As I navigate my way through the complex maze of cottages and battlements just off Bridge Street, I eventually locate the loaf-shaped house of Vona Groarke, writer-in-residence at St John’s College and celebrated Irish writer in a wider professional capacity.

Situated between tasteful Kettle’s Yard prints and bookshelves filled to the nines, I was very lucky to grab just under an hour’s wide-ranging chat with Groake about her work at the college, the nature of her previous success, and plans for the future.

“Eight hours of Groarke’s day are reserved for privacy and seclusion”

For starters, Groarke’s principal roles at the college are provision for students, for whom creative expression isn’t part of the formal curriculum, including, recently and notably, the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies. Groarke maintains her own writing alongside this work, which she acerbically refers to as her employment contract’s “header”. Having commenced her role at St. John’s in October 2022, Groarke highlights not just her pleasure at working within the college, but also creative partnerships forged externally: Professor Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, a colleague at St. John’s and supervisor/lecturer in the field of Celtic and Medieval Studies, and her students, assisted Groarke’s creative adaptation of the ninth-century poem ‘The Lament of the Hag of Beare’, which culminated in her 14th book, Woman of Winter (2023). The ‘Hag of Beara’ is a mythic Irish goddess who, in the original medieval poem, laments her rapidly passing youth. Groarke tells me that this celebrated project, among others, would not have come about had it not been for the experiences and networks Cambridge provides.

A key thread in our conversation was Groarke’s deft articulation of a “patchwork life”: a prolific artist for over 30 years, the chief pleasures of St. John’s academic resources, Groarke outlines, lie in the conversation to be had with literature: that is, the “atmosphere of hard intellectual endeavour” present at Cambridge, with its wealth of resources, “foster[s] creativity.” There was great pleasure to be had in Groarke’s description of her process when in residence at college — eight hours of the day are reserved for “privacy” and “seclusion”, with afternoons opening up to an atmosphere of “sociability and collaboration”, an atmosphere Groarke highlights as ideal.

This seems particularly key due to the range of residencies Groarke has enjoyed over a long career: the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, for instance, consisted of several weeks of total seclusion from the outside world. Another residency saw Groarke spend time at the New York Public Library, the product of which was 2022’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, a fiery, form-mixing account of her grandmother’s emigration to New York in the 1880s, and subsequent expatriate life. Groarke finds inspiration both in Cambridge’s capacity and intellectual expanse. John Kerrigan (with Archipelagic English, 2008) and Clair Wills (Missing Persons, 2024), are good examples of leading scholars of Irish literature who share Cambridge’s sphere of literary studies with Groarke. As well as being a thriving intellectual space, though, Groarke has found delight in Cambridge’s private and internal aspects, for example her mentorship of students, with all its “spectrum of regularity” and the freedom to try things out. All this to say that Cambridge’s “vibrant literary culture” proves that “the practice of writing has some value”.

“Remaining an outsider is a great place for the creative mind to be”

Returning to The Telling Life, produced in part during her tenure as an NYU Cullman Center Scholar, Groarke notes that this piece could “only have been [written] at this stage of my life”, and not a moment earlier. The experimental work, in her words, emerged out of the “dissolution of caution”, the ability to take a risk or, if you’ll indulge me one more description, a remarkable aptitude for spinning plates. It was only in the “doing” that her “intuitive sense of what [she] thought would work” was realised — quoting Roethke, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, and also quoting Groarke: “I learn by going where I have to go.”

Groarke is also frank about her status as an Irish writer working in Cambridge, sometimes drifting into thoughts of being an “outsider”, or perhaps not a “natural insider”. Yet it’s that kind of transient existence, she goes on to explain, which is a “great place for the creative mind to be” — gratefully “admitted to, but not defined, in the space one is placed in”. An instructor at Manchester University for over 17 years, frequent judge of poetry prizes and something of an Irish cultural ambassador, Groarke’s openness and impulse towards doing are, I think, useful lessons for anyone at any stage in their creative process.

We finish off discussing the future. There’s the bare bones of a ninth poetry collection in the works, and a book of essays close to a comfortable revision space (Groarke is spending part of her summer at the houses of John Clare and Thomas Dorchester). Yet, regardless of what Groarke is working on, her playful relationship with language and texts will endure. When I ask her about what she’d like her legacy at St. John’s to be, approaching her final year of residency, we settle on “visibility” — for students first and foremost, as a Writer in Residence really in residence, but also in the numerous other avenues Groarke has had the opportunity to explore while at Cambridge.