Book Festival: Scots poet Len Pennie on raising awareness of mental health issues

When Pennie’s debut collection, Poyums, soared to the no. 2 slot in the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller lists, no one was more surprised than the author.

“I mean, you hope. Everyone who writes hopes. But it’s poetry, it’s poetry about dark things, it’s in Scots, it’s a debut collection, it’s a debut collection by a woman. I thought they were winding me up.”

But 24-year-old Pennie had the kind of fan base most poets can only dream of long before her book hit the shelves. Her Scots Word of the Day social media posts, which began on Twitter in 2020, quickly gained thousands of followers.

In October of that year, her poem, I’m no havin children, went viral, the coverage spilling over into conventional media. She now has 1.5million followers worldwide across her social media channels, 700,000 on TikTok alone.

During our conversation, I see both sides of Pennie. She can be articulate, funny, animated, but at times is also shy, anxious. While natural and confident in her video posts, she says she finds public speaking “absolutely terrifying”.

“My mum always says I’ll feel better when I get there, I try to hold onto that.”

She never intended to write a book. “For me, poetry is very ephemeral and temporal, it lives in the moment. You feel something, you write it down, you perform it, and you leave that moment behind. Also, I wasn’t in control of it [on the page], and I found that difficult. It was only when I started working with children, and they were telling me amazing things about the poems that had nothing to do with me, I thought, why not?”

Pennie was studying Spanish at St Andrews University when she started Scots Word of the Day. When lockdown began, she was furloughed from her restaurant job and on the rebound from a toxic relationship.

“I had left this situation where my sense of self had been completely eroded. I was trying to reconnect with my family and friends and figure out who I was. I needed a project and I’ve always loved words, I’ve always loved Scots.”

To her surprise, her posts were immediately popular. But there was a downside, too. As her following mushroomed, she became a target for social media trolls. One memorable poem in the collection, In Their Own Words, gathers the abusive comments she received in one two-day period, many of which are not repeatable in a newspaper. For them to be addressed directly to a vulnerable young woman feels hideous.

“People think going viral is the best thing that can happen. But you don’t ever - and I mean ever - want to hear 100,000 people’s opinion of anything, let alone you! There’s not a single part of me that hasn’t been ridiculed, picked apart. It would be fine if it was just name-calling, but it’s threats, misogyny, sexualisation, things you can’t get rid of when you go to bed at night. It’s been a lot to deal with.”

Pennie has been praised for how she deals with trolls, and has attracted support online from the likes of Neil Gaiman and Nigella Lawson. But her position feels all the more vulnerable because her poems often come straight from her own experience, from her battles with anxiety and depression, her determinaton to regain her sense of self after an experience of abuse. She has said that many of them were written crying in the bathroom.

“It’s definitely cathartic, to write and to perform. Also, I love the idea that you can take a nuanced powerful topic and exert control over it. With abuse or mental illness, you don’t have any power over these things, so it’s my way of proclaiming power [over them]. Plus if you’re trying to think up a rhyme for ‘eejit’ it takes you out of your head for a while.”

While the rhythmic, rhyming style is partly inspired by her experience of doing Burns recitations at school, she also aims to bring to her work the taboo-busting energy of slam poetry and rap. It’s genuinely ground-breaking to hear, and read, a young contemporary voice talking about tough, nuanced topics in Scots; Pennie has been called the “reinventor of the Scots language for the 21st century”.

She says she is deliberately challenging the attitudes many Scots grew up with about their language, and is clearly passionate about passing on this positivity, particularly to young people.

“If Scots is used in comedy, it’s fine. But if Scots is used academically or politically, or in any of these spheres that we’ve deemed English-only spaces, it isn’t welcome. What I wanted to do was to bring as much Scots as possible to these dark topics. I use Scots in therapy and, for a lot of people, it’s a language where those emotions are allowed to exist or percolate. I’d like to get back to a place where we can grieve in Scotland and celebrate in Scots, we can laugh and we can cry.”

She is as fiercely committed to this as she is to being honest with her audience about her personal struggles.

“I’m very honest about the mistakes and the failures, the bad days, the sad days and the ill days, because I think it’s very damaging to only create this culture of toxic positivity. You look online and you see very polished, very glossy, very happy people, and then if you’re not happy and polished and glossy you think ‘wow, I’m the problem.”

“Raising awareness is only one step, we’ve now got to take the next step which is acommodation and normalisation, making sure that people feel they can speak about it. The only way we’re going to get past the stigma is if we are able to see it more in the people that we watch.

“When I was at my most self-destructive and my most suicidal, you wouldn’t have been able to tell: I was showing up to work, I had make-up on, I was smiling. I want to promote this idea that you don’t have to put on that face, and burn the candle at both ends just to make sure you’re lighting up somebody else’s room.”

That’s a good phrase, I say. She grins. “I’m going to put it in a poem!”

Len Pennie is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 August at 5pm. Poyums is published by Canongate, price £14.99