There were other things about my appearance that were starting to bother me, too. By that age I was wearing a spinal brace, a sort of hospital corset made of white plastic that covered my torso, designed to try and steady my ever curving spine. Scoliosis is a condition where the spine curves and in some cases, like mine, twists, rotating the ribcage around so that a ‘hunched back’ appearance can develop. I also have a nerve condition that slowly progresses, primarily affecting my feet, lower legs and hands. This can cause, amongst other things, legs that look, as the NHS website describes, like ‘upside down champagne bottles’ as the muscles become weak and waste, being particularly thin in the lower legs. With all of that going on, thirteen-year-old me just really thought she deserved a cracking pair of knockers.

I look down at my skinny hands […] and think: someone, somewhere, could be describing these hands as the start of their horror story

There are lots of things I didn’t like about The Ring, but what stayed with me long after the fear of television static was a scene that flashed back to Samara (the evil TV ghost girl) when she was still alive. She sits in a hospital gown, in a clinical, cold, white room, her arms and legs are thin, her long hair is loose, her eyes are planted firmly at the floor. And all I could think was: she looks like me. She looks like me when I sit in hospital appointments, hiding behind my hair, and all I can do is stare at the floor. Her arms and legs look like my arms and legs. Her skin is pale like my skin. Later, zoomed sections focus on her hands that look angular in their form. Just like mine. And it’s all designed to scare you. That really hits home when you’re thirteen. Never mind not finding my body type in magazines, I only recognised myself in horror films. Even as I type this now, I look down at my skinny hands, with all their beautiful, slowly forming weakness and think: someone, somewhere, could be describing these hands as the start of their horror story.

why do we so easily, so lazily, use signs of some sort of illness or disability as a metaphor for evil?

It was sometime later I went to see The Woman in Black at the theatre. I tried watching the film, years afterwards, but couldn’t get past the first five minutes. My thirteen-year-old self still can’t quite get to sleep sometimes, and she scrambles for the light in a way that wakes me. Reading the book by Susan Hill, we find that the woman has, ‘a wasted face’ and sunken-in eyes, pale skin and an ‘extreme look of illness’. All of this is meant to give us the creeps, but what, actually, is so frightening about looking ill? The metaphor, as a device, is key for writers. So why do we so easily, so lazily, use signs of some sort of illness or disability as a metaphor for evil? If you are doing any sort of spooky writing this Halloween, I reckon it’s a good idea to check your descriptors. I love the bloke, but Edgar Allen Poe was always adding a scar or taking an eye away from someone to denote a sense of foreboding. It’s not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but if the “scary” thing in your work is: emaciated, wasted, pale, scrawny, angular, twisted, bony, gaunt, sickly, tired, scarred, drawn, frail or afflicted, I would encourage you to think about why you have used that word to describe something frightening.

If you are doing any sort of spooky writing this Halloween, I reckon it’s a good idea to check your descriptors.

It’s a niche segue, but bear with. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton write and star in the BBC horror/comedy Inside Number Nine. In the audio commentary to the episode ‘The 12 days of Christine,’ they talk about the moment when a man in a rain soaked anorak suddenly appears in the flat of a terrified woman. The director, Guillem Morales, said of the character, ‘He needs to look out of place, something that doesn’t quite belong in that environment.’ There are two important things to note here: firstly, the very effective result of this incongruity-makes-great-horror theory (the moment is genuinely very scary) shows there’s far more scope to the description of frightening characters than people with ‘wasted faces,’ – a man in a anorak does the job nicely. And secondly, it unearths something even more problematic about using illness or disability as a vehicle for a jump-scare. A man, soaked through from rain, with steamed glasses is incongruous to the setting of an interior, dry flat. Someone with a disability isn’t incongruous to anything. I am not separate from society. It should not be ‘out of place’ to see my body anywhere. If that accounts for part of the reason that the horror genre so often uses the metaphors I’ve described, then that, too, needs to change, along with a much bigger shift in representation and perceptions of disability.

I might still be struggling with whether there really is a heaven or not, but one thing’s for sure: I’m not a ghost, I’m not less, not a “nearly person”, not a surprise, not scary. So poets, tread carefully this Halloween, because the words you use can do a lot more than just provide a passing fright.

by Helen Seymour

Helen Seymour is a spoken-poet-word-artist-human-performance-person. She is known for mixing off-beat comedy with dark subject matters. She has been awarded three Arts Council England Grants, been shortlisted for the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship, and performed her play, Helen Highwater, at the Southbank Centre as part of London Literature Festival. She has recently been commissioned to create a short poetry film looking at the doctor-patient relationship on the theme of ‘Translations’ for DadaFest 2020, supported by Apples and Snakes. For more info see helenseymour.com and follow @whathelens on Instagram.

Photo credit: Jake Cunningham

‘And ever in our hearts doth ring
This song of Spring, Spring!’

and Seedling…

‘As a quiet little seedling
Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
And this is what it said.’

There is something about nature and poetry that is interconnected, something felt and experienced whenever we give ourselves time and space to be present in nature. An indescribable sense of peace that can stay with us as Wordsworth says in I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud, about the daffodils he spied….

‘For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.’

nature feels intense and overwhelming and begs us to write for her

And this is not just some poetic, arty nonsense; time in nature makes us feel better. One recent study showed that spending 120 minutes in nature a week is associated with good health and well-being. But is this really a surprise? I think it’s fair to say that we all feel better for getting outside, feeling the sun on our skin and breathing in fresh air. Poets tend to be observant and sensitive. It’s part of the job description to observe the world around you and to feel as you observe and to condense those feelings and emotions into a poem. It is easy to see how we have ended up with so many poems that reflect on nature, nature feels intense and overwhelming and begs us to write for her.

I suspect this revival is no longer just because of Nature’s awesomeness, but because of her vulnerability

With the Poet Laureate’s new poetry award for nature poems (The Laurel Prize) it seems that nature poetry is back in vogue and there have been many fabulous new poetry collections celebrating all that is nature, from the wonderful works of Nicola Davies to Robert Macfarlane’s and Jackie Morris’ brilliant The Lost Words. I suspect this revival is no longer just because of Nature’s awesomeness, but because of her vulnerability. Climate change has gone from being something we can avoid to a threat we must try to minimise, we have depleted the seas and filled them with plastic, we continue to burn fossil fuels and just in the UK alone our most important wildlife species have plummeted by 60% since the 1970’s! (nbn.org.uk) Nature is in peril and maybe poetry is a way of inspiring change.

My poetry collection A Year Of Nature Poems (illustrated by Kelly Louise Judd) follows on the poetic tradition of nature writing with one poem inspired by the natural world for each month of the year. I wanted to readdress humanity’s apparent separation and disregard for nature by focusing the poems on moments of human interaction with the natural world, such as sitting outside during the April showers, watching mayflies rise from a garden-dug pond and playing in autumn’s dry leaves. My hope was that in centring these poems around the human in nature my readers would reflect on their own experiences in the natural world. Unfortunately it became impossible to just revel in the magnificence of nature in these poems (as poets had the freedom to do in times gone by) as so many of the topics I wanted to write about are directly affected by climate change, from amphibian decline to changes in jet streams affecting our local climate. To that end each poem has a brief introduction highlighting some of the larger issues at play allowing, I hope, for further reflection and action.

Nature is in peril and maybe poetry is a way of inspiring change

I’ve been so awed and impressed with the active role young people are taking in highlighting their concerns regarding the planet they are set to inherit. They have brought the issues of climate change and the natural world booming ever louder onto our TV’s and radios and social media feeds and outside our local schools. There is clearly a long way to go to change government policies to make long lasting significant change but as we strive forward I know that poetry is going to be a big part of this journey. How else can we truly communicate what is under threat, how else can we truly grieve what we have lost?

Joseph Coelho’s Poetry Collection A Year Of Nature Poems, Illustrated by Kelly Louise Judd, is now available in Paperback and published by Wide eyed Books. Find out more about Joseph’s work at www.thepoetryofjosephcoelho.com

Photo credit:  KT Bruce