Cork poet Victoria Kennefick on diving deep into the personal
Victoria Kennefick is from Shanagarry in Co Cork.
Victoria Kennefick admits that she cried while writing almost every poem in her second collection, Egg/Shell. The Tralee-based writer and teacher (currently on leave from her secondary school teaching job), who is originally from Shanagarry in Co Cork, says she cries regularly. Crafting her deeply personal poetry, Kennefick says the process is cathartic for her.
“When a poem is on the page, I can stop running from particular feelings, emotions or situations,” she says.
Her first collection, Eat or We Both Starve, addressed, among other subjects, eating disorders, Catholicism and Irish history. The book won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
For Kennefick, writing is not therapy. “But I get some sort of relief from writing,” she says.
Writer-in-residence for 2024 with Cork County Council, Kennefick always wanted to be a writer. Through her practice, she channels her experiences, distilling the emotions that accompany life’s events.
Probably the most dramatic event in her life to date was her former spouse coming out as a trans woman. “It was very difficult for both of us in many different ways. It took a lot of discussion and patience and understanding to really realise that it was ultimately for the good. I’m really glad it happened but it was a very challenging time. There are positives and negatives to every single change, whether you’re getting married and leaving your single life behind, having a baby where you leave your sense of being an individual person behind or moving country. Whatever it is, there are always losses and gains. I’ve really worked on looking at what I’ve learned from the experience. I think this book helped me to make sense of it.”
Kennefick and her former spouse, who are co-parenting their six-year-old daughter, are still very good friends. “We get on really well. It’s all very amicable. We both really care about each other. I feel lucky that we’ve managed to maintain that. We do a lot of family things together. One of my quests is to find a word to describe a female that you co-parent with, that’s not a sister or an aunt. It’s a new relationship.”
Kennefick’s new collection also deals with infertility. She has had a number of miscarriages and suffered from secondary infertility. “I’m very lucky to have a beautiful child and I didn’t really expect any complications or difficulties in my attempts to create more people, as my first was without complication. I was quite blindsided when I did have issues. The book is an attempt to grapple with that new reality.”
Writing during the pandemic, Kennefick and her daughter used to visit a lake close to where they live. There was a pair of swans who had built a nest and there were eight eggs in it. “We were all excited about it. But I remember the realisation after a couple of weeks that these eggs weren’t going to hatch. I was going through my own experiences of something very similar. It just felt like everything was connected.”
During this time, Kennefick’s ex-spouse came out as transgender. “It changed the whole book as well as my life. I started to research transgender issues to try to understand what was happening. I found out that one of the words for someone who doesn’t yet realise they are transgender is ‘egg.’ When the person has an epiphany that they’re trans, it’s called ‘cracking your egg'.”
The collection was already about eggs, because of the swans. It’s also about the transformation involved when a life partner’s identity changes. “If anything, it further emphasised the theme of the book and gave it a totally different perspective. The idea of cracking one’s egg is such a beautiful metaphor. You have to break something, obviously and you can’t put it back together again. But something beautiful emerges out of that, something hopeful and new, the next level of the person’s essence.”
Egg/Shell is divided into two sections. “The ‘egg’ part is around infertility and motherhood while the ‘shell’ part is witnessing the transgender experience. You’re an observer rather than a participant.”
Kennefick has the blessing of her co-parent to publish the poems. They do not attempt to explain her former spouse’s experience. “These poems are very much focused on how I dealt with the shift from being a wife in a seemingly heterosexual relationship to being something else and I realise now, someone else entirely,” says Kennefick.
- Egg/Shell, by Victoria Kennefick is published by published by Carcanet Press and will be launched on Wednesday, February 21, at Waterstones Cork at 6.30pm. At the event, she'll be interviewed by fellow-poet Thomas McCarthy
