FEATURE

Accidental poet Katrina Naomi shares her creative practice and how swimming helps her out of her head and into her body

I’m writing this mid-November with a hot water bottle stuffed inside my cardy. It’s the first time this season that I’ve noticed my fingers fumbling with the zip of my anorak after a swim (yes, sea swimming in winter is a highly glamorous business) and I need my fingers for writing, as well as for swimming. But I’m here to talk about the positives of sea swimming, year-round, as far as creativity is concerned. I find a lot of benefits to sea swimming, not least that I enjoy it, that it puts me in a very good mood, and that I’m dead keen to get to my writing desk as soon as I’ve swum.

I’m a poet, it’s my job – a strange sort of job I’ll grant you, but then a lot of people think sea swimming outside of August is a strange thing. I’m quite happy to fit into both categories of oddity here.

I haven’t always written. I got into poetry by accident. I hated poetry at school. There was nothing I could relate to. I found it pompous, elitist and dull. It wasn’t until I was 30 that someone read me a poem by the US poet Sharon Olds, which they followed up with a Mark Doty poem, and I found myself thinking, if that’s poetry, then I’m in. A bit like the sea.

So what’s the link between creativity and swimming for me? Being a poet, I spend a lot of time inside my head, which isn’t always the healthiest of spaces. Swimming has enabled me to reconnect with my body and this has really freed my poetry up. I could give you a lot of scientific stuff about sea swimming and creativity, talk of synapses and the like but I’m a creative nerd and whenever I meet another writer or a visual artist, I want to know what their process is – what makes them write, paint or bash clay around. So here’s my process.