Poet Erin Fornoff: ‘I was feeling sick and blaming the boat for a long time, and then I was like, oh wait! I’m knocked up!’

Two months before the pandemic hit, the poet Erin Fornoff started living on a boat. She ended up being aboard for 4½ years. It was yet another intriguing chapter in the life of a fascinating poet, who rose through the Irish spoken word and performance poetry scene while achieving something to which performance poets often struggle to make the leap: publishing collections of her work. She is a much-loved poet in both spoken and written poetry circles in Ireland, known for her openness and support of other writers, as well as a sort of low-key brilliance that shuns self-promotion.

Fornoff, who is from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, had finished working on Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 when she moved to Ireland in the midst of the Great Recession. She had always been drawn to poetry, but hadn’t started writing seriously, or performed her work, until she moved here. “I think some of that,” she says of finding her creative footing at the time, “is that thing when you move to a new country and you can be whoever you want to be. And also the culture of it here.” She found the love and respect for poetry in Ireland “not a stereotype. That is a full-on, true statement about Ireland. It was a feasible thing you could do. You wouldn’t get an eyebrow raise or anything.”

Initially lonely upon emigrating, she would often leave her phone at home while she went out for an evening, for the simple reason that she had no numbers in it. Attending the Brown Bread Mixtape night, and poetry sessions in the basement of the International Bar, and upstairs in the Stags Head, she found a community. The first poem she read on stage was the wonderful Hymn to the Reckless, “I was so scared that I probably went to the loo 200 times before I got on stage. And this is not a good coping thing, but I used to drink four pints before I could get up there … One thing that’s nice about the culture here is if someone is taking a risk, or is new, just starting, people are relentlessly supportive and enthusiastic.”

Around half a decade later, she became a driving force behind the Lingo spoken word festival. This was preceded by more poetry nights, “other events, other gigs, you start to get asked to do stuff. Then you get paid to do something – that was mind-blowing. Then you start growing your ambition, trying different things, you get more comfortable on stage.”

A bucket-list goal was preforming at Glastonbury, which she achieved. “You think it’s going to be the best gig of your life, and then there’s 15 people in a tent. But it’s amazing the culture of it, these UK poets and the level of professionalism to what they were doing. I think maybe I wasn’t ready for that gig the first time. I was visibly anxious in between poems. I didn’t have any comfort on stage, unless I was performing the poem.” As her strength in performance grew, one of the things that began to feel like an achievement was “having a fluency on stage, have fun playing with an audience. It took me a while to learn the banter.”

Fornoff’s work is fundamentally about the human experience. Her words have a tendency to conjure immersive scenes, all tactile detail, full of colour, taste and a way of somehow making the meaty feel delicate. The result is an intoxicating nostalgia, filled with a love of people and place. “I remember once my partner said I really shared myself through poetry more than I did through speaking,” she says, “Maybe that is true.”

She has published a chapbook called Folk Heroes through a Scottish publisher, along with the collection Hymn to the Reckless. In 2025, We Are An Archipelago will be published, which she previously performed at the Dublin Fringe Festival.

Fornoff found life on the water to be a creative mode of living, “You are deciding where to go, where to live, and there are tonnes of artists on the boats – probably more artists than not.” Fornoff is now living in Clare. “The one thing I appreciate now, being in a house, is I have a desk for the first time in many years. Having that dedicated space is unfathomable luxury.”

On the barge, Fornoff wrote the first draft of a novel. She was the writer in residence for the Inland Waterways, which, she explains, “was a job I made up myself and got funding from the Arts Council Project Award – it’s such a great scheme, they’re doing great stuff there.” She hosted creative writing workshops for other boat-dwellers, a poetry and photography exhibition, wrote essays for Winter Papers and other outlets. During the pandemic, she and some boaters – the DJ and broadcaster Claire Beck, the musician Richy Kelly of Sounds of a System Breakdown, and others – began a five-month trip, travelling at about 6km/h. “It’s almost like a weird pilgrimage called the Green & Silver,” she says, “It’s a loop of the whole Grand Canal, going up the Shannon, crossing Lough Rea, going the full length of the Royal Canal and connecting through Dublin to the Grand Canal.”

On the Shannon, she was plagued by what she thought was seasickness, “I was blaming the boat for a long time, and then I was like, oh wait! I’m knocked up! I was just pregnant. We spent the second half of the trip completely freaking out about being pregnant, and puking my way down the Royal Canal. I’m definitely going to remember that for the rest of my life. It was creatively fruitful all right!”

For now, Fornoff is writing away in east Clare, and is also on the committee of the Mountshannon Arts Festival. She sometimes misses Dublin, “everyone misses Dublin who leaves,” she says, “but I have been told, and I think, that maybe I’m missing a Dublin that isn’t quite there any more. In my mind, everyone is still at the Brown Bread Mixtape. I have this joke with a friend where I’ll be like ‘everyone is hanging out at the Bernard Shaw without me!’ and he’s like, ‘Erin they tore that down to build offices’.”