Clare Best came to read to us at the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society recently, and absolutely wowed everyone who was lucky enough to be there.

She read from her latest book, Excisions just out from Waterloo Press, and, amongst other things, allowed us to share her memories of her father (and his love of pink gin) as well as her experience after an elective double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery.

What I love best about Clare’s work – and indeed her reading – is that she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects but is never sentimental or loud. Instead, by examining her experiences so deeply, she allows you, me, the reader, to examine our worlds too. She’s also very funny.

Anyway, I knew immediately I wanted Clare to come on here and answer my five questions. So here she is…

When I was small, I wanted to be …
both a ballet dancer and a writer. I took ballet lessons from the age of five. I still have my first pair of point shoes somewhere – flesh-pink satin with yards of flesh-pink ribbon. I remember the excitement of putting them on, criss-crossing the ribbons up my ankles, and the wonderful blocky sound they made when I danced on points on the parquet floor of the church hall where I used to go for lessons. The ballet teacher once told me I was a born dancer. I turned red with pride. But I had to give up ballet when I was eleven and was sent off to boarding school – apparently there wasn’t room for it in the Timetable. And the Timetable was obviously the most important thing. Anyway, by then I had decided I really only wanted to be a writer. It took me a while to get there, a circuitous route via most of the book trades!

I may not say it aloud [often enough] but …
I don’t believe in having regrets. Someone wise once told me: You can only regret the things you don’t do. So I try, within reason, to do all the things I would like to do as well as the things I should do. And I don’t regret the things I have done – whichever way they’ve worked out in the end – because when I did them I tried to make sure that I thought everything through as far as I possibly could, then I made my choices and I did what I did.

The last time I went WOOP with excitement was …
probably skiing slightly too fast downhill or catching a good wave (not standing on the surfboard, I hasten to add, although I’m thinking of learning how to do that). I have a love of speed, though it’s suppressed most of the time. I think it came from both my parents – my father commanded motor torpedo boats in World War Two and my mother loved breaking the sound barrier when she flew by Concorde. She drove a Lotus Elan, into her 70s.

Something that never fails to give me inspiration is …
listening. I love being with people, and I love music, and I love activity and colourful things happening, and I listen to all that. And then I love stillness and quiet and solitude, and I listen to that in another way. If I can’t listen to the stillness to counterpoint the busyness, I quickly become exhausted, and creativity evaporates.

My five favourite words are:
Popocatepetl (it means ‘smoking mountain’ and it is the name of a volcano in Mexico) … because it is such fun to say – a sequence of small explosions in the mouth!
Blossom … because it was one of my first words. I feel deeply attached to it.
Veil … because it’s fascinating that the word came from the old French ‘voile’ which came from the Latin ‘velum’ meaning a sail.
Cachinnation (meaning a burst of loud or immoderate laughter) … because it is so odd.
Troth … because it was originally just another variety of ‘truth’.

So drop the veil, let troth be a popocatepetl as you continue to blossom, and may cachinnation sound out in all the best ways.

Thanks Clare!

Clare’s website is here, and you can read the two other ‘Five Sentences’ finishers here. More to come…