Bridget Hart

Hello! This is the original introduction for Chewing Gum before Malaika Kegode wrote the final one for print.

It’s been said that I am a Grease super-fan for writing this book. That might be true, or it could be hyper fixation, or simply the thing I found joy in recently, which is no small feat. Writing poetry is difficult, writing for myself at all takes a lot of effort, self esteem and head space, three things I rarely have.

In January 2020, before the start of widespread COVID19 and national lockdowns I was in a cottage in Wales, celebrating the life of my late best friend Stacey. She was in many ways the inspiration for Chewing Gum. We had a lot of fandoms that we bonded deeply over, we made up stories, inserted ourselves into movies, tv shows, video games and all through the magical channels of fan fiction and online roleplay. When she died the worlds we had created became closed to me, without her imagination there was no going back, it felt like Wendy being too old for Neverland.

There are a couple of lines on the first page after Mal’s intro, ‘and the angry birds devoured me’ which was actually a night terror I had where I was on this stretch where they have the race in Grease. It wasn’t exactly the inspiration for the book, but I think my brain has dropped hints at me along the way. I wrote the first poem Kenickie on a rainy afternoon in this cottage whilst I was grieving the space she’d left. I found that I had that same joy plucking a character out of something and creating them in a new context. This was a power I thought I had lost in my grief. It was joy that led me to spend a year writing more poems like I never have before. I’m so surprised by this book because it did what my parental part couldn’t; it made me love writing again.

Meanwhile Grease is such a staple of pop culture. We watched it on TV, saw the musical, knew all the moves when the Grease megamix played. The story of Sandy and Danny is famous. As a queer non-binary person I don’t relate to this heteronormative relationship. It has never sat well with me that Sandy has to pretend to be someone else to be with Danny, who in return makes the smallest gesture with a letter-man cardigan that he discards immediately. It was the characters in the background – Rizzo, Principle McGee, Jan – who made me excited to watch it, I was always looking out for their faces and little quirks. These characters, working class fashion icons, who chose their own family were inspiring and cool to me. Their attitudes towards authority and rules mirrored my own rebellion and their sense of belonging was something I desperately wanted.

Queerness is central to Chewing Gum. I have used trivia, historical locations and events to mark out a time in which being anything but straight was illegal, but human rights movements were gaining more attention. This sense of secrecy is central to many of the poems. Beyond that I wanted to give these characters some form of closure and happiness as Greased Lightin’ takes off into the sky like a heteronormative fairy tale. There’s even some Grease 2 content because despite it’s questionable and problematic story line, it was Michelle Pfieffer’s movie debut and some of the songs are pretty catchy.

Chewing Gum, it turns out, has become a gateway for me to get back into the joy of writing. It is a collection about grief, of friendship and acceptance and it would not be complete without Lisa Rose’s instantly recognisable illustrations, which bring each poem to life. Malaika Kegode’s introduction too, which contextualises Grease in a queer discourse and is a reminder that these films belong to all of us who engage in subculture to manage life in world of impossible expectations, for those of us who rebel, and revel in all our beautiful differences.