“I gave up everything to write and perform. I gave up my career, my nine-to-five wage and worked three part-time jobs where I had less responsibility so I could have more time to write and trial workshops. I regret nothing!!!!! This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”
Sophie Sparham is a writer from Derby. She has written commissions for BBC Radio 4, The V&A and The People’s History Museum.
Sophie co-hosts the poetry night ‘Word Wise’ which won Best Spoken Word Night at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Last year she became the first poet to perform at the metal festival Bloodstock Open Air.
THE MAN WHO ATE 50,000 WEETABIX
‘If I was asked to make a film of my life / I’d capture every unextraordinary moment.’
‘The Man Who ate 50,000 Weetabix’ is a collection which explores the tension between masculinity and freedom in a Derbyshire setting. The poems weave between pubs, fathers, music and the expectations that we put on ourselves.
The collection is a celebration of the mundane: the graffiti on toilets doors, bad take away names, fake ID, Wetherspoons carpets, local Star Trek Appreciation fan clubs and the phrase ‘ay’up’. How everyday rituals and occurrences are weird and magical.
SAMPLE POEM
Sunrise Over Aldi
It won’t always be like this, somewhere
boys will put down their postcodes and weep
into tracksuits, step over double yellow lines
and loiter with one another. On the south side
of the city a mother will embrace her daughter
for the first time, try on her new name and
find that it fits her lips. Caroline she will say,
Caroline, Caroline, you look beautiful.
It won’t always be like this, somewhere
a seventy-year-old bird watcher will buy a motorbike
and find that he too can fly, a black woman
will show a mixed-race girl how to tie a headwrap
and something in her heart will leap. Somewhere,
someone will utter the words; I love you,
I miss you,
I’m sorry.
An atheist will speak Allah and smile at the taste
of honey on his tongue, the dead will climb out of
their graves and shake those standing in line
at the bank. Somewhere, you will look down at the
stars shooting across the duel carriageway and
decide to climb off the iron railings. In the shadow
of the service station, you will wait for dawn.
