if we accept them then they should accept themselves as well and other people should as well and it’s that thing again of like I love the idea that if our young people come up against a brick wall of an inaccessible space, not internalising that and being aware that no they are capable, it’s just that that’s a brick wall that’s been put up with a lack of access, and that’s nothing to do with them and like your poetry workshop did that as well because it was like there’s no reason why you can’t get up on a stage. Like no one should tell you like actually you’re not like worthy of being platformed or supported because like everyone’s ready, everyone should be able to share their experiences and their crafts and receive like a warm welcome by an audience, and the audience at that event were so nice as well.
Emily:
Yeah it was so lovely.
Ella:
When the audience then got up and performed it just felt like a really like I don’t know like such like a sharing experience of like people have given you the listening and then you in turn give them listening back. So that was really sweet and I’d love to chat with you just generally about poetry since that’s your craft of choice and maybe like the ways poetry makes a safe space for you personally.
Emily:
Yeah I think the word that you chose there was like “your craft of choice” and it’s so interesting to me because I feel like I never really chose poetry. Like without sounding so pompous like “it chose me!” But like on a genuine level I never kind of sought out to write poetry, I never thought you know “I’m going to write a poem!” I think I was about 13 and I had a little online blog and it was called Soul Notes which is very like cyclical and I love that, erm, and it was basically just a space for me to vent and talk and just like I don’t know I just had really long like blog pages that were really intense and throughout that writing process they naturally turned into poems, and I think that’s something that is so interesting to me because I have never been professionally taught poetry. I studied literature in school and I studied literature at uni for a month and then I dropped out (laughing) but I just feel like it is something that is very intrinsic to me you know? You know it’s not something that I particularly know all of the forms of and all of the I don’t know I guess the technical areas of, and if I do know that I do it accidentally. You know sometimes I’ll write a haiku and I’ll be like oh that’s what that is! So I think it’s a very natural process and it’s very organic and I think the reason why it is like that is because I don’t write to share. I don’t write poems thinking I need to perform this. You know I don’t write thinking I’m going to get this very poem that I’m writing right now published. I just write for me, and I write as a healing practice and when I say write that could be jotting things down in my journal or in the notes app in my phone which is often the most common format that I go to purely because I’m always on my phone and I find inspiration everywhere. So for me it’s very much a therapeutic practice and just the type of person that I am I don’t process emotions, I guess I don’t process emotions in a common way, so I don’t feel emotions much in the moment. There seems for me to be quite a distance in the moment and then the feeling, so I use poetry to navigate how I feel about things, and often for me I will be in a moment and I think this is how I should feel right now and then I’ll write a poem about it and I got the feeling wrong. Maybe I felt sad about that happy moment or maybe I felt elated about something other people wouldn’t and I use poetry as a reflective practice to better understand myself and say this is how you feel organically, no one’s watching, there’s no audience. Just being honest with myself because something that I do and I think a lot of people do this and I don’t know why we do it, even if you write in a journal, I’m like oh I don’t want to write this in case someone reads it, like what if it’s an Anne Frank moment and someone publishes it like it’s not happening, just be honest with yourself. If you can’t be honest with yourself then you can’t be honest with anybody ever. So I do use poetry as just getting rid of the smoke and mirrors and saying this is how you feel and this is you navigating this process and something that’s interesting to me in terms of like safety in poetry is that when I was younger I often like turned to poetry when it was something really negative and something really heavy that I was exploring, and that was actually like a big point of solace for me. But as I got older I don’t want to write just about sadness anymore and I think that’s often, well I think it is a really big reflection of my own mental state and where I’m at in my own life. I’m in a very healing stage, I want to connect with my inner child, I want to jump in puddles, I want to go on walks, I want to kind of live in a more safe way. So I’m now using poetry to explore good things and happy things and exploring love outside of the tragedy and explore life outside of the sadness. So I’m now finding that my practice and my poetry brings me safety in entirely new ways than it did a few months ago, and I think that poetry for me feels so tangible even though it’s dealing with things that are so wishy-washy and vague, really grounds me and that brings me real safety because I think often, you know, when I was younger every single poem I had to share, not because I wanted to but because I felt like I had to. I felt obligated to share because I’d always think oh but what if this helps someone though, what if it get them and they just needed this. But then it’s also like it’s getting rid of that ego to it, like not everyone needs your poetry you know? Not everyone needs you to be a saviour in this practice, you can just have poetry for you, and you can just write it for you and it can stay in your phone notes forever. It doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of a poem because it wasn’t shared, you don’t need to always share your poems with people. I think it’s important to first of all own it for you, and hold it close to you first, and then if you do want to share it, absolutely share it, that’s fine, that’s lovely! I want to hear everyone’s work and I always want to share my thoughts with people but I think like again within that safety is having that safety net of thinking do I want to share this and is this something that I do want people to hold, because linking back earlier to what I was saying about letting go of meaning and letting it exist within people, I’ve found that really hard to do personally, especially if that was a poem about like a breakup or a poem about someone that I cared about and often someone would message me and be like “is that about me?” and it’s like ohhhhh and it's like that navigation of like well yeah it is but I don’t want this to lead to a conversation, I don’t want to lead to having to navigate this all over again, like this was for me. So I think having that practice of first of all having that safety net of do I want to share this? And if I do what are my reasons for sharing this? Is this because I want to? Is this because I feel obligated to? Am I ready for questions? Am I ready to explore these feelings deeper? So I think often within safety it comes to those safety nets of having boundaries within your practice too.
Ella:
Definitely and it’s something I think has been a learning curve for me as well is like learning when things are just for you and when you don’t need to share them, or maybe like when it’s less safe for you to share them.
Emily:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Ella:
That’s probably the best way to say it. Where maybe things haven’t come to a resolution yet and if someone were to ask you about it that would just cause distress because sometimes poems aren’t answers they are, like I think often we go to poetry to resolve feelings or to untangle them or to articulate them but sometimes the thing that you articulate is just as confusing as the feeling itself.
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
And putting that out sometimes isn’t what you need or what you want to do and there was a poem I wrote recently which was a poem about a poem that I’d written months and months ago about a situation that was really unresolved and I was feeling a lot of anxiety about and it was something where I felt like I just needed to get it out for some reason and for me because of how I exist online I guess and like I think we’re similar in that we’ve used creative practices to like navigate our experiences and I think if you’re someone who grows up in like a traumatic situation or even just like dealing with your identity and stuff, really like claiming it is something which is like feels safe when you’re younger but it’s not necessarily something you want to do for your whole life. So like elements I know for me anyway, like you’re talking about writing happy things and stuff, when I was younger I felt like who I was as a person was so constructed by trauma and sadness.
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
Like that was who I was and like my Queerness was everything that I was and Ella was basically a combination of everything that had happened to me and the way that the outside world was perceiving me and now I don’t necessarily want to just be those things and I don’t want to have to only express myself through the areas of my life that are distressing. So sometimes things that are hurtful and painful I don’t have to share with the world, I can just wait until those things heal, and they don’t have to define me.
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
I don’t need to reclaim them, I can just let them go.
Emily:
Absolutely.
Ella:
Which is a really hard lesson to learn I think. It’s a real coping mechanism and it makes complete sense why we do it and I know we were talking about this the other day in terms of like, is it the Cass Identity Model?
Emily:
The Cass Identity Model yeah.
Ella:
And something that’s been interesting for me is like when I was like 17 or 18 I was like a brand of like Queerness, and like trauma and like not being very well and being very upset and like dealing with a lot of stuff and as I’ve got older and I’m healing through those things and I’m letting them go, there’s a feeling of like a loss of identity and also like we were saying when people follow you and give you gratification for sharing those things, when you start to let them go it like impacts your self-worth. Like well who am I outside of like this brand that I’ve built for myself? Can I just be like a happy person who has these elements to my identity but that’s not all that I am? And I think like learning to use creative practices to just exist is a really important way to treat poetry and any other practice as a safe space rather than being a way to structure yourself?
Emily:
Definitely, and it’s also interesting that you’ve chosen to say the brand that you’ve made for yourself when often it’s not the case! Often it’s what people are putting on you or things that have happened and I think having that passive experience of things just happening to you and you having to live through them is so so complex and so complicated and you know I look back on how like I built my brand I guess you could say and it’s really traumatic and it’s upsetting and like you were saying people perceive you as something. Like just as an example of me I was out as a Lesbian for many many a year, and it was my brand, 100%, and I know it was, but as we were saying before, the Cass Identity Model (which is anyone who’s listening doesn’t know what it is, please google it, it’s great) and it’s looking at the concept of the different stages of Queer identity that we live through and I think living within those stages and having that clarity of this is not an individual experience, you know, this is something that is very real and it’s very easy to cling onto a label or to cling onto an identity that whether you’ve made for yourself or you’ve made for you, it’s difficult to find safety within that. So I think using your creative practice to navigate that and get out of that traumatic cycle and get out of that space to truly heal and to truly navigate how you feel for you for you, for an audience, not for anyone else, for you, is so so important and I think it’s lovely that us both as collaborators and as friends and as colleagues and as platonic soulmates and everything, I think it’s lovely that we’re both at very similar stages within our craft because I think for me having that sense of community is massive safety and I think that’s what we were clinging to when we were younger when you’re thinking of the reasons that we shared and the reasons that we had this I guess brand for a lack of a better word. The reason why we do that is it’s a sense of community and it’s a sense of kind of yeah safety within you know unsafe practices I guess. So I think the main thing for me within my craft is having that sense of community. That’s a really big safety net for me I think.
Ella:
Yeah I think to just loop it all round to a nice finish, that’s something which is a real aim of a project that we’re working on now which Em is leading which is the Queer Agenda and it’s for older younger Queer people. It’s an interesting bracket but we work with a wide range of young people from a very young age to 25 and I think it’s something which often doesn’t get addressed is like you come out and you have that coming out experience and you know obviously that’s at different stages for everyone but say you’ve come out at 15-17, you have that experience you come to terms with that identity, for a lot of people you really claim that identity it’s all that you are but then like you just continue to live.
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
And things keep happening and I think as you get more agency and as you become more of your own person and an adult and things change and things aren’t the way that they were when you were a younger teenager with the sort of fire and the feeling that comes with the initial entrance into the Queer community, there’s so much to navigate with being a slightly older young person who’s coming into adulthood and I’m really excited for how that’s going to create a community in itself of talking about what comes after that period of times of coming to terms with and things like the Identity Synthesis stage where maybe you’re not presenting as visibly Queer as you used to, or maybe you’re presenting visibly Queer in different ways which you didn’t expect and that’s a conversation to have too that many people come out multiple times in your lives. You know especially as you become an adult you enter new spaces and you meet new people and your identity and your experience of your identity is going to change massively so I think that project should be a lovely way to find community with people of a similar age and people who are at all different stages of their journey but offering a safe space to say like it’s fine! (laughing)
Emily:
Yeah.
Ella:
And it continues to be fine and I’m very excited about that. I think you’ve done a great job at setting it all up and that shall be a very exciting one.
Emily:
Aw thank you! Definitely and I think that’s kind of like the thing that we need in general within Merseyside of like Safe Spaces for people who are over 18 you know and that doesn’t involve alcohol or doesn’t involve like dancing or drugs or whatever it might be. That’s fine you know live your best life but I think it’s also important that we do have those healing practices and that we do have those workshops and you know we are existing within workplaces with knowing what best practice is within a workplace and knowing what to expect and knowing what your rights are legally as well as healing that inner child and as well as understanding you know your identity stages as an LGBTQIA* person and often so many spaces within Merseyside are branded safe and they’re really not because often safety starts with the ethos of everything, like genuinely safety I think starts at kind of the paperwork, it starts at making sure that there are safety procedures in place, that making sure that the people you hire are representative of your ethos and you know everything that you stand for and everything you’re an advocate for, because it just takes on person or one policy to fall through and then safety doesn’t exist in that space anymore. So I think that’s kind of the main thing that I just want to get across is that the things that we need within our city are looking at policy change and are looking at who are leading these discussions, who is leading this change?
Ella:
Yeah and I think that’s a really key thing that we’ve had from a lot of our young people is that there needs to be spaces that aren’t just nightlife spaces for Queer people and that there is maybe an expectation that within being a Queer person you have to exist in these sort of nightlife spaces and there are loads of reasons why those spaces can be unsafe for people like people who can have issues with being in environments which include alcohol, with histories of drug abuse, there’s loads of different stuff that come up for people and just in general like community should be able to exist and thrive in like a multitude of different spaces and like there is so much which unifies us as Queer people but we’re also all different as well and we should all be able to find spaces that we feel comfortable in rather than feeling that we have to fit into the few designated spaces that are made for us and that we have to sort of like fit ourselves into. So I think that would be, any venues or spaces in Merseyside listening, if you have a space no matter what it is, if it’s a café, if it’s a bookshop, no matter what you are there will be Queer people who want to access your space and finding ways to make your space accessible, available and safe for Queer people is so important because it’s the most needed thing in our city with hate crimes in general. Obviously there’s a lot of education that needs to happen to prevent those from happening in the first place, but there also needs to be spaces of refuge in the city that people feel they can go to that aren’t just like a bar or a club.
Emily:
Absolutely, and that’s something that towards the end of the Queer agenda programme we’re going to be putting together a handbook. So that’s looking at you know best practice, it’s a one stop shop essentially for institutions, organisations, individuals to know how best to work with and support LGBTQ* people. You know it’s looking at session plans, it’s looking at resources, research papers, zines, everything that is to do with our existence and how to support us well is going to be within that handbook. So you know I feel like while it is important to have such healing conversations and progressive discussions there does need to be policy change and there does need to be tangible shifts happening within Merseyside and I think that is through understanding, like you were saying it’s about that knowledge sharing. So hopefully by the end of the year that handbook will be a real source of learning for people and organisations.
Ella:
Amazing, well I think that is a very hopeful place to end so thank you very much for chatting with me today!
Emily:
Aw you’re welcome! Thank you for having me it was lovely as ever!
Our song of the week is a beautiful track by The Moss Farm, a project by local singer-songwriter Matt Humphries who also happens to be a lovely lovely person! We met Matt through our events at the Bloom Building where they were playing in the Lazy Band. Each and every time I have met matt he has been abundant with sweetness and smiles, a sentiment which shines through in his music as The Moss Farm.
This song in particular is a favourite of mine as it speaks to family, the bittersweet nostalgia of childhood and growing older, finding community and safety in others. The sentiment of this song feels so fitting to the conversations in this episode, of how we can all comfort and be guides and supports to one another, holding each other through the winding paths that life takes us on.
With tender melodies and instrumentation that feels like it belongs to small cottages and fields filled with lavender, this song is bound to be a favourite for anyone who thinks longingly on soft twilight skies. We hope you enjoy!
Play We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home – The Moss Farm
We are Ella and Eve from Where are the Girlbands working in collaboration with Comics Youth to bring you interviews with local organisations and individuals who create safe spaces. You can find us on Instagram as @wherearethegirlbands where we celebrate women in music and discuss how to make local music scenes more accessible for everyone through reviews, video series, interviews and events! You can find more about Comics Youth on Instagram at @comicsyouth or via the website comicsyouth.co.uk. Comics Youth is a youth led organisation that aims to empower youth across the Liverpool City Region to flourish from the margins of society, creating safe spaces where young people can harness their own narratives and find confidence within a creative community. Comics Youth provide a range of creative services designed to support and amplify the often diminished voices of young people, from zine creation to youth led publishing hubs and projects such as this podcast which highlights the voices of those working within our community to create safe spaces! Thanks for listening.
