Ren Dick on Becoming an Award-Winning Poet
Ren’s pronouns are she/they, so the pronouns in this article are ‘they/their’ to respect and reflect Ren’s gender identity.
Happy days ahead for the award-winning poet Ren. Photo provided by Ren Dick
As we sat down at a table tucked away in the back corner of the coffee shop, it was impossible not to be captivated by Ren’s infectiously enthusiastic personality. Ren Dick, 26, is currently a sports journalist at the BBC in Glasgow and has also proudly gained the title of award-winning poet. With the success they’ve had in the past 18 months, it’s almost too hard to believe that they were once too afraid to share their own poems.
Ren began reciting poems at the Inverclyde Music Festival, which also showcased creative storytelling and poetry recitals, and their memories of these were clearly very fond.
“My Head Teacher, Gerry Maguire, was a big, big fan of getting me to utilise my chatting and the ‘king of the showmanship’ that I have in a more productive way, so he put me forward for poetry competitions,” Ren stated as they began to recall their introduction to the world of spoken-word workshops and events.
“We always won first or second place and then, as I got a bit older, I started doing a bit of the standard Robbie Burns poetry competitions for school, and again I always did quite well; I always placed. For me, that sort of sparked something in me to do poetry performances, but I never really wrote poetry until I was like an angsty teenager.”
While they had been writing poetry since high school, it wasn’t until 2019 that Ren began sharing their poems with other people, but you would hardly know it talking to them now.
“I just sort of always wrote, and I enjoyed it, but I was a little bit too frightened to let people hear my work. The only people I would let hear is my best friend [and] maybe my mum. Then when the pandemic happened, about a month in, a friend sent me a post about a thing called The Scribbler’s Union.”
The Scribblers’ Union was started by award-winning writer and facilitator Kevin P. Gilday as a way to continue writing and performing with others during lockdown. Ren joined the collective in 2020, where they began sharing their poems to a group for the first time and started to find success in their poetry work.
After a successful few months of Ren sharing their work with the group and building their confidence, The Scribbler’s Union published its first book ‘The Scribbler’s Union Vol. 1’ on January 17th, 2021. The book managed to reach number seven in Amazon’s Poetry Anthology section on the day of its release.
“We were in esteemed company.” Ren beamed while talking about the book’s success.
“We were next to Stephen Fry and Rupi Kaur, and that was quite a buzz, I think. I mean, a lot of it will have been to do with the fact that not a lot of people were buying poetry books. It’s something you can hold and look back on, even if you don’t want to do something else.”
Ren performing at the Hug and Pint in September 2021. Photo Provided by Ren Dick
In May of this year, Ren was also one of five recipients of the Culture Matters ‘Bread and Roses’ award, after submitting the poem ‘Stay Home, Save Lives (Greenock)’. The award, open to entrants from the UK and Ireland, focuses on working people and poems with themes that mean something to working-class people. The award-winning poem highlighted the irony of Boris Johnson’s daily briefings and the motto “stay home, save lives”.
“We’re getting told in this briefing that we need to stay home, take care of ourselves, love thy neighbours and keep your distance and that’s how we’ll get out of the pandemic,” Ren sighed.
“Then, I also read at the same time that my hometown now has the highest murder rate in the UK, higher per 100,000 people than London… So I was thinking, these people are being told to stay home and save lives but what lives are they saving? I was really angry.”
Working-class themes are something that Ren is incredibly passionate about. Their face lights up when talking about the importance of highlighting more than just art from overly educated people, saying:
“Some of the best art I’ve seen is on the streets. It’s been street performing, busking, things like that; the real community and grass-roots stuff. It’s my bread and butter or my ‘Bread and Roses’.”
In their own work, Ren likes to incorporate parts of their lived experience.
“A huge part for me is that I grew up in a really socially deprived area. I grew up in what is now the murder capital of the UK and my childhood was a little ropey, a little rocky. So there’s tonnes of that to it, but almost jesting. I like to write in, not so much Scots, but slang; just the way we would talk.”
Ren’s poetry is raw, honest, funny, and moving in its portrayal of Scottish life. Not only is Ren succeeding in their attempt to reach people, but they are also part of a much larger movement of making art accessible.
The jump Ren’s made from being too afraid to share a poem with anyone, to performing and winning awards for their work about working-class life is a testament to what they fundamentally believe: art is for everyone, no matter what your background is.