“I feel like expressing ourselves creatively is as important as talking, or exercising.” For Anna Doran, writing is a tool for figuring out and expressing her subconscious feelings; she finds the power to break through cycles of suppression, understand herself and her trauma, and, importantly, heal and rebuild.
Anna’s debut show Roots in Every Room – which will be on from July 15th – 18th at The Project Arts Centre following a sold-out run at the 2025 Dublin Fringe Festival – invites audiences into her journey healing a maternal lineage and confronting inherited trauma. Through poetry, film, and sound it aims to address what goes unsaid in womanhood, or even what we ourselves can’t fully understand. Anna reclaims the suppressed potential of the women who came before her, transforming pain into strength.
Anna’s talent for translating her complex feelings into poems exploring motherhood, femininity, and inter-generational trauma earned her the All-Ireland Poetry Slam title. Our conversation begins with a profound account of how she got into poetry in the first place. Facing post-natal depression, words came to Anna, and eventually, poems established the first roots of her healing journey, which later would grow and branch out into her performance.
“I had one poem that had come to me about the struggle of early motherhood that just sort of came to me after I’d had my second daughter, so I was like, I think I’ll just share that at the next open mic that they’re doing, and so I did. I just got up and shared that poem, and then it just snowballed. Everybody just responded well to my work, and I went on to win the All-Ireland Poetry Slam about six months later with that same poem. So it really happened by accident, to be honest, like I didn’t mean to make a career out of it, but it just felt really, really aligned, and I had an excuse to be writing then, because I was getting booked for gigs.”
Finding the words to express herself, Anna realized her passion for writing could become a way to help others in their own healing. Uplifted by the poetry community in Dublin, Anna continued to find the inspiration she needed to continue making art, taking in her surroundings and thoughtfully reflecting. When asking her about her writing process, Anna explained how her thoughtful reflections lead to bursts of powerful words, forming poems: “very much my whole life it would all come in one big spark of inspiration and flow, as in sometimes a poem would come out fully formed, and they’re often the best ones but if I was to break that process down, what it looks like now, and what probably was happening subconsciously, is you know, I’m absorbing information and inspiration through things I’m seeing on the news, things that are happening in real life, social media, things I’m reading, art … I’m very much a connect the dots type person.”
Recognizing that starting to be vulnerable through writing and sharing poetry in front of an audience can be nerve-racking, I asked Anna about her experience with performing and overcoming the potential fear that comes along with it.
“The reason why I’m doing it is I’m standing there speaking my complete truth, and that’s what spoken word is, you know? And so there’s obviously a part of me that really has a drive to express that, and so, yeah, it is scary, but I’m also very much a truth-seeking person, so sometimes you’re left a little bit vulnerable and exposed, depending on the setting. There’s more reward than there is any sort of negative effects to it. There’s growth in pushing through the fear.”
Getting into the creation of Roots in Every Room, Anna talked about her process creating her sold-out show. “It started as a collection of my words, so from that moment that I told you that I started to share, I started to write more and more, I started to process. I’d been through a really, really rough couple of years, and I was at a time where I was really trying to heal from that, I was really trying to process all of that, and poetry was my healing tool, and I really advocate for it as a healing tool. I think that there is something very, very special about it, as that. So that’s what I was doing.
I was reading these stories about myself, I was trying to work out what kind of issues I’d had, where things started, picking apart my life and trying to piece it back together again. So, there are various different stories, those moments throughout my life, and that was the reason I was writing them, and so then I had this collection, and they were having quite a profound impact on audiences.
I realized what the thread was, that it was very much about struggles of womanhood, that it was very much about reclaiming the elements of womanhood that have been suppressed not just within me but within all the women gone before me, and so I started to tie it all together with this interlinking script that bridged one poem to the next. Because it’s quite a subconscious internal thoughtful dream like experience, I wanted film and sound to bring the audience into that internal world, and I use stories of my grandmother’s dream and my mother’s dream.
So it starts with my grandmother’s voice, or an actual recording of her voice. She’s passed now, and it starts with her voice, and then tells the story of the last dream that she had before she died,which I felt was very much like passing the mantle on to me, that there was something that I had to grow and heal. My mother had quite an opposite dream of bare spaces, that was a recurring dream all the time. And then it goes on to a dream that I had at this start in my healing process, where I was facing my demons, and then it ends with my daughter’s voice asking, is it her turn next?
So it’s this really, really beautiful kind of full cycle of full circle of just breaking cycles, so it just packaged together neatly into this heroine’s journey, and I’m really proud of it.”
Anna’s view on dreams takes inspiration from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jungian dream interpretation revolves around the idea that our dreams reveal our inner complexes and archetypes; dreams are messages from our subconscious that communicates with our conscious minds. Anna explained how this scientific view of dreams influenced her performance.
“I’m really, really into dreams and dream interpretation. I’m really into Carl Jung and Jungian dream interpretation, dream analysis. I have a master’s in drama therapy, and we worked with archetypes a lot in that kind of work, and I map a lot of internal and external processes onto archetypes. And so I used the mother and father archetypes and tied that in with the sort of dream stuff, because it’s, I suppose, a metaphorical way of looking at patriarchal dynamics.
I really believe that our ancestors can contact us through dreams, and so my granny having that dream felt like it was some kind of a message for me, or some kind of a last link between us, and then my mom’s dream, which is quite a common symbol of suppressed potential, and then my dream very much felt like some sort of a contact to ancestors. I just think it taps into the collective unconscious and some deeper stuff that’s going on within ourselves, but also some deeper stuff that binds and connects us all.
My granny told me when she was in the hospice, she literally said she doesn’t remember having a dream for years, and that she’d had this dream, and it was about me. And she came to my house, and I let her in, and there was a tree going through the middle of my house with roots in every room, and she kept walking into a room, there was more growth everywhere, and that symbol just stopped. I remember going home and drawing it, drawing pictures of it. It used to come back and haunt me a bit, it just always came back to me all the time. I was like, what did that mean? Like, why did that feel so potent? Why was it my house? Why was there so much growth?
I’ve always felt a really special link to my grandmother, and it just.. it just felt like she was trying to tell me something, that there was a message in it, it was about rooms full of growth. And then my mom had told me throughout her life about this dream, she’d say, ‘Oh, I had that dream again,’ where she’d be in her own house, everything would look the same, and then all she would find [was] a room that she never knew about before, and it was this bare, empty, unused room.
And I looked that up, and that is a kind of common reoccurring dream that apparently symbolizes unfulfilled potential. Women of my mother’s generation had to suppress a lot of themselves, they didn’t have the options and the freedom that we have today.” Anna believes that creative expression is essential to our well being. When we prioritize expressing ourselves and understanding our inner states, we feel more fulfilled in our lives.
“I feel like expressing ourselves creatively is as important as talking or exercising. It’s something that is a way to connect with your inner self. And if we’re disconnected from our inner selves, we’re coasting and we’re going on autopilot and we’re probably gonna end up not okay.”
In spoken word poetry, the use of pauses and rhythm and tone can contribute to the meaning of messages. Alongside her view of using words to express her inner self, Anna places emotion at the center of creating her poems.
“For me, the emotion is the number one driving force of the poem. What feeling am I trying to express? What feeling do I want the audience to feel specifically around this? What emotion am I getting out here? And then that sets the pace, that sets the tone for me, and then, because I have a musical background, everything revolves around musicality. I just sort of naturally found that using rhyme and using pauses and rhyme can create the rhythm that just feels right.”
Discussing the themes in her poems and upcoming performance, I asked Anna about breaking through cycles of inter-generational trauma, and how it becomes ingrained and passed on.
“Because it’s inter-generational, it’s extremely deep rooted. You’ve got like pre-verbal conditioning. Little girls are taught that they are punished, rejected, or abandoned for being too outspoken, or not conforming; that good girl conditioning happens from when we are tiny. So how do you undo something that is physically manifested in your body, that you don’t even have words for, because it’s the culture that’s around you. And that’s why it’s so hard. Literally, my job as a writer and an activist, I suppose, is to try to find the words to say, ‘This is why this is like this, look at this system, look at the system around us that has caused this all.’
There are whole economies built on women hating themselves, like the wellness industry, the beauty industry, and all of these patriarchal standards and systems that have caused us to be small and suppress ourselves, to accept abuse, and all of that is age generational stuff. There’s expectations on mothers to do it all and suffer in silence, so without pinpointing any one major trauma in my life, I’m very much looking at this accumulation of minor aggressions that we all experience.”
Asking what conversations she hopes her performance sparks, Anna replied, “For women to talk to each other about what they may have accepted throughout their life, and that’s everything ranging from those minor ways that we’ve been oppressed and expected to carry the emotional weight of relationships, the mental load as mothers, or the things that have been said or done to us by men in our lives.
That’s very much a message of one of the pieces and that’s where misogyny starts to take hold, and they’re [young boys] very much in danger of it online as well as amongst their peers. I hope people talk about, and see that there is a path of finding our way to reclaiming parts of ourselves that have been broken or damaged through this sort of patriarchal system. There is a strength in women that is phenomenal, we are resilient, and the more we reclaim our full feminine selves, the better we’ll all be.”
Looking forward, Anna tells me about her future aspirations. “I would be very happy to take this show on tour around Ireland and abroad, and I’m also just so, so excited about this new play that I’m working on. I’m a resident artist at the Dublin Fringe Festival. I’ve really been making the most of that and being quite well supported in the theater sector, and made some links with some amazing collaborators. The next story that I want to tell is, as I said, just focused on trying to give people the experience of what it actually feels like when you become a mother, because you see one thing from the outside, because women are very good at concealing, but one in three women suffer with postnatal depression, 95% of new mothers have intrusive thoughts, there is a level of craziness that is unparalleled.
No matter where on the spectrum people are in that struggle, mothers are struggling, and there needs to be better support. So I’m hoping next year will be just more of working on the new show, more audiences getting to see Roots in Every Room, and then in 2028 we’ll have the preview of this new piece.”
Speaking to her upcoming performance Anna tells viewers to “Let your heart expand, and hopefully we’ll all experience a little bit of collective healing together.”
Words: Ashley Barcroft
Roots in Every Room is at The Project Arts Centre from July 15th – 18th. Tickets here.
