Guest Poet: Esther Lay
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This month, I'm delighted to share the work of Esther Lay as The Jotter's Guest Poet. I hope you enjoy reading three of her poems and her insights on writing below; feel free to like, share widely and subscribe to the blog for more.
Esther Lay is a British-American priest, poet, and classical singer living in Oxfordshire. She is the winner of the 2025 East Riding Festival of Words Poetry Prize (earning a Forward Prize nomination) and the 2024 Write By The Sea Poetry Prize. She has been placed or highly commended in numerous international competitions, including the Bridport Prize, Write Out Loud, Plaza Prizes, Charles Causley International Prize, Four Faced Liar Prize, Passionfruit Prize, and Ware Poets; shortlisted in the Winchester Poetry Prize, New Writers Prize, and Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year; and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in Waxed Lemon, Grain, Thimble Lit Mag, Rust & Moth, 14 Magazine, Passionfruit Review, Four Faced Liar, and Magma, and she has forthcoming work in Poetry London. Her debut collection will be published by Corsair in March 2028.
Interview
Why do you write?
To preserve memories, make sense of things, and be surprised; but maybe most importantly, to just play with language. That last is the thing that keeps me going when everything else falters.
More specifically, I might see or hear something that needs capturing: ideas come in the form of a mental image, or I hear a line in my head and need to write it down and see where it will lead; or a sadness or joy asks to be given a verbal shape. Sometimes I slice into an onion and feel a weird transcendence because of the way the light falls on it. I write to engage with being human while I’m still alive - if the novel is a roiling pot of soup, a poem is a stock cube. Writing one is a process of boiling things down to what’s essential. And I write until the thing that’s been hanging around in the periphery of my vision is finally clear on the page, and fits (crucially) into a metered shape. Giving poems rhythm feels like a way of bringing some order to the world.
How do you write?
By hand in first drafts; digitally thereafter. I write in the bath, on park benches, in the pub, on the sofa, and in bed, if it’s the middle of winter -- almost never at a desk. This makes me sound wholesomely anachronistic, but in fact my first collection was written almost entirely on my phone, with my thumbs, and edited that way too with occasional crackings-open of the laptop. I wrote the poems that make up the book in the middle of the night while breastfeeding, largely, and edited them lying on my side too, and while walking to and from my theological college during ordination training. It’s a miracle I never fell in a hole or walked into a lamppost. In my curacy (whose poems make up the middle section of the book), I did a lot of editing on public transport, again on my phone. Nowadays I work part-time and set aside specific hours to work on poems, so I find myself sitting in the luxury of a sunny living room, totally alone, moving things around on the page. I reference paintings quite a lot at the moment, but ultimately all I’m doing is noodling around, trying to make it sound as good as possible.
When I moved to pen and paper, I was shocked at how self-conscious I felt putting ink on a page, having got into the habit of typing, but the result has been a general improvement. First drafts seem to emerge at a higher quality than they did when I was typing them directly onto the screen. We all need to get off of our addictive blue screens and do things with physical materials and our actual hands.
When do you write?
Daily. As an Anglican priest, we have an obligation to say the Daily Office - morning and evening prayer - and while I don’t always succeed at that, I do somehow manage to write every day. I dread to think what this says about my priorities. But (and I hope this doesn’t sound like a cop-out) I also use writing deliberately as a form of prayer: to process things, speak to God, and articulate any images that come up in my own encounters with the mysterious or numinous. If prayer is “absolutely unmixed attention”, as Simone Weil put it, writing and editing poems comes awfully close to that.
I’m lucky to work part-time now as a parish priest, so there are often half-days and occasionally whole days that I can spend writing and editing. When I started in 2020, poetry was an escape: my first marriage was ending and I was effectively single-parenting two very small children (and shortly after, definitely single parenting), and poetry gave me a huge amount of pleasure when life was very hard, exhausting, and dark. Now that things are significantly happier and easier, the writing has got fatter and taken its proper place in the big armchair: something that occupies a great deal of time and is allowed to compete with parish work and childcare. And of course there’s other writing-adjacent work: reading, submitting to prizes and journals, speaking, teaching. I run a local workshop in my parish but have also developed something of a specialism for teaching and leading quiet days focused on the intersection between poetry and prayer, and I love this kind of work.
The other half of this answer is that I write intensively during writing workshops. I dread to think how many poems I would never have read and written if it weren’t for Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s January Writing Hours, and my mentor Marjorie Lotfi’s superb “Marjorie’s Table” sessions, which happen regularly across the year. Both are online; both are almost miraculously generative, and great for introducing participants to the work of poets they’ve never read before.
Who have been the three most influential poets for you?
I’m going to cheat and give you five, in three groups. For engagement with the natural world and attention to meter, John Burnside and Seamus Heaney: the heft of their work is so satisfying, and it’s full of beauty, mystery, and seriousness, all of which I prize enormously a time when things feel light and half-formed across a lot of the poetry world. Malcolm Guite showed me you could be a priest and a poet at the same time, and that it’s possible to find an audience in the secular world while unashamedly expressing your love for the saints and the seasons; I’m grateful to him for that. Marjorie Lotfi and Niall Campbell have both mentored me over the last couple of years with enormous generosity, and have taught me how to push a poem as far as I think it can possibly go, and then push it further again. Marjorie especially is great at identifying what’s distracting for the reader, and dealing with it incisively.
Tell us about your process as a writer.
I move between projects constantly, circling back to things over and over depending on what I remember I’ve been editing and what part of my mind is active in a particular week. I have a very chaotic list of poems that are supposed to be “in progress” and poems I’m sending out on submission. I have at least stopped letting these two lists overlap, a scourge of my early years of writing. This year I went too hard on writing workshops, as one might go too hard on cheesecake, and am dealing with the peculiar problem of having (at the time of writing) 125 new poems in my “2026” document: a total disaster for prioritisation and time management.
When I’m on top of it, different things feed into the work. Art galleries are extremely helpful, as are the acts of drawing and painting, because they vigorously exercise a non-verbal part of the brain. Baking is also very good, particularly bread. Staring out the window a la Billy Collins is essential, and going (reluctantly) into nature - I like the idea of being outside more than the reality of being too hot/cold/damp/tired, but if the weather is just right, it can be magical. I don’t listen to music much, as it was my first career. At the moment I’m oscillating between working on a “mass setting” of poems inspired by the different movements of the mass (Kyrie; Gloria; Credo, etc.) and a longer collection themed around pigments and the use of colour in human history, from art to textiles to cave paintings. And editing new work, and writing new things as they emerge. It’s always the case that the moment I commit to a strong concept for a new group of poems, I find myself writing other things.
In editing on the micro level, though, the process of working on a poem is about trying to be accurate, making it sound good, and being relaxed enough to allow myself to be surprised. There is always a point where the poem’s internal logic or voice takes over, and something odd happens that I didn’t expect or set out to achieve. Then I know it’s working.
Tell us about your forthcoming book with Corsair.
A Sailor’s Wife is coming out in March 2028. It’s a memoir in verse - a collection of poems that chart the ending of one marriage and the beginning of another, with a sprinkling of priesthood and motherhood in the mix as well. I didn’t realise it was a memoir until I started putting together the poems, which had taken about five years to write as a body of work, and realised they made the most sense in chronological order. I hope the collection consoles people of any age, particularly women, who have gone through the gut-wrenching experience of divorce while parenting, and I hope that the intersection of priesthood/faith/motherhood/sex (mild!) will be more refreshing than alarming. I can safely say there isn’t anything else like it on the market. I think the voice and style are unique because of my odd upbringing outside the west - my idiom is quite old-fashioned thanks to what I read as a child and being bilingual with Mandarin - but that’s a story for another time. The book ends, crucially, with some poems of happy marriage, written for my husband, after whom the book is named.
I’m very grateful to Corsair and my editor, Sarah Castleton, for believing in this book - it will be wonderful to be debuted by the same house that publishes Ada Limon, Victoria Chang, and Mary Oliver. March 2028 seems like a long time to wait as I sit here in September of 2026, but there’s plenty of work to do in the meantime.
THREE POEMS
Character Formation
Precarious on the back of dad’s black bike,
I fly between the Mao suits, blue and grey,
and stop halfway to embassy and school
to wolf down youtiao dipped in salty broth.
The classroom desks are square, and four by four
the sub-divided squares in which we learn
stroke order: radicals above, below;
internal mysteries, and each one split
into more parts, as sweet and logical
as salvia splendens blooming in the pots
beside the playground, red as poster slogans,
red as martyrs’ blood. I deconstruct them
every breaktime, suck each flower’s drop
of secret nectar, silently recite
the four tones, with examples, like a charm:
Mā, má, mǎ, mà — meaning
mother, numb, horse, curse. Chinese
gives things shape. Country: jade, enclosed.
Letter: someone stretching up to lift
a box’s lid, two papers floating down.
Love, in simple script: a missing heart.
Immortality Project
After Matthew Buckley Smith
You buy a leather journal for your daughter,
scrub the sink with soapy steel wool till
it shines like it belongs in a hotel.
You do a workout in your room to make
the pain pool heavy as mahogany
inside your upper arms. You are still fat.
The garbage truck comes late: you get to witness
the removing of decay. You float,
a chattering spectre, through your messy house.
The feather and bone of ritual will surely
string out life beyond its natural span.
You buy a leather journal for yourself.
A Sailor Comes Home on Leave
The road uncurls beneath the car like butter
sliding off a knife. You’re back, and the dark
is a warm black vacuum without noise or questions.
This is the first time I have slipped into
this heavy quiet without feeling lost.
At home, when we have paid the babysitter,
we’ll devour each other’s mouths and skins,
the house all silent, Christmas lights turned off.
