Poem 01

Giovanna MacKenna (she/her) is The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Poet in Residence 2025

I’m beginning this residency with a loss. I had a working document which was nearing completion: a collection of thoughts around loss and renewal, my role for this coming year, how I write and what my take on the project’s key themes are. It was a quite brilliant piece (you’ll have to take my word for it) which I now cannot access. My computer tantalises me with a visible memory load that proves the work exists but does not allow me to see those words, to read and shape them and offer them to you. At first, panic squatted somewhere between my heart and stomach, followed by a nauseous hollow that increased as all possible solutions failed – now, I can smile at the congruity.

This text is my second beginning. So, it’s good to meet you. Thank you for coming with me on this journey through 2025 with The Museum of Loss and Renewal. This feels like a good start, I think. A realigning of hope with reality. An acceptance of circumstance and possibility.

My name is Giovanna, and I am a poet and creative facilitator. I work with words and people, aiming to excite and expand communication. My writing began with grief; the permission to write appeared after both my parents had died. Their absence allowed me to see myself, to create in a way that had always been with me but had never been revealed. At the core of my practice sits a need to tell stories. I am interested in probing the work of everyday living, in encouraging all its joys and challenges to be unhidden and explored. Mostly, I hope my work is an invitation to conversation. It is meant as an offer to investigate the experiences we shoulder alone but which are often universal.

The Museum of Loss and Renewal published my poetry collection, How the Heart can Falter, in 2022. Since then, I’ve worked on many projects, facilitated writing groups, been the poet for one of Scotland’s Covid Memorials, and Poet in Residence for the Wellcome Trust’s Dundee centre for Anti-Infectives Research.

This residency with The Museum of Loss and Renewal feels like a joyful, open opportunity. I’m looking forward to exploring how I reflect on an art project that lives in many spaces. What comes to the surface in the wake of constant movement?

I hope to progress through this year discovering people, places and words that reveal more of ourselves and our connection to the lands we live on. I’m interested in investigating a space for renewal through the invitation to creative conversation and personal practice. 

I’ve been to The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s centres in Molise, Italy, and Orkney, Scotland, I’ve travelled the paths in-between. In fact, pieces of both places sit on my windowsill; the white bone stone of Collemacchia nestles next to the clenched secret of a Birsay Groatie Buckie, the tiny cowrie shell whispering wave songs to a scrap of a land-locked region. Both places feel “other” to me. They are almost liminal in their ability to shift the immediacy of world concerns to a distance where the process of creation begins to flourish.

January has been a month far from liminal, a month of crunching reality. A challenging month. A time of starts and stops, some steps forward and many, many backwards. The world has been a heavy presence. For me, loss has felt unavoidable – time / health / people / values / certainty / rights / safety. In the face of seemingly unconquerable powers, I find my own in observance and response.

This poem is a personal reaction to a global happening. It is an invitation to you to also create in the face of rising panic. It is a small resistance, a cry in the hope of hearing the voices of others returned.

Listen to Giovanna reading Poem 01

Giovanna is The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Poet in Residence in 2025. Giovanna was an actor, and a journalist, and is now a poet and creative facilitator. Her poem Silenced by My Mother’s Tongue has recently been included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems list. Giovanna has been Poet in Residence for the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research at University of Dundee and is part of the creative team working on Scotland’s Remembering Together Covid Memorial project. Her first collection, How the Heart can Falter, is available from The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing.

One poem will be published here each month. At the end of the year the poems will be brought together in a publication by The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing.