A conversation with Cara Thompson: Nottingham’s new Nature Poet Laureate

Cara, your family has always had a connection to literature. Your great grandma would recite Shakespeare before bed, for example - so did you always think you might turn into a writer?
For a long time I didn't know it was an option. I think that's the case for a lot of people that become poets, though - I don't think there’s a traditional route. I always enjoyed writing as a kid - it sounds weird, but I really just enjoyed the feeling of a pen on paper! 

And there’s always been a very creative streak in my family… You speak to a lot of people who come from an immigrant background, and their parents often weren't so encouraging about going into the arts because, understandably, they wanted assurance that their kids were going to be financially stable - the arts don’t grant you that all the time. My dad actually wanted to be a landscape artist, and he was discouraged from going down that path by his father. So I think that he really wanted us to be able to be and create and do what feels right. Same with my mum. My mum was an amazing singer - she started taking up writing classes towards the later years of her life, and she was fantastic. That kind of background goes a really long way towards sustaining you.

So I guess you had some built-in faith that something creative would come off, even if you didn't know the exact form it’d take…
Yeah, it's weird. Maybe it's kind of a blind audacity. I just have a real faith that creativity can serve and sustain you, even if it's not done as a profession. There are ways it can be integrated into our lives, and that's good for us.

How did you approach the interview process for the Nature Poet Laureateship?
I just tried to be really honest about what my motivations to apply were. I said something along the lines of: I'm not going to be able to kind of tell you the genus of this species of plant, but I am going to be able to meet people at the ground level with things - I'm learning things along the way. And I think that's what a lot of communities will want, without being spoken down to - to be brought into the conversation more equally. 

Is there an aspect of nature that you already feel attached to, or is it something you're excited about exploring more?
A lot of us think of nature as rolling hills, maybe - these things that not many of us have access to in our day to day lives. But my garden is a green space, my local park is a green space - those have been prevalent throughout my entire life, and they have value. Just because they're public and they're five minutes down the road, it doesn't make them less worthy of acknowledgement.

And being of Jamaican heritage, a big thing for me is how many early stories I heard about the natural environments that my family grew up in: their nostalgia for those spaces, and how much they would love to go back and be connected to that land again. I hadn't realised how much of that is permeated throughout my childhood’s stories.

I love the idea that there are conceptual green spaces too - do you think you had an idea of Jamaican nature before you'd necessarily been there?
A hundred percent. As part of applying for the role, we had to submit some poetry: I remember going back and thinking, ‘What do I have that's nature related?’ I realised that almost every poem had a reference - or a really specific image - connected to something that I maybe hadn’t even seen before. It's because these images have been made so strong through the stories that’ve been passed down by my family, by close friends. They feel real to me - they feel like something that I can like, grip and hold on to. And I think that's really interesting in itself, you know: how can poetry be a way into nature for those that don't even have access to it?

What’s the idea behind the Growing Words part of your program?
Growing Words will be about bringing communities into green spaces across the city and making connections with community groups, particularly those that might have felt historically underrepresented in green spaces. That was a big motivation for me applying: there was a real acknowledgement of systemic barriers that exist around accessing green heritage spaces. We'll run poetry workshops in these spaces with these groups, and hopefully the outcome will be that we produce some anthologies of their work.

And I have my first workshop in the post coming up in October at the Attenborough Nature Reserve, which I’m really excited about! I'll be running it with young writers, helping them to write work to be considered for the Solstice Prize, which is a nature writing competition for young people, run by Writing East Midlands.

And there's no reason why a nature reserve should feel like it belongs to one kind of group or another
Attenborough has been incredibly warm and supportive already! They’re instrumental to the initiative as one of City of Literature’s partners. It seems kind of critical that if there is this interest in making nature a part of everybody's language, and a part of everybody's way of thinking, then there needs to be a grassroots approach to doing that. Community groups have to be involved over the course of the entire process - I've written a nature Poet Laureate manifesto that will be coming out on UNESCO's page, and it touches on the importance of putting the community at the center of a lot of this work. And I think it's necessary for me to be able to do my work: I don't think this will be a process that I can do in isolation, you know - I'm going to learn from everybody that I meet, in some way, shape or form!

Have we all become a bit disconnected from nature, then?
I keep hearing, ‘Why does it have to be nature?’ And that, in itself, is really interesting. People almost see it as a barrier to understanding what I'm doing - it’s something that doesn't feel relevant to them in some way. And I think that's exactly why it does need to be nature. Once you actually get talking, people do realise that they’re a lot more connected to it than they've initially perceived. When you’re growing up in the inner city, or working nine to five - the last thing you have time for is getting out and going somewhere that’s kind of ‘outside of your realm’. Those are things that we need to be able to think about and deconstruct. Why is it that we don't feel able to access or welcome in certain spaces?

Does accessing nature have to be this thing that we travel for? Is it something we can do from our own front doors?
I think that's something that working with local groups is going to be really important for, and it's not for me to answer every question. It's just about building those connections - and poetry can be a way to build them.

carathompson.co.uk