Small Business Spotlight: Poetry Pharmacy This month I sat down with Deborah Alma to talk all about her business: Poetry Pharmacy. Poetry Pharmacy is a poetry focused bookshop in Shropshire, England which also has some products online. I was lucky enough to sit down with Deborah over zoom and learn more about this wonderful shop.
that I’m in now, which is the Poetry Pharmacy. As I peered through the windows of this derelict building with dusty shelves, I began to imagine what it would look like as a pharmacy. This resulted in me bullying my partner into moving to a new house, getting a stupid mortgage, you know, and kinda going “yeah, it’d be a really good idea”, and here we are now!
KT: I love that though. I love that you peered KT: What inspired you to start Poetry Pharma- through the windows of a building for so long cy? Where did the idea come from? and almost manifested your current life. DA: Well Kirsty, I don’t know if you know about DA: Yeah, I know. It’s amazing that I did it a project I was doing, called emergency poet? actually. It’s a lot of work. Have you heard about that? KT: Yeah, I have! I saw a little bit about that. DA: For years I’d been driving around in a vintage ambulance, dressed as a doctor, accompanied by a ‘nurse’, first going to: festivals, libraries, schools, music festivals, arts festivals, and conferences all over the place, and doing poetry on prescription. So, people encounter the ambulance and come in and lie on the back stretcher. Then after a series of questions, I would prescribe them a poem. So that was a bit of a mad idea, but it ended up meaning I could give up my sensible job and made me just about a living. Actually, not really. KT: A creative living! DA: Well, anyway. But then it got quite a lot of publicity at the time, or over the years even. And then there was a book from the project, which did really well. And the second book, which did less well actually, didn’t have such a good title. But I’m really old so as a result I was a bit tired of driving across moor land in the fog or in the city of London in this vintage ambulance. It had no power steering, and it was often cold and wet and exhausting. So, I decided I needed a change and I had sort of been constantly peering into this building 36
KT: That’s neat. And so obviously, for our readers who don’t know much about you, now that you are in the building, how does your Poetry Pharmacy work? Just for people who maybe don’t know, or are interested in trying it, people that live nearby, you’re in Shropshire, is that right? DA: Yeah, we’re on the borders, right on the West of England, about a mile and a half from Wales. So, it is absolutely in the middle of nowhere. So that was a mad idea. And the high street has tumbleweed blowing down it as well. I knew from the start that it had to attract people from out of the area especially at a time that is described as the death of the high street when poetry doesn’t sell and yet, here I am doing this. The idea of it and what it was for six months before the first lockdown, when things changed quite a lot for us, was that it was a kind of mini Poetry Art Centre, I suppose. At the heart of it is the idea of poetry on prescription. It has lots of different factors that need to be in place for it to work, and it was an experimental idea, but it does seem to work. So, we’ll go back to it. But there’s a cafe with good cakes and good fresh ground coffee so that people can hang around. It’s important to have cake and coffee.
