OPENREACH (part two)
Nathaniel King in conversation with Selima Hill
Nathaniel King, Selima Hill
Nathaniel King: There have always been elements of autobiography and emotional realism to your work. It always feels true, or has that element of ‘truthiness’, yet the specific details are often, as you say, encoded.
Selima Hill: Yes, I feel very strongly that writing is never an excuse to hurt people.
NK: How do you know how much to reveal?
SH: Exactly, exactly! How do you know? I was talking about this just last week with Neil [Astley]. Is writing about your life self-indulgent and self-pitying, or is it helping others? Neil says ‘it’s helping others’. I don’t know if I buy that. If I publish it, like pretending it’s not me, nobody’s fooled, are they, Nathan? For instance, I’ve written a lot about my husband. I was writing a lot, almost autofiction, thinking to myself, ‘this will never see the light of day’, and then thought, what the hell? But I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.
NK: I’m sorry for your loss. That’s a question I consider a lot. Does art help people? I suppose it does in an abstract sense, but it’s very hard to measure or quantify. Sometimes it can feel like an exercise in self-indulgence if it’s too close to reality.
SH: Yes exactly. Is it oversharing? That feels mortifying. I write the same as I always have, but yes I do publish more, and I embargo myself less. Last week, I was putting together a new collection for Neil, with Penny, my PA, and I thought ‘I suppose I’ll just grin and bear it.’ Because it’s much more interesting for people if you tell the truth.
NK: Yes, and it’s different when you invoke the ‘G’ word. Grief. It helps people feel less alone. People can hopefully see their experience in that, and feel understood.
SH: I know that’s what it’s supposed to do, but does it?
NK: Has it helped you? Writing about it. Writing through the grief.
SH: I don’t know, because that’s my way of processing everything all of the time. If it’s revealed anything, it’s just what a self pitying, self indulgent and bad person I am.
NK: I’m sorry it feels that way. We’re circling the idea of shame again.
SH: We are.
NK: We have to tell ourselves it’s helpful.
SH: We do. But we don’t have to believe it… I don’t have a leg to stand on because I do publish it all. When I was first published in the eighties, when my mother was still alive, looking very distressed, she said ‘well done darling, but we won’t read it.’ And that’s always been the way it is with the family, ever since… but I probably project that too. I never discuss my work at home. This morning, I so wanted to send my son. ‘Tell Nathan I’ve lost my voice and you can speak for me. You can tell the truth that mum ignored us in our childhood and was always writing her stupid poems.’ I think it would be so interesting to interview someone about me, on my behalf, to see their perceptions.
NK: That would’ve be fun, but I’m glad you didn’t!
SH: [laughs] Me too! In another interview, in Bristol, I wanted a friend to go on my behalf, and pretend to be me, but not tell the interviewer. She said the resemblance wasn’t strong enough to pull it off. Because of course people know what I look like now.
NK: We’ll have to find your doppelganger.
SH: Yes [laughs] I’m still on the hunt for my doppelganger.
NK: I think this idea of poetry as simultaneously wanting to be seen and hiding is an interesting one. Poets aren’t actors, on press junkets. We hope the work will reach people, and let it exist outside of ourselves, rather than explaining it. Especially if we’re grappling with big emotions like grief and mourning.
SH: Yes. I had a session with a grief counsellor recently. And she kept telling me ‘you’re grieving.’ And I thought to myself ‘of course I am! Why are you telling me this?’
NK: Do you think that’s connected to why you’ve lived in Dorset for the past forty years, after leaving London. Is there something about the atmosphere that you feel is conducive to your writing?
SH: Well, at the palace, the lady-in-waiting was trying to keep me un-anxious by talking. She kept telling me about the happy memories she had with her family here. It’s all so happy and lovely. Which is exactly the opposite of why I moved here. I moved to Dorset because I’d never been here with my family growing up.
I felt like I’d discovered it. Also I went to boarding school here and was happier there than I was at home with my parents. But I was expelled! For various reasons. Forging your own relationship to it – that’s a separate thing. Most importantly, I felt free to not be a writer here. I don’t do any workshops in the area.
You don’t have that pressure. It’s not very mature to have two identities, but, going back to the idea of shame and safety, you can’t write if you don’t feel free.
NK: I wanted to ask who you’ve been reading, watching, lately. Not your influences per say, but artists that are informing your practice. You’ve talked before about the impact of Eastern European art, and your love of Béla Tarr, who is a big touchstone for me as well.
SH: Oh I thought you’d like Béla. I hoped you would. I thought you might ask about who influences are, so I came prepared. They’re mostly women, except for Kafka! [Selima takes out another scrap of paper on which the following names are printed:]
Angelica Garrett
Pina Bausch
Emily Bronte
Emily Dickinson
Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop
Tove Jannson
Agatha Christie
Frida Kahlo
Sylvia Plath
Thomas Merton
Béla Tarr
Georgia O’Keefe
Franz Kafka
Alex H…Free Solo
Right now, I’m very drawn to the German artist, Pina Bausch. A German artist. Her approach to theatre is very similar to mine. ‘It’s not about how people move, but what moves them.’ It’s a very embodied practice. Movement, I suppose, interests me. And swimming… At school, I was very sporty. But girls weren’t supposed to be sporty… I would like to have been a sculptor. But I didn’t feel free or confident enough to have such a visible practice at the time.
NK: You have lots of painters in the family. In the past, you’ve talked about how writing was your refuge growing up.
SH: You’ve done your research! Yes, writing was a way of hiding. On holiday, all the cousins would show paintings, and everyone would be looking at each other’s work, critiquing and celebrating it. And I didn’t feel like I belonged. So I wrote. It was private. Looking back now, I suppose I do belong more among artists than, say, engineers or fisherman or something. But at that time, I didn’t feel very embedded in my family. This was a reaction to that. Not as a way to please them…
NK: But to have your own interior world.
SH: Exactly. And looking back on it, my writing was very, very, very small. Which, I suppose, was how I felt at the time.
NK: Perhaps there was something about that. I’ve been reading a lot of W.S. Graham lately, who was heavily connected with the St Ives Modernist painters. He often talked about how he preferred being a poet among painters than his own kind.
SH: Of course! It’s funny how he went by ‘W.S’, as opposed to William.
NK: Yes, it feels quite old-fashioned now, but it was very common to be abbreviated: W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Y.B. Yeats. Do you ever think about being S. Hill?
SH: Yes! Because it’s gender-free. Names are always patrilinear. My name was my husband’s, and before that it was my fathers. I preferred my husbands, of the two. I’m very happy to be a Hill. Even if I’m not really. Anyway, I think I agree with that. But I’ve always said that I wish I’d been a sculptor. It’s much more hands on, tactile, and less neurotic.
NK: In recent years, you’ve been working more with photography and painting, and collaborating with visual artists. I’m thinking of The Bed, or the drawings in The Lonely Slug with your son, Moby. How do you think about collaboration?
SH: I always make it clear that the art they’re producing shouldn’t just be an illustration of my poems. They’re responding to the work. Illustrating versus responding. There’s a crucial difference. By respond I mean, bring themselves to the work, rather than ‘prettifying’ someone else’s.
NK: Good point! I want to finish by returning to this idea of writing versus being perceived.
SH: If I think of people actually reading my work, it makes me feel sick!
NK: That’s so interesting, because your work resonates with such a wide and varied audience. Something I noticed recently, is that you have this cross-generational appeal. You are celebrated by the more ‘establishment poets’ but also embraced by younger generations. I was thinking about how newer online journals see publishing you as a badge of honour. For instance, it’s rare to be published in a micro-poetry journal the same week you’re receiving a medal from the King. I have my theories on why I think that is, but what do you think?
SH: Oh, I’m interested to hear what you think. With the establishment, I suppose it’s because of my education, because I’m considered ‘a proper person’. The younger, maybe because I keep it short. Cut, cut, cut, cut. The poems don’t start short. They start way long. I hate typing and writing. But anyway, what do you think?
NK: I think there’s a playfulness to your voice that gives your poems a kind of light, effervescent quality. Also, its resistant to trends. There’s an immediacy or unpretentiousness to it, so even when it’s heavy, it feels light.
SH: Light? That’s interesting. It’s because I love writing it! But the thing is, when I meet my readers, I find it very difficult. I write for strangers. That’s what I really like: strangers.
NK: When you’re writing, how do you get past the critical voice?
SH: I try to outrun it, slip into a different mode. Sometimes I hope the telephone rings, just to break the rhythm and let me write with a different kind of attention. Anything that takes the pressure off.
NK: A kind of flow state.
SH: Exactly that. I’ve been thinking about getting another dog and calling her Flow, so I could let her off the leash and say, ‘I’m just going with the Flow!’
Nathaniel King is a poet from Cornwall, UK. His debut pamphlet, Ghost Clinic (2023), published by Broken Sleep Books, was awarded the 2024 Eric Gregory Award by the Society of Authors. His work has appeared in magazines and journals including Poetry London, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Bath Magg and others. He is a First Story writer-in-residence for schools in North London and is currently completing a practice-based PhD in hauntological poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.
Selima Hill was awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, recommended for her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems, which draws on ten collections including Bunny (2001), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has published eleven further collections with Bloodaxe, most recently Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022, and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her twenty-second book of poetry, A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2025.
