#TheWhiskeyShot: Poet Spotlight (Wave 2) – Lucy Heuschen

Lucy Heuschen returned to poetry like someone kicking open a locked door, through grief, illness, and the sharp need to create something that felt alive. For years, poetry was something she did as a younger woman, until life, as it often does, interrupted. But when a cancer diagnosis coincided with the close of a long legal career, poetry reappeared, not as a hobby, but as necessity. “Some days, a page of poetry was all I could manage from my chemo chair,” she says. Those lines became anchors. “Reading and writing poetry soon became an essential (re)building block; the brilliant, diverse, global poetry community became my shelter and inspiration.”

What began as writing from the trenches of her own experience has since expanded. In recent years, Heuschen has turned her attention to the voices of women from history, biblical, medieval, political, and pop cultural. Her fascination is both intellectual and visceral. “The way women’s voices still speak over centuries never ceases to thrill and amaze me,” she says. “A great jumping-off point for exploring how women move through the world today.” It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about resonance, listening to the echoes of women who were vilified, mythologised, or erased, and then finding her own voice among theirs.

That voice tends to show up uninvited. “My thoughts and emotions tend to arrive at awkward moments!” she laughs. “I jot them down that second in the Notes app on my phone. If I leave it to later, I know from bitter experience it will be gone.” She’s learned to move fast, to catch the poem by the tail—as her favourite poet Ruth Stone put it—before it vanishes. But once the raw material is caught, the former lawyer kicks in. “The old lawyer in me likes things to be orderly and precise, often I can’t resist tinkering with words or lines as I go.” Knowing this, she steps away. Coffee. Dog walk. Distance. That’s when the real shaping begins. These days, she’s more relaxed about finding form after the fact. “The human being, the story, the emotions are front and centre.”

Her first full collection, Daughter of Fire, published by Yaffle Press in 2025, is a blazing homage to Margaret of Anjou, 15th century warrior queen, political survivor, Shakespeare’s “She-Wolf of France,” and the alleged inspiration for Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister. But Heuschen doesn’t just mythologise her, she reclaims her. “Watching Shakespeare’s Henriad plays and a certain TV series… I experienced a surge of anger and grief for her that could not be denied.” Margaret’s life, and the ways she was twisted by history, became a mirror and a muse. “Reconsidering Margaret’s life and legacy—the woman, daughter, wife, mother, politician, schemer, warrior—has been my challenge and inspiration for the past four years.”

Her writing space is calm and quiet, a well-lit basement room surrounded by poetry and history books, a place of focus and refuge. But her poems don’t stay inside. “Sometimes I read lines from my phone as I am out walking in the fields and forests around my home. I must worry the locals who pass me by,” she jokes, “but it helps to take my words out into fresh air and nature. I can hear the words more clearly somehow, unfettered, with new possibilities.” That rhythm of solitude and community is what grounds her practice. “Sharing my love of poetry and being part of a supportive, global, poetry community is massively inspiring for me,” she says. “Social media is essential for making these connections, but I switch it off when it becomes overwhelming.”

In 2023, she won The Broken Spine’s Chapbook Competition with Loggerheads, a project that forced her to reckon with her own history. “Writing Loggerheads was cathartic in some ways and required me to dig deep,” she says. “As I wrote those poems I realised that I tend to see life as a battle, a struggle, always second-guessing and trying to justify myself and my decisions.” It became, in her words, “a note-to-myself, a reminder of the redemptive power of love and self-belief.” But even when writing about historical figures, her personal story is never far away. “I respond to them as real people and seek connections between my own experiences and theirs… These similarities between women of different centuries never fails to surprise and delight me—and sometimes, to anger and appal me.”

In Daughter of Fire, she weaves a new “third act” for Margaret of Anjou, one that connects her with other women like her: “wayward women,” Heuschen says, “myself included.” Each woman, across time, “walks her own path with wild, messy, beautiful resilience.”

Lucy Heuschen’s poetry doesn’t beg for attention, it earns it. Her work has been widely published in journals, zines, and anthologies (which she says she “adores”). Her pamphlets We Wear The Crown (2022) and Loggerheads (2024) both emerged from competition wins with Hedgehog Poetry Press and The Broken Spine. She was commended in The Poetry Society’s Stanza Competition in 2024. Daughter of Fire is her debut full collection, but it reads like the culmination of a voice hard-won and fully formed.

In a quiet room in the Rheinland, Heuschen writes poems that refuse to stay still. They walk fields, revisit histories, and burn with the fierce light of women, real and remembered, who refused to be silenced.