Opening Poem: Tell Good People Good Things

Poet, novelist, and broadcaster Salena Godden on turning love, grief, and fury into books and poems, surviving years in the wilderness before publication, and sustaining a boundaryless creative life through performance, early-morning writing, and community.

You'll learn:

• Why you don’t have to be a “starving artist” and how to make powerful work while loving yourself and looking after your health.
• How to treat your story as uniquely yours, with material that no one else can reproduce.
• How Salena’s “rule of three” can help you balance meaning, generosity, and income in a creative career.
• Ways to draft poems and prose from an image or phrase and reshape darker early drafts into a final piece.
• How to write for “tomorrow you” first, using self-doubt and a critical future self as fuel for deeper revision.
• What it looks like to carry a memoir from years of rejection to publication without letting the work disappear.
• How to “compose on the lips” by walking, speaking drafts into your phone, and writing in the space between sleep and waking.
• Ways to ground yourself after writing emotionally charged work, including nature, slow rituals, and leaning on trusted loved ones.

Resources and Links:

• 📑Interview Transcript
• Salena’s Books: 
  • Mrs Death Misses Death
  • Pessimism is for Lightweights
  • With Love, Grief and Fury
  • Springfield Road - A Poet's Childhood Revisited
  • Fishing in the Aftermath
• Salena's Instagram 
• Poets, Musicians, and Authors mentioned: 
  • Jock Scott
  • Shane MacGowan
  • John Cooper Clarke
  • Neneh Cherry
  • Joelle Taylor
  • Jenni Fagan
  • Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
• Burning Eye Books
• National Theatre At Home - 
  • Medea (Greek Tragedy)
• Salena’s Roaring 20s Radio Show (Soho Radio)

About Salena Godden:

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning novelist, poet, and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican–Irish heritage, and the author of the acclaimed debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death, which won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her books include the poetry collections Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance and With Love, Grief and Fury, and the literary childhood memoir Springfield Road: A Poet’s Childhood Revisited, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival, and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.   

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