This is the unabridged version of the interview we conducted with Zoë Brigley, editor of Poetry Wales, for our fifth issue. It was conducted by Ally-Joh Gowan-Day and Hannah Coyle. It was edited by Ally-Joh Gowan-Day

 

Ally

I wanted to start by talking about yours and Kristian Evans’ creation MODRON  Magazine. Can you tell us a little bit about where this idea started and the process of starting this magazine, please? 

 

Zoë

I first started working with Kristian when we were editing the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth for Seren Books. I was not editor for Seren then, but it began a new stage for me where editing began to take centre stage. It is the five year anniversary of that anthology this year. We sat down and read as many contemporary poets with an ecological slant as possible. We wanted British poets but also to have a flavour of Irish poets, American poets, poets from India, any Anglophone poets really. We really enjoyed that process.

I know that Kristian had a dream for a long time of having a new, environmentally slanted magazine in Wales. We spent a couple of years thinking about what that would look like and then along came a funding opportunity: the Books Council of Wales’ New Audiences Fund, and I said “Let's go for it”. We wanted MODRON to be an online magazine so it could be nimble and we could respond to events happening quickly. So for example, when the Sycamore Gap tree was cut down, we immediately put together a response from Jane Burn and Philip Gross, and due to the online nature of the magazine, it could be posted immediately. I'm a technologically minded person and Kristian is steeped in environmental theory and philosophy and so on. So we have a good working relationship.

We secured the funding from the New Audiences Fund for a few years running. Unfortunately, The Books Council of Wales New Audiences Fund has now come to an end, which is a real shame. I'm hoping, at some point, maybe something like it will come back. One of the hardest things about being in the publishing industry at the moment is the squeeze on funding across the field. We're having to adapt to that and be nimble, try and find different ways to keep funding the magazine, because we're a not-for-profit at MODRON for an environmental cause. We find bits of money here and there to keep it going, but it is a different animal to something like Poetry Wales.

I love being able to have these different roles because Poetry Wales is a flagship magazine. It is a magazine that not only publishes world poetry alongside Welsh poetry, but it also represents Wales. There's responsibility in that role. I'm an eclectic reader of poetry. I love all kinds of poetry. I bridge many different areas of poetry. At certain times in British poetry, arguments have broken out between innovative poets and mainstream poets or different kinds of groups criticizing each other. I hope I sit beyond all that because I actually enjoy all kinds of poetry. That's what Poetry Wales should be publishing: an array of new poets, established poets, innovative poetry, sometimes poetry in translation, some mainstream poetry. It needs to be representative of what's going on as a whole. 

An important aspect of working on any magazine is to have a good team. At MODRON, we have Glyn F. Edwards, who scouts poets in North Wales and beyond. Siân Melangell Dafydd is a Welsh speaker, former editor of Taliesin, and a great poet. Then we have Taz Rahman, who is from South Wales. Taz is very present on the poetry scene in Cardiff, and he's always scouting for poets. We've got a great team, all of them accomplished poets and writers in their own right, and we have a huge amount of freedom to do what we want to do with MODRON. Kristian and I founded it and we run it in our spare time. It's a labour of love because we care about it deeply. Poetry Wales has to have a much broader overview of poetry. I love being able to work on both. 

I would say as well that Poetry Wales is something that you can only do for a certain amount of time. You have a tenure. I come in, I do the work and then eventually I'll be passing that on to someone else to take on that role. Whereas MODRON is ours and we're going to continue to work on and invest time in for the foreseeable.

Of course, the other part is being the Joint Poetry Editor at Seren Books with Rhian Edwards. There we are looking for whole projects rather than single poems. You never quite know what will be in the inbox for poetry collections, but I'm looking for originality, a book unlike anything I have  read before - that sense of newness. I'm looking for care being taken with form, a variety of forms across a collection and that form is being thought through. I also look for the collections to be at a very good standard, that they've been drafted and redrafted. There is always a little space there because Rhian and I are open to manuscripts where we could just help a little bit in terms of the editing. However, we want something that's fairly far along and that's definitely at the end stages of drafting.

In terms of what we're looking for for Poetry Wales,I want to flag up something which I think confuses writers. We’re open to all themes and kinds of poetry with every call for submissions. We usually have a slant to each issue rather than a theme. For example, the call for submissions that recently closed was about poetry and teaching. I tried to highlight that, yes, we're open to poems related to teaching, about or by teachers, but we're also open to everything all the time. It's important that we don't miss excellent poems that aren't on a theme. Sometimes I'm reading ahead a bit as well, two issues ahead maybe. So if I can't squeeze something into one issue, I may be thinking about putting it into the next one. 

For MODRON, there are some specific themes and ideas that we're looking for, and we will be opening up later in 2026 for poems. We look for ecological thinking about nature and the ‘more than human’. This means not just using nature as an objective correlative for how we feel about our own life. So often, we can bring nature into a poem and it's our story, it's about us, our feelings, what the speaker is going through. For us at MODRON, nature is its own thing. It has its own agendas, which have nothing to do with human concerns. I love poems that try to get into the strangeness of what it is to be some other kind of creature or organism. Can we write a poem about what it's like to be a mollusk? What would that look like? I think sometimes people haven't had these conversations or they haven't read the poets who are writing about ecologies, and that's okay, but that's also why we want this space to be here so that people can start to think about it if they haven't already, and to recapture a sense of wonder about nature. 

Kristian and I just finished writing up the editorial for the next issue of MODRON, and it does feel like the past year has been a slog through bad news. Sometimes poetry feels ineffectual against forces like that. One of the most important things we can do however is change the way that people look at the world. There's a whole research centre at Cardiff [Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations], which is about changing how people look at the environment and seeking to  create a sea change. Maybe that’s something that could change the world. It may be a little idealistic, but we need some idealism alongside immense  realism about the disastrous conditions we are living in. .

 

Ally

What place do you think Poetry Wales holds in the careers of young poets?

 

Zoë 

It's really important to us that we are a space for new writers to be published. Last year, because it was our 60th anniversary, we devoted more space to new Welsh writers. Generally, we want to be a space for new Welsh writers, new British writers, new Irish writers, new world writers. That's a big part of our mission. 

When I was about 19 and I was at university I had my first poem published in Poetry Wales. Robert Minhinnick was the editor and I sent him one round of poems. He said, Like these but send more. In those days, you used to send by post and he would just send your poems back to you with these one line replies. One day, in the post,I had a response from him and he’d written on one poem, I'll take this! and that was it. It was very exciting and getting paid for my poem was a wonderful thing. So we've always wanted to make sure that we pay writers, even if we can't budget a huge amount. Robert Minhinnick was a wonderful editor and really supported me in my career, in my twenties as well, before I had my first collection. This was wonderful for me because I realised that there was this big institution, this very respected magazine that was publishing my work, and they were behind me. Having that endorsement meant a lot to me. So, I've always loved Poetry Wales and then becoming editor was a huge honour. 

My main mission with everything I do is to support writers, because most of our readers are also writers. When we can get funding for it, we often have guest editors and they're usually not necessarily established writers. We want to give new editors experience and then they can go out and set up their own magazines or they can just benefit from having that extra training.

There is just one problem at Poetry Wales, which is that we have, say, 50 pages for poetry per issue, which is not that much. One of the problems we've come up against has been the incredible volume of submissions that we receive. Recently, we've made a cap on submissions. After a certain number, it closes. We're getting too much good work and I read all of it, every single poem that comes in. Most of the time, it's just me. 

The last call for submissions we had was so overwhelming. We had thousands of poems. It was just completely bonkers. We want people to have a good chance of getting published. So if we cut it off after a certain point, people who've submitted have a good chance of getting published. If you're submitting with thousands of other poems to compete against, your chance of getting published is going down. It also made sense to cap the submissions to try and make the workload manageable because that's a huge amount, especially since I am very careful about reading stuff. I can't skim read things. I have to sit down and read it carefully. I almost think of it like the Ghost Whisperer, the corny TV show from years ago with Jennifer Love Hewitt and she'd have glimpses of ghostly stories. Reading poems, you have a little window into somebody's imagination and that is such a blessing. It's a wonderful thing, but it also requires a lot of emotional space if you read things properly. 

 

Hannah

How do you, as an editor, create that space for yourself to be able to sit and read all of those submissions?

 

Zoë 

It's almost like the mindset that you go into when you write a poem, that real absorption. I'm not a person who can write every day because my life is so busy. When I write, I have to have quite a good space of hours, like an afternoon or a day, and then I get absorbed - really, really absorbed.. It's similar with submissions. I have to say: Right, we're going to do a good lot this afternoon; and I get absorbed in it. You have to also know when you've read enough. If you start reading it and it's not pleasurable anymore, you need to say, I've got to stop now because we've got to give everybody their best shot. 

Something that helps when submitting is to have a really clear submission letter. Make it really clear. We always ask for a 50 word bio because that's an exercise. If you are skilled as a writer, you should be able to sum up what's important about you in 50 words. Having everything succinct and carefully laid out means I can glance over the submission letter and get a good sense of what's going on without having to be really absorbed in the submission letter as well as the poems submitted. An important note is that while it is great to see a bio and have a sense of a poet’s background, it is the work that matters most, not the reputation of poets - it is simply the work. 

 

Hannah

Is there anything that you do to help ease rejections?

 

Zoë Brigley

Rejection is one of the hardest parts of being a writer and of being an editor. This is partly because there's so much good work, so it's hard when you have five great poems in front of you and you can only choose one of them. Sometimes people think, That editor has rejected my writing so easily, but it's not easy - not at all. It is important to communicate when writers are doing good work. 

When I am reading, I usually start by having a longlist and then I will cut that down and then I will cut it down again. I probably read poems about two or three times. As I go, I'm usually sorting people into categories. So I'm thinking, Oh, this is a great poem, but there's something about the ending of it which doesn't quite work. So I have little notes to myself for each poet. 

Then there are other people who are new and developing, and they're almost there, but not quite yet. I try to be very honest and tailor my submission letters to make sure that writers know if I enjoyed their work. Sometimes I cannot squeeze them into the magazine andI want them to know that. I write and say, You're a wonderful writer. Sometimes when we receive rejections as writers, we don't have a lot of information. I know this from submitting stuff myself, and you might be left wondering what the process was or if you were close to being published. Were you far away? That can be demoralizing. So, if you can be honest with people and say, I really like this work, I think you've still got a bit of work to do on it, but keep going with it or I think you're going in the right direction and so on, that’s so helpful. The bizarre thing is I've had a lot of people on social media, who will write after I've done my round of rejections that they had just received the best rejection letter from Poetry Wales and that’s so nice. I'm so happy about that. I'm glad that it was taken well and that people felt happy with the type of rejection letter I wrote, but there's always a bit of regret when you have to let good work go. 

Rejection is still a difficult thing whether you've received a detailed rejection letter or not. Good for you if you can manage the emotional part of it. Some people aim to have 100 rejections per year with the goal to get used to it. You still need to research what journal is going to work for your writing however, and not just send them off randomly to different places. I did have a year, I think it was like maybe 2017 or 2018, where I did this thing of sending out my writing to loads of places and I had an incredible year. I was shortlisted for all kinds of prizes and I published in all kinds of places, like in Ireland and Australia. I looked all over the world at different publications that might be sympathetic to my work and it's definitely a good idea, but I am also of the mind that a few really good publications a year are completely fine. We don't have to be on this treadmill which is constantly going. We can be mindful about it. 

I keep track of everything that I submit. I make space and time to send out submissions a couple times of year or something like that. It is different for me now because I'm writing more fiction and that takes me a lot longer. The problem of poets writing prose is that you often find yourself prevaricating over a sentence. You've got however many words, say 1000 words to write, and you're like, Oh, but this sentence, I can't go on until I've got this sentence right. It's terrible. So I feel like I'm a lot slower with writing prose, but I have got a story coming out in America with Waxwing, which is exciting. So I'm really pleased about that. It just takes me so long, but we all have to move at our own speed, right?

 

Ally  

You've had workshops for Poetry Wales, Tŷ Newydd, Aberystwyth Poetry Festival, and for Seren Books as well. I'm interested in this role of the mentor. How important do you feel the role of a mentor is to young, or new, writers?

 

Zoë 

There were a few people who were really important to me as a young poet, like Robert Minhinnick as I mentioned. Then, later on when I went to study at Warwick, David Morley was, and still is, a wonderful poet. He was a scientist before he became a poet and taught me a lot about writing, nature and all kinds of things.

Many Welsh women inspired me. When I was doing my PhD research, which was looking at Welsh women poets, I interviewed three poets, wonderful writers: Gwyneth Lewis, Pascal Petit and Darren Rees-Jones. I learned brilliant stuff from all of them. It’s a really good thing for new poets to have somebody who will encourage you and understand you. 

I love my mentoring work that I do with poets. The best mentoring is a combination of giving great feedback on work on the level of the sentence, on the level of the poem, but also thinking about the emotional stuff. That's something I've really learned from reading around different experts on creative writing teaching, like Felicia Rose Chavez, for example, who really emphasises writer's block and imposter syndrome and how those things are so important to deal with. You might be teaching someone writing, but if they have those emotional blockages they won’t be able to do their best work, so battling those is also important. There's coaching involved in being a mentor, there's emotional support involved around writing and our hang-ups about it. Then there's also the actual written feedback that you get on work or the technical feedback. I think if you can get those things from a mentor, that's wonderful. 

You mentioned Tŷ Newydd, for example, and we might wonder about accessibility. Of course, if you have money to pay, you can get a mentor, but you might not have those funds. That's why I think something like Literature Wales Representing Wales is really important. Tŷ Newydd can be expensive, but they do have grants available for part of the fee. The other thing I would suggest is, if Ty Newydd is unaffordable, it’s not a bad idea to actually e-mail the staff and say, I would love to go on a course, but I don't have funding for it at the moment. They do their best to try and help people in terms of suggesting where you could get funding. So Tŷ Newydd are aware of the expensive side of it all, too, and they want to help people. 

At Poetry Wales, f, we do have special rates for those on low income and students. For low income, you don't have to give us any evidence of that. You just have to write to us and let us know, because I don't think there should be a vetting process for something like that - it can be shaming. We want to make it as easy as possible to support people. 

There is a gap in supporting working class writers or writers on low income. I've thought about it a lot and it's why we're trying hard to get as many resources as we can on the website for Poetry Wales. Sometimes we take articles or workshops and we'll put them up for free because not everybody has the resources to access mentoring or subscribing or whatever else. There's definitely room for more of that kind of provision in the literary community in Wales.

 

Hannah 

It would be great if you could speak about the duality of being a Welsh American writer, how both of these places have shaped your writing and your own poetry.

 

Zoë Brigley 

I do feel that I have learned a huge amount from American poetry, from being steeped in American poetry, from going to see American poets read, from interviewing American poets. It's such a huge variety of different kinds of writing. It’s like trying to talk about European poetry, it’s tough because you’d have to pick a place and zoom in and even then there’d be loads to talk about. 

One thing I find interesting is that some conversations in poetry happen first in the States before the UK. So for example, thinking about writing around disability and disability activism. One thing that came up in the States pretty quickly was the idea of using ableist language and ableist metaphors. If you use the metaphor of someone being blind, you're actually attaching some kind of negativity to blindness, which is ableist, but these things are steeped in our language. 

I'm partially deaf and when I became deaf I suddenly noticed that everybody around me kept saying the phrase tone deaf. I kept hearing it all the time. It started driving me mad. I was like, Why are people using this deafness metaphor all the time? Why didn't I notice it before? Were they using it before and I just didn’t notice? But I do notice it now and it's something that I try to have conversations with people about in the UK because I feel like it's still not quite there yet. My feeling about poetry is that we want to have as much care and as much tenderness as when we're dealing with language and writing around people. I always want to be writing as carefully as possible. Sometimes we might get things wrong and it's good to reassess and think about that. We do our best until we know better. I think I'm paraphrasing Maya Angelou now, but, we do our best and when we know better, we do better. I hope to enable conversations around things in the UK when I see it's not happening. 

We had an interview for Poetry Wales with The Cyborg Jillian Weise, who's an American writer and also a disability activist and we talked about some of these things. Like, for example, thinking about if you're a disabled writer, who are you writing for? Are you writing something legible so that non-disabled people will understand it? Or are you writing it for other disabled people? Are you writing it for yourself? If I can bring over conversations like that from the US, it becomes really interesting and it's just opening up new conversations for us in Wales and the UK, which is exciting to me. 

I’ve also learnt a load of stuff on form. The Americans are so daring in terms of how they use form. There's a lot of interesting stuff that's happening in the US, and of course, a lot of terrible stuff politically, but there are really good communities of writers who are trying to write against forces that are about restricting people, about shutting people down and that's something I really appreciate too.

 

Ally  

I really love this idea that you spoke, ‘poetry can weave our empowerment and freedom from shame’. Can you think of the first time you realised poetry really held this power? And is there a poem/s that made you realise poetry can be used to empower and explore this freedom from shame? 

 

Zoë Brigley 

I love all kinds of poetry, but I do have a special place in my heart for poems that write against shame and there are all kinds of different shames that we can experience in our lives. When I was a teenager, I didn't know it then, but I was actually experiencing quite a serious mental health condition. I've been in remission for some years, but at the time, I remember that feeling of shame. I had a lot of body dysmorphia and trauma induced mental health issues. 

At first, I didn’t quite realise what I was doing, because I think I was doing it intuitively. So my first serious poems that I wrote when I started doing the Creative Writing BA at Warwick University, I didn't realise it, but I was writing my way out of shame. The poems I wrote then were almost like performative acts because I would write them down and they would make me feel better. They would make me feel more empowered. They would make me feel like I had more control of my life. 

I see it so much from poets that we publish here at Poetry Wales. Like, for example, Bethany Handley, who had a wonderful book out with us [Seren Books] called Cling Film. When you're disabled, it’s like being wrapped in cling film because the world doesn't adapt for your disability when it should. There's a lot in that book where people interact with the speaker of the poems, who's disabled, which are very shaming, blaming the person for their own disability or coming up with all kinds of bizarre comments. Bethany Handley writes this out in the poems and it becomes empowering because it's pushing back, putting ableism in its place. 

Another Seren writer, Wendy Allen, writes about the body and sex and desire, which is not something that women are necessarily ‘supposed’ to write about in a very explicit way, but Wendy goes there. She also talks about the difficulty of getting what you want as a woman in relationships, in intimacy. Writing those things out, it gives us a language to talk about things which are difficult. There are many more of our poets who are writing back and taking control of experiences which were shaming, but pushing against it changes the narrative. That's something that I hugely admire because it's doing work not just for the person themselves writing it, but for the rest of us, too. Meanwhile, for those of us who haven't experienced that shaming, we can understand it and support and be allies. It gives us a language to talk about it. It gives us a way of thinking about it and showing us how to overcome it. 

 

Hannah 

How can we write honestly without being overwhelmed by a fear of judgement? 

 

Zoë Brigley 

In my first collection The Secret, I did not write explicitly or confessionall exactly. The whole collection is about exploring other people's stories. I didn't realise this at the time because I hadn't done the work I've done now, but that was actually a way of protecting myself. It wasn't until I wrote my most recent collection that I wrote more obviously about trauma, whilst also looking at other people's stories as well. It's not a bad idea to allow yourself not to write explicit poems straight away. So if you're writing about material that's difficult or personal or intimate or anything that's tricky for you, there is a way around this. 

One workshop that I've done with new poets wanting to write about tricky or difficult material is a workshop using dreams. I've always been obsessed with dreams. I've had very vivid dreams. Some of my poems were dreams that I would just write out as a poem. Dream language is something that can really protect you and here is how…

In the dream workshop, I talk about the language of dreams. Freud,  in The Interpretation of Dreams talks about different kinds of dreams, for example the dream that is wish fulfillment, where it's like, I won the prize, I won the Pulitzer. Yes, that's just wish fulfillment! Then there are other kinds of dream work. One is called condensation, the other displacement. 

Have you ever had a dream where it's been two places at once? I often dream about my office at work. I'll walk up the stairs and it will turn into my comprehensive school in Caerphilly. When that happens, that's a metaphor because your dream is trying to tell you that these two places have something in common. Maybe it's work stress. For example, you were doing exams at school and then you have some kind of stress going on in your office at work, so those two places merge. If I remember rightly, Freud talks about how he keeps seeing this composite figure in his dreams where it's something like a man who has the moustache of one colleague and the hat of another colleague. What he realises is that he hates both of them and he feels threatened by both of them. So his dream of the two merged together is a metaphor. Here's two people you feel threatened by. We'll put them in one. 

The other thing that Freud talks about is displacement, which is like metonymy where a part or something adjacent stands in for the whole. Off the top of my head, I remember that he has this woman he's analyzing. and she dreams that she's running up and down stairs. She keeps running up and down, up and down the stairs. He realises eventually that this is actually about class; it’s the movement of up and down that's important. She's thinking about marrying a man who's of a different class, and this seems to be what the dream is trying to tell her. 

In my dream workshops, we’ll do some free writing on whatever is particularly difficult for the participants, emphasising that no one else is going to see it. Then I ask them to write it out in dream language. I ask them, What could stand in for this [the thing they're struggling with]? What could stand in for a person? What could stand in for a situation? In the resulting poem, we won't know exactly what the situation is, but we’ll have a feeling from the dream language. Whoever is comfortable reads their dream language poems out loud. You don't need to know what the real situation is because the images, the poetry tell you. My first collection, the whole of it, is written in dream language to an extent. I think it's okay not to write explicitly. 

 

Ally

What advice would you give to a student who wants to write about social and environmental issues but doesn't know where to start?

 

Zoë 

If you want to write about social or environmental issues, start with curiosity in your own back yard. Observe your community, notice challenges, and reflect on what resonates with you personally. Begin small with short essays, poems, or micro-stories, so you can experiment without pressure. Research carefully and seek multiple perspectives. Make your work authentic and informed. Reading widely helps you discover different modes of writing. Above all, connect issues to your own experiences and values. Writing is strongest when it reflects what genuinely moves you.

 

Zoë’s Recent Top 4: 

Four favourite pieces by Welsh artists? I’m thinking right there are too many to name but let’s start with four favourites from right now. I recently read Drift, a novel by Caryl Lewis, and a beautifully written story of love, magic, and belonging set against the Welsh coast. I also recommend Hôtel Amour, a poetry collection by Deryn Rees‑Jones, which is a dreamy, surrealist journey through the city of Paris. I want to highlight the artwork of Jon Abell, whose print graced my recent pamphlet Lycanthrope (Salo Press). Finally, Zillah Bowes’ short film Staying, now streaming on Disney Plus, demonstrates contemporary Welsh filmmaking at its most thoughtful.

 

Some advice that Zoë has received from mentors: 

• From David Morley: if you have a bird, creature or animal in a poem, let it be specific and not a generic “bird” for example. He was a biologist before he became a poet.

• From American poet Joanna Klink: when you create a collection and you are looking at ordering, put the shiny car at the front of the lot.

• From Pascale Petit: do not be afraid to write poetry that breaks taboos, especially if it is meaningful for you to do so.

• From Robert Minhinnick: learn from editors if they pay attention to your work and give you feedback.

• From American poet Kathy Fagan: do not neglect to apply the same artistry to your line breaks as to every other part of the poem.