add a great deal to the publishing industry, but many of those will be people who can’t afford to do an internship for free.”
Publishing
Joseph found a route into publishing almost by accident, joining an active and passionate community of poets through the performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes. “That was the first time I realised this could be a job,” says Joseph, but adds: “In the poetry scene at the time there was a bit of a divide between performance poets and published poets.” He said that’s changed now with a younger generation of incredible poets like Raymond Antrobus, Anthony Anaxagorou, and Deanna Rodgers who sit very comfortably in the performance poetry and publishing worlds. “I think those lines are blurring, thank god,” he says. “It was because of the frustration of wanting to get published that I started hanging out at the London Book Fair. For three years in a row I went to every stand and found out as much as I could and that’s where I met Janetta (Otter-Barry), giving a talk on children’s poetry and that’s what opened up the children’s poetry publishing world to me.”
“It wouldn’t have happened without
fighting against my own insecurities and fears – that maybe I can’t get published because there are very few black male authors doing children’s poetry, or writing picture books, and therefore no reason for me to think that I can. And that was hard.”
Libraries Marathon Joseph didn’t get much exposure to literature in his early years: “In my home, education was something that happened at school and stopped at the front door. You get these generational patterns that, by luck, I happened to break out of.” Despite this, his family’s love of word play was important. “My grandmother kept a funny Mabel Lucie Attwell poem above the toilet which I memorised by osmosis, and my mother would sing silly little ditties that I still know to this day.” At school English teachers passed on their enthusiasm to him and libraries –
8 PEN&INC.
both school and public – “have been hugely important in my life,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to have them next door and if they weren’t next door – and this is a really important point – I just would not have gone because we didn’t have a car.” Now, with public libraries under threat he said: “I really wanted to do something to celebrate and promote them. That’s why I’m doing the Library Marathon. In August I drove slowly up to Scotland and slowly back, and in three weeks I joined lots of library services.” During Libraries Week - which took place
as Pen&Inc went to press, Joseph aimed to join every library authority in London with a view to joining.every authority in the UK. Read his blogs on the topic and follow his journey on instagram. He’s still in talks about the end product of the marathon, but the idea is to start up a title for a children’s writer or illustrator –
a dedicated libraries champion who will take part in 10 to 15 free-to-the-library events per year.
l
www.thepoetryofjosephcoelho.com Twitter: @Poetryjoe
Instgram: josephcoelhoauthor Autumn-Winter 2019
Joseph Coelho
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