Introduction to Romalyn and Rachel

Transcript of audio 

A very warm welcome to this Voicing our Silences workshop interview and performance led by Romalyn Ante and Rachel Lewis around the idea of resilience.  Before introducing, and handing you over to Romalyn and Rachel, I’d like to say a few words about this quality. 

We’ve all had to nurture resilience over the course of 2020 – trying to stay afloat within the continually evolving challenges thrown up by the pandemic. 

But as someone who was sexually abused as a child, then diagnosed with ovarian cancer in my 40s, resilience has always been integral to my own identity, and part of my creative processes. 

When I think of how resilience operates, I see it as something like swimming.  It can let you ride the waves of your life – rather than being pulled under by them. But resilience, like swimming, doesn’t come automatically.  

While we’re growing up, and as adults, our resilience is both learnt and absorbed.  And one of the key spaces for this, especially for those of us with less easy starts in life, is art in the broader sense.  When you watch a film, or read a story, or a poem, and the characters find their ways to a better place, or become able to speak of what has happened to them, they show you that this is possible.  Whether or not their lives are like yours, they make you part of the process as the story plays out within your own consciousness. 

This is true of Romalyn Ante’s brilliant debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, published with Chatto this autumn.  Compelling, extraordinary poems give us what it means to grow up in the Philippines and come to the UK, to be separated from your family as a result of migration, to work as a nurse within the NHS. They also reclaim and honour, with immense resonance, the migrant identity that society has often been unwilling to acknowledge, giving voice to millions of peoples around the world. 

And that, for me, is another key creative work of resilience.  It can enable you to take on complex, sometimes challenging, sometimes exhilarating, life materials.  Through the process of making them into an artform, you’re then able in some measure to transform your relationship, and those of your audience, to them.  

Like Romalyn, Rachel Lewis does this in her debut pamphlet Three Degrees of Separation.  Exploring joy in recovery from mental illness, it won the 2019 Wordsmith Prize and was published by Wordsmith HQ.  The poems trace the intertwining stories of a young boy and two girls from childhood to their teenage years.  Funny and sensuous, and rich with all the clutter and chatter of growing up, it is also taut with the tension which builds steadily from the boy and one of the girls facing profound mental health challenges, and the impacts of these on the other girl.

Rachel Lewis is a former Foyle Young Poet, Poet in the City Young Producer, and Roundhouse cross-arts collective member, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Poetry London mentoring scheme. She is currently working on two new projects: a poetry collection exploring her family’s history as Jews in Belfast during the Troubles, and facilitating poetry workshops exploring ‘writing happiness’.

As many of you already know, Romalyn Ante is the recipient of multiple distinguished awards, including the Poetry London Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Primers Prize, and the Creative Futures Platinum Award.  With Kostya Tsolákis, she is the co-founder of harana poetry, for poets working in English as a parallel or additional language. Romalyn has taught at the Poetry School, won prizes for her life writing, and is currently working as an NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Services psychotherapist while also developing new creative projects. 

Romalyn Ante and Rachel Lewis will speak to each other about their work, and perform poems.   

Due to a recording error, the video does not include the workshop exercise, but an audio link to a writing prompt can be found here: 

The writing exercise for this workshop can be found as an audio file here:

The video of our event is below.  Please turn on captions through Youtube if you need to.