The First Fortnight mental health arts and festival celebrates Nollaig na mBan (Women's Christmas or Little Christmas) on January 6th, 2026 with an evening of music, poetry and fun featuring three talented Irish artists who reflect this cherished tradition: poet Jan Brierton, musician Tolu Makay and poet Vona Groarke.
Ahead of the event, Jan celebrates the power of poetry...
Everybody is a poem.
Wellness; I hate that word, I hate its smugness, its preachy delivery. I hate wellness speak "hello beautiful souls, let’s all sit together drinking our cosmic cacao and hold space while we journal in this organic recycled toilet paper life planner (which you can buy after today’s session for just €49.99!) Let’s gather in community and support our emotional and physical transformation by breathing just through our right nostril and tapping our belly buttons. Let’s release love and light and wellness friends"
Feck "wellness" I aim for well-ish. Good enough. OK. Goodish. Grand.
Some people do yoga, some run, and others torture themselves in one of those Hyrox thingies. I write poems; they mostly rhyme, and they can’t be too long and they help me make sense of my banjaxed mind. So yeah I guess you could say that poetry is my yoga.
I don’t need to go anywhere, I don’t need to wear stretchy leggings and inhale and exhale deeply. I can sit and stretch my brain and my emotions in a rhyme. Recently I watched a short reel on Instagram where writers were asked to show us, the Instagram audience where they write. We were treated to a carousel of images of gorgeous writer’s desks and rooms with inspiring window views and comfortable chairs, candles, rich bound notebooks and fancy laptops. Ha! I thought, if they asked me they’d have pictures of the front seat top floor of the 27 bus. I don’t have a cosy nook to write in. My poems arrive to me on the bus, or the dart, or sitting waiting for my dad at another one of his hospital appointments. I type the first line in the notes in my phone, if I’m doing a trip across town I might get a whole poem down. But often it’s only a first or last line, and getting it out and writing it down gives me a sense of clarity and calm. Its good-ish. It’s a release.
I write about life, love, friendship, mothering, rage and regret. Emotional fog and midlife weather forecasts. I write about menopause, and womaning, aging and bodies and all the important stuff like biscuits and cake. And thankfully my little rhymes have provided me with a place to put all the complicated and conflicting feelings that I carry. I don’t write the feelings away; but rather I give them away now. I share the load by performing them and reading them on stage at festivals and theatres. And in sharing them I’ve found that by writing me, on the dart into work, I’ve also been writing you. All the shared experiences are there in my bitesize rhymes. There’s no chanting or incense or wellness preaching. Just common ground, some laughs and some tears. Everybody is a poem.
Celebrate Nollaig na mBan with First Fortnight on January 6th at Whelan’s, Wexford Street, Dublin - find out more here, and take a deeper dive into this year's First Fortnight programme here
