Fiona Hutchings - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 8 / 7 / 2025

“Poetry is changing a lot,” Fiona Hutchings tells Pennyblackmusic in an interview about her second book of poetry, ‘Uncommon Labels;’, which was published last year. “But when I was a kid, it seemed that poetry was written in a very particular way by a very particular person. The first poem that I ever wrote I actually became a finalist with on the BBC ‘Jackanory’ 25th Anniversary Competition.” “I wrote a poem about someone I saw on the bus going home in Sheffield. That would have been in the late ‘80s, and it was all very exciting, I started writing poetry after that in the way that I thought you were meant to write poetry. Iwhich was with a poetic voice, and I showed something to my English teacher, and she said, ‘I don’t know what that is. Go back to writing it in your own voice,’ That was an incredibly important lesson for me, to use my own voice.” What shines through in ‘Uncommon Labels’, which follows on from a previous volume of poetry ,’The Chip On My Shoulder is Gluten Free’ is Fiona’s voice – matter-of-fact, earthy, working class and often caustically funny. It looks at the labels and titles that have been given to her by society over the years, and those that she sometimes has put on herself. It tells of her Sheffield upbringing in poverty, and in which she had to rely on free school and other children’s cast -off clothes to survive. There are poems about her near-death experience when she suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2011, and a second aneurism, for which she had to go through another life-or-death operation in 2017. She writes too in this sparky collection about music, her family and what it means to be working class. We spoke to Fiona, who has written for Pennyblack for over fifteen years, about ‘Uncommon Labels’. PB: The main theme of ‘Uncommon Labels’ is the labels that society and people put on each other. Did you set out with that big theme in mind o is that something which developed as you kept writing poems? FIONA HUTCHINGS: It wasn’t a conscious thing to start with. Quite often with poetry a line or an idea will pop into my head and that generally starts it off. I often don’t know where I am going when I start writing, but it started to become apparent that this was my main theme, and I began to write poems directly about labels. There have always been labels in my life because I was born female, working class, Northern, and born with a congenital disease, I have been disabled since birth, and some of the labels that were used for that in the 1980s were much less user friendly than some of the ones they use now (Laughs). It was also important to me that there were things in there about the labels I chose for myself as wel.. There are labels that I chose to reject, but there were labels as well that I chose for myself or for which I accepted the ones that I had been given. So, I wanted it to feel balanced in that regard. Labels can be uniformly seen as a bad thing, but labels can sometimes be very validating and help us understand ourselves better. To start with, I wasn’t thinking about writing a book, but the poems just kept coming, and the title cane really late. I am normally quite bad at titling things, and that was one of the last things as it all came together. PB: Michael J Fox has said about Parkinson’s Disease that he sees it as one level a gift. Do you feel for all the grief that it has caused you and the fact that it almost killed you the same way about your brain haemorrhage? FH: I definitely see it in some ways as a gift. At that point when it happened in 2011, I was really unhappy in a lot of ways. I was being bullied in a job that I didn’t like. I was training be a therapist by that stage, but I was clinging on to the idea that once I had qualified only then would I be able to change things. Having gone through that, it has made me change my perspective on life and made me a better person in a lot of ways. I was offered the chance to go to New York recently and to read some of my poetry over there, and I jumped at the chance, whereas before I would have come up with every excuse for not going. It has also meant that i stopped putting up from shit with people that I should have stopped putting up with a long time before. It was harder in some ways when they discovered the second brain aneurism. When it happened the first time, I was surviving on cigarettes, too much caffeine, too little sleep and junk food. I had lost a lot of weight by the second time. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. I didn’t even have fizzy drinks. I wasn’t supposed to have another brain aneurism. That felt harder and I was really angry for a while. I kept thinking., “Is this the day it is going to happen again?” which hadn’t been a thing after the first brain haemorrhage at all, but then I eventually thought, “If it happens for a third time, I will know what it feels like. I4 won’t be left in A and E for hours,” and “If I do die, I will not know anything about it,” At that point I thought, “ I can live with that. I have got to make the most of what I have got.” I do take a tremendous amount of comfort from that whenever and however I die the people who I am closest to and care about will know that I did so much more stuff that made me happy. I thought a lot about how if I lost someone and knew that they were deeply unhappy how much harder that would make it, so it removed a lot of fear ultimately. PB: In ‘Being My Carer’ you have written about your two then very young childrem having to grow up being your carer as a result of you having the brain haemorrhage. Is that the most diifficult thing about it, that your children have lost a lot of their childhood just looking after Mum? FH: Yes. I was a young carer as well, and I really had not wanted that for my children. A couple of weeks after we had our first child Ary in 2006 my husband Chris was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis which affects his immune system, and he is sometimes quite unwell, They have no memory of life before we were both ill, and they have made a lot from it and |I am very proud of both of them. I think they are both incredible human beings. They have tried to use their experiences to help other people. It is horrible when your three year old is trying not to make too much noise because your head hurts too much They literally went to bed one night, and they woke up the next morning and the house was full of other people, and Chrishad to have this horrific conversation with them before he left to go to hospital where I was about to go into surgery. It was most children’s worst nightmare. If I could take it back, I would, but I can’t, can I? PB: You have brought up two amazing children, who are fantastic. FH: Yeah, they are. I know I am biased, but they are. PB: In ‘Music Nerd’ you write about being a massive fan of music and not being able to listen to music for a long time after the haemorrhage. How long did that last? FH: The first gig I went to after the haemorrhage was for Pennyblack, and it was a solo gig with Mark Morriss from The Bluetones. It was an acoustic gig in a very small environment, and that was the only way I was able to do it at all. That was in 2013, and It was almost two yeara since I had had the haemorrhage by then, It was so disorientating suddenly not being able to listen to music because I had listened to music and made play lists and mix tapes for as long as I remember. When I was in hospital, people coming to visit and bringing gifts would often bring CDs. Chris brought a bag with my ukulele and my ipod in. That was the first thing that he did . He knew that I didn’t go anywhere \without my ipod and I couldn’t bear to listen to it. It was like having the worst migraine for months and months, I have always got at least one song playing somewhere in my head, usually after people say something that reminds me of a song lyric, and that is constant. It always has been. It wasn’t even silence. It was just other people’s noise that I couldn’t block out. I couldn’t really use music even when I started blogging again soon after, and I would listen to it as low down as possible if I was listening to it. It was otherwise too painful. I had my phone headphones with me the second time I went into hospital for brain surgery in 2017, and the first time I was on my own a couple of days after I had surgery I put my earphones in, played something, and went, “Good. We’re fine,” because I really couldn’t go through the risk of going through that again. It was too much. PB: ‘Living Eulogy’ is about your friends commenting about it on Facebook after you were rushed to accident and emergency directly after you had had the haemorrhage in 2011. That must have been a very odd experience reading all these comments from people wondering whether you were going to live or die. FH: Yeah, it was really bizarre. I don’t think that when anybody was doing that on my wall that they were doing it with an eye that people were going to be reading it at some point. With the way social media is now, we almost ignore the fact that somebody will look at that later on if they want to. It was very immediate, That poem is one of the very few of mine that if Chris or the children are at an event I don’t read. I didn’t read it at my book launch either because a lot of my friends were there and I knew that they would find it deeply painful. That poem is a kind of an amalgamation of their comments. The reason why I wrote it was to show how really weird it is when something like this happens, but I also saw it is a way of capturing what people actually talk about and think of at such a time. I am very lucky in that I have had my core friendship group for over 25 years now and since we were all at uni. We have always rushed to help one another if there are problems, and tag teamed each other. One of the things that I took a great deal of comfort in when I did go back and read all these comments was to see them all looking after each other. I also knew if I hadn’t made it they would have looked after my children in the same way they looked after each other. PB: You say on ‘I’m Not Middle Class’ that you are working class but you have gone through all the statutory middle class things like going to college and getting a degree. What’s your definition of working class? FH: To me, it is I having no back-up. There is no family money. If it all goes wrong, and it nearly has in the past, then it is all on me. I either make enough money to live on or I am screwed. I have gone back to university and I am currently doing a Master’s in Creative Writing, but unlike my counselling I didn’t have to pay for that upfront, I am actually better off now doing a degree and getting a student loan in my mid-forties than when I was trying to support myself as a 19-yearold with part-time, unpredictable hours. I recently got in a taxi. As I am disabled, I get a fund for taxis and, as soon as I got in the taxi and told the driver that I wanted to go to the university, the driver seeing where I lived, which is in a very working class neighbourhood, said, “I didn’t think people from your area went to university,.” I came from a very poor background. There was no money especially when I was a young child, but I also had parents who valued education and books and reading. I was called posh at school because I used the correct term for things, but often there was not much food, no new clothes and I wore shoes with holes in. Class in this country is a very loaded term. I think having been that kid, having to rely on free school meals – I write about it in ‘They Said They Were Poor Too’ - it was very much drummed into me by my classmates and some other adults about not getting ideas above your station, there being a certain level of education and attainment. I remember thinking as a kid that I was not meant to write poetry, but at the same rime I came from this household where you could read books and also do poetry. There were a lot of other issues at home but that was very much encouraged. I remember thinking. “I don’t really understand what I am meant to do because I am getting really conflicting messages from everywhere.” PB: You make the point in ‘They Said They Were Poor Too’ that at the time of Brit Pop all these otherwise very middle-class people started adopting working class accents, wearing National Health specs and pretending to be much poorer than they were. Why do you think they chose to do that? FH: It has always confused me why people wanted to do that. I remember the first time that I heard ‘Common People’ by Pulp just sitting there and thinking, “That is literally my life, “You could get away with slumming it back then, while having your hand in your wallet. As someone who had to choose between a packet of pot noodles and a pint of milk, and that would have to do me for two days because of poverty, it used to make me pretty angry. When you know what poverty is, why would you want to 4xperience it ? It is horrible. I remember meeting people who had bullied me at junior school for having charity clothes and then ten years later it was the height of fashion. I remember thinking, “When did those rules change? And why are you starting to sa6y you’re from the Manor. . Why are starting to pretend you’re not posh?” PB: Final question. Where do you go from here with your poetry? Arre you planning a third volume? FH: Yes, I am formulating ideas for a poetry collection looking more broadly at Sheffield and Sheffield’s identity. There is something unique there about Sheffield, which comes out especially with all our music, whether it be Pulp, Def Leppard or Reverend and The Makers – Self-Esteem is Rotherham but we’ll adopt her – but it is there in all our culture. I want to work out why that is, but also why so many brilliant bands come from there. PB: Thank you.

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