Ruth Allen

Writing is a way to logic when science fails me. I have been writing ‘with intent’ for a very short time, but I am getting increasingly preoccupied with it and hope I never run out of words. I started with short stories but everything ended as a poem, and however hard I try to tell a longer story, the poem form comes back like a faithful dog. I tend to take an autobiographical kernel and pop fictional corn with it.
My background in geology crops out variously in my work. I like the voice in the poem to explore places in the silence. I suppose they possess a certain melancholia and my obsession with the need for wilderness.

Biography

Ruth Allen was born in Essex in 1982. She spent the first few years of her life here, and returns to regularly to see family. She grew up in Bristol and has been moving northwards ever since via Birmingham and sometimes Norfolk. She has been in Lancaster for four years, settling here after completing her geology PhD. She works at Lancaster University in a job that reflects little about her.

She is due to start an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster in the autumn 2009.

Reflection on the poems in The Crowd Without

I keep coming back to the role of the coast in growing-up. Whether it’s growing-up at the coast, or visiting the coast at various times of your life. There is something desperate about the land falling away to the sea, and if I am there for an hour, a week or several years it always changes something in me. The shaping of identity is always a theme in my work. Coastal happenings are a great ready-made metaphor that I like to re-examine and play with.
 

Listen to Ruth read Reclamation from The Crowd Without, Flax018

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