Poetry on Prescription: In Conversation With Deborah Alma, Founder of The Poetry Pharmacy

There is a beautiful Victorian shop in the tranquil town of Bishop Stortford, which lies on the Welsh-English border. The sign on the door says ‘pharmacy’ , but the mahogany shelves inside are actually filled with books and other literary gifts. In the Poetry Pharmacy, you will be prescribed different poems to help with any problem you might be having. The founder of the shop, Deborah Alma, tells the story of how this magical place came to life.

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Deborah, a poet herself, originally started doing poetry prescriptions part-time, using an old ambulance that she was driving around the country. She became known as ‘the emergency poet’, recommending poems to people at various events like literary festivals. According to her, the main reason why she wanted to do this was to bring poetry closer to people. ‘I grew up in London on a council estate, and poetry was not seen as something for the likes of people there - it was considered difficult or a kind of ‘high art’. And the reason I did the emergency poet was to actively say that actually, this is an art form like any other art, like music or painting.’ She was also doing workshops for people with dementia, where she discovered how powerful poems can be. ‘Poems create this sort of feeling, and even if you can’t remember the words, you will remember the feeling’’, she explains.

The idea of turning the ambulance into a pharmacy was actually inspired by the building that currently gives home to the shop. After a few years, Deborah started getting tired of driving an ambulance around the country and working outside, and she was looking for a change. ‘I've been aware of this place for sale on and off for years. I went there, and looked through the windows - you can see all these dusty shelves of an old ironmongery, and I thought it looked like an old pharmacy. And I said to my husband, can you imagine all my pill bottles on those shelves? We could have a poetry pharmacy. So the building inspired the idea of settling down here. And its location. It's a tiny town on the Welsh borders, full of writers and artists and people who've stepped out of the world.’

Inside the poetry pharmacy, there is a café, a library, and a few rooms - one of which gives home to Deborah’s one-on-one consultations. These consultations are designed similarly to conventional therapy sessions; people are asked to share their feelings and worries to get the right poems prescribed for them. ‘I ask what they would like to be prescribed poems for - and it may be something quite light, or it can be quite a profound thing; like grief or heartbreak or lack of self-confidence or anxiety about their future. And having listened to them, I give them the gift, I suppose, of a poem. These poems are all very resolved - they are all full of hope or optimism. They may deal with a difficult subject matter, but they always end on a hopeful note.’ - Deborah explains. ‘And then I tell them how to take the poem. With a glass of wine in the evening or a cup of tea, or sitting in the garden.’

Apart from the consultations, the Poetry Pharmacy is a venue for a multitude of different workshops. Deborah says she is the happiest when the whole place is being used. ‘I work really hard, but I really love it. I originally graduated in Creative Writing, and I used to give lectures at Keele University to pay back the mortgage I had on the building. But now I am fully focused on the poetry pharmacy, and I’m doing a lot of different things. Right now, I am working on a collaboration with Lush - we are selling bath bombs with an extract of a poem inside them. And that's getting a little bit of poetry out to people who wouldn't normally encounter it - which is the main thing I want to achieve with this whole idea.’