Small Cures with Poet Della Hicks-Wilson
Della, you are such brilliant poet. When did you start writing? How has writing supported your voice and story?
Just being called a poet is a huge compliment within itself, so thank you. I started writing words that rhymed or had another meaning not long after I had mastered the act of physically writing, so really young - and I was maybe 8 years old when I was first asked by my teacher to perform a poem I’d written at a school assembly. I remember another teacher approaching me in the playground to tell me how great it was and I felt like the whole small world I knew was watching me for the entire day. It was my first real taste I had of how powerful my words could be. My voice and my writing have literally and figuratively been developing in tandem ever since. When I think about it, writing is one of the few things that has never left me. I can’t have one (voice) without the other (writing). In keeping with that, words are where I go to make sense of my story, to console or celebrate myself, to work through the difficult things in a loving way.
What would you tell a new writer that is just starting out and doesn't know where to begin? What do you wish someone had told you?
I would say start there, start in that uncertain space. Toni Morrison said that her novels always began with a question, so what is yours? What do you want to know? What are you trying to figure out? It’s something that I have been thinking about a lot as I slowly start working on my second book, and it really does help in the writing because everything you write is a response, everything has a purpose.
I think I received the advice I wish I would have been given - just write - my mum would always tell me that. I’m a notorious planner and although there’s strength in that, there’s also opportunity to extinguish the original spark that made you pick up the pen in the first place. Get the content down, craft and critique it later.
When you think of the word healing, what comes up for you? Tell us about a time in your life where you felt small and a time you felt empowered.
Words. Art. I believe deeply in the curative power of them - and it’s where the title of my book, Small Cures came from. To heal we must accept, and to me, the easiest way to accept something is through language. Language can make the most unpalatable truths palatable. One of my favorite art forms that does this for me is spoken word poetry. I have spent hours at a time in that rabbit hole on YouTube and often I’ll meditate on a specific poem over and over again. The words either carry me away from my hurt or they give me perspective on it. When readers tell me that my words have helped them, soothed them, healed them, it touches me deeply, because if I close my eyes I can still remember and re-feel the feeling I got when I first read and heard Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls.
Fittingly, one of the times in my life when I felt small is when I didn’t have the language. The hurt took over. I was in a seminar at university, I studied English at Cambridge, and we were talking about Jamaica Kincaid’s book-length essay, A Small Place. It is a book about Antigua and its British colonial legacy and I was the only black person in the room. And out of almost nowhere, someone blurted out that slavery wasn’t that bad, or wasn’t as bad as another tragedy. And I just didn’t have the right words, and on reflection, possibly the desire to explain something that to me was so devastatingly obvious. So many years later, when I was sitting in an office and a white colleague casually used a heavily loaded derogatory term to describe the medical care in another Caribbean island, I can’t tell you how empowered I felt when the language came. Ignorance doesn’t stand a chance against language. And language is one of the greatest forms of protest I think.
Your debut poetry book is here! Congrats! Tell us about what prompted the writing of this book and the challenges you went through to create it.
Thank you very much, the amount of love the book has received has been incredible, beyond. As I explain in the preface to Small Cures, I’ve always wanted to write a book and have whole notebooks filled with outlines and snippets. But like many great things, this book was not planned. I started sharing poetry on Tumblr back in 2013, really as a form of self-care, although I didn’t have that language for it back then. And the work, predominately short journal-like entries really resonated with people and before I knew it I had hundreds of thousands of likes and shares and lots of followers asking me for a book of these poems. My friends and family were asking the same thing and I thought why not make this project number one. I did not think it would take me this long, life happened and I’m a busy mum of two beautiful and boisterous boys (5 and 2). In addition to that, I’m a perfectionist. It was crucial to me that the poems were presented in the right way. I had a vision of creating something which I don’t think has been done before with “Instagram poetry”: a book-length lyrical self(love) poem, made from smaller poems and told in three progressive parts. So in addition to writing new poems, I spent a huge amount of time on the editing: selecting poems, revising old pieces and weaving them together so that they would feel like were always supposed to be one, and at the same, completely independent from one another. It was a puzzle, and as I grew as a person over the years, the final picture I was working towards did as well, and that was a huge challenge to work through. But we made it.
If you could sit with your younger self—what would you say?
Whew, I was thinking about this the other day actually. And it dawned on me that Small Cures is a letter to my younger self. And that maybe three books from now, that will be another and then another. A letter to every milestone. But if I only had say five minutes to sit with her, I would say this: Della, never settle. Do not stay in anything that doesn’t feel good most of the time. Say yes more. You do not want a life spent remembering the no’s. Just try. Submit the thing. It doesn’t have to be your idea of perfect. No thing is. Hold on to like-minded people, the ones that show you love. In love, language is not enough.
If you were handed a microphone and asked to speak to every woman what would you want them to know?
This might sound like a cop out and a really cheeky way of inadvertently telling your readers to buy my book, but honestly I would grab Small Cures and read it aloud, from part to part, front to back, as I largely intended it to be consumed. Small Cures is a long lyrical love song and so many of my readers, mostly women agree, that the world, especially now, needs so many more of these.
Della Hicks-Wilson is a black British poet and writer of Caribbean descent, born and raised in London. She holds a BA and MA in English from King’s College, Cambridge and is best known for her short viral poems and spoken word videos. She recently published her bestselling first collection entitled Small Cures which became an Amazon #1 New Release in Love Poems and Poetry by Women. She is currently working on her second collection.