Claire HM

Claire HM is a teacher, poet, storyteller, and early empty-nester. At the end of 2019, she achieved a lifelong ambition of completing a Masters in Creative Writing. Her essay in the anthology, I Wrote it Anyway: An Anthology of Essays ($1.57), describes her experience of accessing university, and the long journey of finding the confidence to write as a woman in her forties from a working class background. She is fervent about writing as a healing practice, and writes about identity within “othered” perspectives, desire and consent, reclamation of femmes, and sorceresses from Classical mythologies, and the politics and privilege of class and language.

Her poetry has most recently been published or is upcoming in Black Flowers Literary Journal, Cape Magazine, Mooky Chick, Nymphs, and Tears in the Fence. Claire’s first book-length publication, the novella ‘How to Bring Him Back‘, will be published by Fly on the Wall press in October 2021.

empty nest by the-dark-queen jumbleandflow

July 28, 2021

By Claire HM

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Empty nester: who will I be without dependent children?

Empty nesting is a complicated web of emotions, but for this 45-year-old English mum, it’s also an opportunity to revisit creative ambitions and carve out a new path forward.