When I began my English degree in 2019, Seán Hewitt was known as the well-dressed professor with a beautifully curated Instagram. Today, he’s an internationally renowned author and poet, with countless literary awards under his (ever-fashionable) belt. Despite having haunted the fourth floor of the Arts Block for many years, I somehow managed to evade Hewitt, and meet him for the first time at a crumb-covered table in Bestseller, where we sit down to talk about his writing.
Hewitt’s debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, was published in April 2020. While the most exciting event in my life was an Irish Writing exam being cancelled, Tongues of Fire was racking up awards and shortlist nominations. Since then, Hewitt has gone from strength to strength, with his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, being released last year. As a result, Hewitt was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, with one judge describing his writing as “visionary and gemlike.” Hewitt wrote All Down Darkness Wide in the summer research period, before college started back up in late September. He tells me, “It was a good distraction to have teaching.” He’s now both lecturing and working on two new books, a balancing act which is admittedly “not so fun”.
Ghosts of poets, lovers, and lives haunt All Down Darkness Wide. Hewitt has referred to it many times as a ‘Gothic memoir’, but reveals that his original vision for the book was very different to its final form. When he wrote the opening chapter, he was writing a ghost story. “It retains the ghost story form,” he says, “because we don’t have a good language for talking about mental health.” For Hewitt, the language of the Gothic is much better than that of the clinic. His memoir also utilises Gothic tropes: death, isolation, ghosts, and haunted houses. Two historical figures float at the periphery of the narrative, poets Gerard Manly Hopkins and Karin Boye. Hewitt describes them as “guardian angels, or ghosts”, in keeping with the Gothic themes of history haunting the present.
The ghosts most present in the novel are those of past lovers. The book begins with the untimely death of a university paramour named Jack, although the majority of All Down Darkness Wide focuses on Hewitt’s relationship with Elias, a Swedish man. Hewitt moves to Gothenburg to be with him, but his life takes a darker turn when Elias’s mental health and suicide attempt consume the relationship. “The older you get,” explains Hewitt, “the more you bring to bear on every relationship you have, because you have all of these ghost relationships to which you compare it.” Not just relationships, he clarifies, but even people that you yearned for and idealised. “You’re haunted by the idea that something has gone wrong before, so you try to prevent it.”
All Down Darkness Wide was a departure from Hewitt’s previous work, both in form and content. I was particularly struck by the architectural aspects of the book, a contrast to his poetry, which often centres the natural world. Hewitt explains that despite the different forms, the core of both works remain the same. The memoir presents “isolation, but surrounded by people,” versus his poetry, “isolation, but surrounded by the non-human.”
Hewitt has a second collection of poetry, the recently-announced Rapture’s Road, coming out next year. Although the book is made up of individual poems, Hewitt views it as a continuous narrative. Does he return to nature in this work? “It’s kind of a nature poem,” he explains, “but I would say it’s more like a dream sequence. I left the real world behind a little bit.” Like All Down Darkness Wide, Rapture’s Road looks to history, but unlike the man-made world of his memoir, it “has a fear of environmental collapse hanging over it.” The work is set in a dream-version of Phoenix Park, close to where Hewitt lives. He was drawn to the history of the park, a place of danger, murder, and outlaws, in addition to its status as one of Dublin’s oldest cruising hotspots. “I’m so fascinated by the idea that it’s this alternate world at night,” he says. We talk briefly about the similarities between cruising and rewilding, two topics he found himself returning to in the poems. He recalls when Gardaí were arresting people for cottaging in the M&S toilets: “It was basically entrapment. You had, again, this sense of threat, people trying to create a “normalised” sexuality, which felt very retro.”
Hewitt dove more into history in 2021 when he was appointed as the first poet-in-residence at the Irish Queer Archives. “There was a huge amount of reading,” he says of the experience. “The archive is massive. I was there for about three months and I only scratched the surface.” Helped around by GCN and its co-founder, Tonie Walsh, Hewitt describes the experience as “humbling”. As poet-in-residence, Hewitt was tasked with writing 10 poems. He admits that faced with the scale of the archives, this was a bit daunting. “I began by thinking, ‘I have to condense 300,000 documents into 10 poems’,” says Hewitt. In the end, he settled on around six sets of documents, and worked the research into the poems. These contain phrases from newspaper articles, footnotes, and erasure poems (“Not on the original documents,” he assures me). “I realised that I wanted to let the archive kind of speak for itself,” Hewitt tells me. “Anytime I tried to come in as Seán with a voice, I thought, ‘I’m making this too much about me.’” He fought the impulse to write about his own life, and instead gave voice to queer history.
His other forthcoming project also concerns desire that has historically been punished or erased. 300,000 Kisses is a collection of classical queer romances due to be released this October. It’s a collaboration between Hewitt and artist Luke Edward Hall. “The classics are full of really wild things that we’re never taught or given access to,” which Hewitt reveals are at the heart of the anthology. The book features well-known gays of antiquity (think Achilles and Patroclus) alongside some of these more obscure tales. “Some of the stories that we found had been deliberately cut out of English versions in the 19th Century and never put back in,” he says, “so it’s quite nice to be able to put them back in.”
One of the main challenges Hewitt and Hall encountered when working on 300,000 Kisses was keeping it from becoming all-out erotica. “Some of the tales, if they were written today, would be classed as deliberately subversive literature,” Hewitt says, laughing, “but they’re classics!” He summarises one of his favourite stories as an example, which features a shepherd propositioning the god of wine, a quest to the underworld, an untimely death, and a dildo carved from a fig tree. He stresses that this doesn’t mean the ancient world is without shame or rules. “They have their own system, but it’s so different from ours. It shows that everything is very arbitrary, and could be very different.”
Sexuality and nature were more closely associated in ancient times than in the present, a theme that pops up both in 300,000 Kisses and Hewitt’s poetry. “I like the idea that the earth is full of longing and desire, so it’s only natural that the people are too,” he explains. For Hewitt, one of the many allures of the nature poem is the way it “draws a correlation between all these impulses we’re trying to regulate that happen without consciousness in plants.” Animals and their lack of shame around sex are also part of this correlation. Hewitt points out that this doesn’t sit well with people. “We see animals’ desires as analogous to our own in a way that makes us embarrassed.” He jokingly evokes the image of a father covering his daughter’s eyes while watching animals mate in a nature documentary, and states: “People endlessly surprise me with their prudery.”
There are sections in All Down Darkness Wide where Hewitt delves into ideas of shame and desire. When he was growing up, he would talk to other gay teenagers on anonymous forums and arrange to meet up. I was interested in this idea of the way we as queer people have to fictionalise ourselves as a form of protection. He tells me that homophobia of the early 2000s, “kind of emphasized to me the idea of secrecy in sexuality. Those two things became interlinked, because I had to be secret in order to find people.” For Hewitt, adolescence consisted of trying on roles and trying to find a place to fit. He admits he was an emo for a good few years (“I straightened my hair and I had, like, a big bleached thing in it”) because it was accepting of androgyny in a way wider society wasn’t. “As you grow out of that, you have to find something else to be,” he says. “But I don’t think you ever really stop trying to find someone to be.”
So, what is Hewitt trying to be now? Should we expect an emo module next year? “The emo fringe is coming back,” he jokes, before pausing to confess that honestly, he doesn’t quite know. When Hewitt graduated college, it was into the post-crash economy, a reality that current students are also facing. Hewitt stresses the similarities: “There were strikes, there were protests, there was no money.” It was a world away from the life of his parents’ generation. “I spent a lot of my 20s as everyone does; working very hard to try and get purchase on the world. Because you feel kind of locked out of it.”
He cuts himself off, clarifying that he doesn’t mean to be all “doom and gloom”. I reassure him that our generation is pretty resigned to the current state of things. As an English student, I’m under no illusions that the job market will treat me kindly. He felt the same when leaving college, and recalls how hard he worked in his 20s “just to try and get somewhere.”
Now, in his early 30s, he has less to prove, and is leaning into that. How is he finding it? “It’s very peaceful,” he tells me. “I would recommend.”
Seán Hewitt’s poetry collection Tongues of Fire and memoir, All Down Darkness Wide are available now. 300,000 Kisses is forthcoming from Particular Books in October 2023. Selected poems from his time as poet-in-residence at IQA are available in Icarus 73.2.