DO SOMETHING THAT SCARES YOU!

CLAIRE SUZANNE, a mature student on the BA Creative Writing at NTU, discusses fear and the joy and benefits of overcoming it.

Do something that scares you – a phrase I’d heard many times, but I’d never listened. I was the mute child, the socially awkward teenager, the adult who had nightmares about public speaking. I would shy away from the limelight, tucking myself into my homemade office, where I would create fictional worlds that allowed me to be the confident person I always longed to be. But that was before I came to NTU. At uni, I pushed the boundaries and left my comfort zone. At uni, I would no longer be a fictional character.

Bring on year two at NTU, wrap up some Bad Betty Poets, throw in a stage, sprinkle some students on top and what was I doing for my 41st birthday? Reading poetry to an audience, of course! The opportunity arose through WRAP – an extracurricular reading and writing group where I volunteer as an ambassador. WRAP was collaborating with Bad Betty, a poetry publisher that was offering one-to-one mentoring with published poets and performers. The opportunity was open to all NTU students, regardless of course or level of study, and I was surprised to find it wasn’t just Creative Writing students who wrote poetry in their spare time. I was the opposite: a Creative Writing student who did not write poetry in her spare time! This, then, was the perfect opportunity for me to find out if there was a poet hiding inside somewhere, waiting to be let loose.

My mentor, Molly, was amazing. Not only were we the same age, but we also had a similar sense of humour. Her poetry made me smile, especially her references to Dawson’s Creek, traffic jams, and finding the ability to be your genuine self, all of which were relatable. Yet when it came to picking themes for my own poems, my mind went blank. All I knew was that I didn’t want to depress the audience, I wanted to entertain. Then I realised I had to talk about my fear of aging – grey hair, wrinkles, and the dreaded menopause. After all, the reading was taking place on the day I officially became ‘over forty’.

Being on stage was no longer a new experience for me, I’d already read two pieces of prose at the Metronome. But those pieces had won competitions, they had been vetted, judged as ‘good writing’, which gave me the confidence to read them. But my poetry, that was new, it was unheard, it was… uncharted territory! I had nothing to compare it to, and I’d certainly never read my poems to an audience before.

My legs moved in slow motion as I approached the stage, but as far as I was concerned the walk to the microphone could last forever. Then I was there, facing my audience, their faces blurred by lights. My heart bashed against my ribs, and my clammy hands created wet imprints into the piece of paper I was holding. The room was silent, yet the slightest cough or mutter rang in my ears to let me know the audience was waiting.

Then I did something that scared me, and it paid off. To hear the audience laughing and applauding made it all worthwhile. Was the poem metaphorical? Not really. Did it rhyme? Yes. Could I write poetry for kids? Probably. But the most important thing was the experience. An experience inaccessible to me before I started at NTU, and one I will never forget, whatever future successes I might have.

Fiction became reality.