Charlotte Cooper

I am a 45 year old Mum of a teenager, toddler and a baby who will forever be nine months old. I live in suburban Scotland with my children and labrador and up until a few years ago would not have considered myself a creative person. My professional life was spent in the corporate world, with little opportunity for cultivating creativity.

When my daughter Heidi died of sepsis in 2019, my whole world changed and part of me died along with her.

I had given up corporate life to be a SAHM after Heidi was born and mental health injuries prevented me from returning to work. I was adrift in a world that didn’t make sense to me, consumed by grief, anger and fear. Desperate for an outlet I organically rediscovered my childhood hobby of writing and wrote my first poem a few months after Heidi’s death. To retain a level of anonymity that I thought I needed at the time, I wrote under the initials CDH. Now I write without fear as Charlotte Cooper.

My daughter Heidi is the inspiration behind the book. She really hated wearing hats! After she died much of what I wrote was consumed with darkness and anger. One day whilst sharing memories of her with her sister, we laughed at how much Heidi hated hates and the alliteration ‘Heidi Hates Hats’ bounced around my brain for days after. I then wrote the full poem and surprised myself by starting to write others that were funny and heart-warming.

I wanted my first book to honour Heidi as much as possible, so the afterword contains signs and symptoms of sepsis and a donation is made to the charity Sepsis Research FEAT UK from sales of the book.

Sharing my work on social media has given me an education I wasn’t expecting. Without the amazing Instagram community I would never have attempted a Haiku or Tanka, wrote a spicy poem or allowed my fascination with the magic of the moon and fireflies to be explored.

Many of my fellow poets on social media are self-published and do their own marketing. I have learned a lot from them about the publishing process and inventive marketing ideas. It’s a wonderful community where we all learn from and support each other.

I sit with an idea or prompt for a while, let it marinate in my brain and see if it germinates into something. If it does, I write on paper and then on screen where a natural re-formation of words happens. Once I have something I like, I sleep on it.

I am naturally an impatient person so this has been hard for me to learn, but it is very valuable to come back to work the next day and see it with fresh eyes. If it still feels right and there’s nothing I want to change, I will run it through Auto Crit or post it on my Instagram page.

Heidi Hates Hats is a heart warming collection of poems about family life with small children. Heidi’s little brother Ray and the funny things he gets up to inspired many of the poems and the magical bedtime story The Prince of Patterned Trousers.

My father was my first creative influence. As a child he created bedtime stories for me and was a vivid story teller. He also instilled in me a love of the freedom and power of nature. I have an early memory of sitting atop a cliff gazing out to sea listening to the calming crashes of the waves. I still seek out a moment of solitude by the ocean whenever possible, that’s where I feel most connected to myself and the universe.

I am inspired by Jungian storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I have read her book Women Who Run With the Wolves many times. The beautiful poems of Rumi launched my self-love journey.

My friends and followers on Instagram have recently been my greatest support and inspiration.

The greatest challenge was all the new platforms and systems I had to learn how to use! I self-published my book through Amazon and created my own cover design and marketing campaign. There’s a lot to do as a self-published author, it’s definitely easier writing than it is publishing!

The flow of poems is important to me in a book. They have to make some sort of chronological sense. For example the poems in Heidi Hates Hats end with bathtime, bedtime and the magical bedtime story The Prince of Patterned Trousers.

The poems in my next book Igniting Intuition, an Ode to Feminine Rage chart my journey of self-love and self-discovery over a period of two years under the shadow of a toxic marriage.

If I ever feel blocked I spend time in nature. Either going for a walk, or planting and digging in the garden. I have had many a good idea whilst mowing the lawn!

Writing is my therapy for coping and processing my personal experiences. From the overwhelming grief following the death of Heidi to the toxic, abusive nature of my marriage.

The negative feedback always stays with you. A magazine once told me a story contained a ‘supreme lack of sentence variety’. I hated them for it at the time, but they were right. My writing improved so much after that rejection.

I have found the traditional literary and publishing paths to be saturated with aspirational authors, the different requirements for each body to be exhausting and my naturally impatient character does not fit into the landscape.

Connecting with authors on social media presented the self-publishing route to me. Whist it is so much more work, the level of control you have over how and when you publish suits my nature.

I have found with social media if people have something nice to say they will and if they don’t they just scroll past. I have learned so much and been hugely inspired by the poetry and writing community on Instagram. It is one of the most supportive and loving communities I have ever experienced and I am honoured to be a part of it every day.

I have a poem published in Tin Can Poetry magazine, prose in Cicadas Literary Journal, a poem in an upcoming Cerasus anthology and inaugural Poetic Reveries Magazine.

With every rejection and acceptance I’ve had I’ve learned something. But I won’t forget my first acceptance which was to Tin Can Poetry Magazine. Having a complete stranger rate my work as worth of publication gave me the confidence to keep writing!

I have another poetry collection coming out on 31/10/24 called Igniting Intuition, an Ode to Feminine Rage. A totally different collection to Heidi Hates Hats!

I am almost finished a collection of multi-genre short stories. Then I have two ideas for novels waiting for me! One centres on the collapse of a woman’s identity on the brink of motherhood and divorce and the healing power of female friendships. Think Marriage Story meets Steel Magnolias.

The other is a futuristic story where a faction attempt to create a utopian society amongst the survivors of a global flood, however it has a dark twist. Think Cabin In The Woods meets Mad Max.

After all that I may do a sequel to Heidi Hates Hats. I have many funny poems lurking in my notes app waiting to have life breathed into them!

I feel like this is a question for a best selling author, not me! I hope that my second poetry collection, Igniting Intuition an Ode to Feminine Rage, finds the women that need it. The downtrodden, abused, silenced women who need to know they’re not alone and the power they need to change their lives lies within themselves.

The title poem Heidi Hates Hats means the most to me as it was the first happy, upbeat poem I wrote since I’d started writing. Every poem up till then had been dark and laced with grief, I surprised myself when I wrote something happy and I was glad that my work could be muti-faceted and used to warm my own heart and hopefully the hearts of others.

A fellow author on social media mentioned the cover of the month competition All Author runs and I thought why not give it a shot! There are so many things I love about All Author, the review makers, promotional banners and automatic tweet scheduler. I wish you could schedule posts on all social media platforms, it would save so much time and time is one thing an indie author needs more of!