McNish hopes young people can enjoy their bodies and not feel less pure, or ashamed, by having consensual sex.
“My first attempt at intercourse was nice. It did not hurt, as rightly it should not, no matter the horrendous narrative about first time pain being some sort of marker of purity. I lost nothing except a sandal,” she says.
McNish reaches millions of people through her books, performances, and short videos on social media, making her one of the UK’s most widely shared poets.
She wrote her first poem aged seven, furious her family would not let her get a cat.
“My mum found it in the attic and it was funny to read back, I was insulting them in rhyme. Writing poetry has always been the way I’ve coped with things and worked stuff out,” she says.
In her teenage years, she doodled poems in her diaries and made up verses about physics to help her remember things for her exams. “It made stuff I hated fun,” she says.
But she fell out of love with poetry when she was forced to learn it at school.
“I remember reading the Seamus Heaney poem Digging, and thinking ‘why are we reading a poem about potatoes’. Now he’s one of my favourite poets, but it was just another subject I had to learn.”
