Creating Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul

Siobhan Maher
Apr 17
9 min read

Origins of the Work

The inspiration for Journeying - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul and Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul did not appear suddenly. It was shaped by experiences, places, and a way of seeing the world that began long before I had the words to explain it.

When I think back to my earliest memories, I don’t remember language in the way most people might. I remember feeling. I remember wind, trees, and earth beneath my feet. I remember how the world felt before I could describe it. Nature spoke to me long before words ever did, and in many ways, it still does.

I moved to Montpelier Hill in Rathfarnham, Dublin, just before my eighth birthday. That move created the real me. It felt like I had come home, not just to a place, but to something deeper. The hill, often known as the Hellfire Club, held a kind of wildness that I slipped into without effort.

I spent hours wandering forest paths, sometimes on horseback, sometimes with a dog beside me, sometimes completely alone. Those moments didn’t feel empty. They felt full. My feet would sink into the earth, and I would lose any sense of separation between myself and the landscape. I didn’t feel like I was observing nature. I felt like I was part of it.

That sense of belonging shaped everything that came later, including my writing.

Early Creative Awakening

I can still remember some of the first poems I ever wrote. They were simple, raw, and completely unfiltered. They weren’t written with any awareness of form or structure. They came from observation and emotion.

Two people, in particular, stayed with me and found their way into those early poems. One was a man known locally as the Ice Man, who lived rough in an old icehouse on the mountain. The other was a woman who slept on a cardboard bed outside Harcourt Street hospital.

I had spent weeks inside the hospital myself, and there was something about seeing her there that unsettled me in a way I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t know her stories, but I could feel something earthy about her. The loneliness, struggle, and presence stayed with me.

As a child, I didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so I wrote.

Those early poems were not about getting things right. They were about getting something out. Even then, I understood that writing could hold emotion in a way nothing else could.

Living with Dyslexia and Finding My Voice

School was complicated for me. Dyslexia made reading and writing difficult in ways that were hard to explain at the time. Numbers and words didn’t always behave the way they were supposed to. They slipped, tangled, and refused to settle.

There were moments when it felt like I was locked out of something that came easily to other people.

But when I wrote creatively, it was different. The pressure disappeared. The rules didn’t matter in the same way. I wasn’t trying to be correct. I was trying to be honest.

That made all the difference.

I was lucky to have teachers such as Mr McGowan in St Colmcille’s, Knocklyon, and Sr Magnier in Our Lady’s Secondary School, who saw something in me and my writing and encouraged me to keep going. That encouragement mattered more than I realised at the time. It gave me permission to trust something in myself that didn’t fit neatly into the school system.

Academic and Professional Life

Despite those challenges, I kept going academically. I completed a Higher National Diploma and degree at Aberystwyth University in Wales, followed by a Master’s in Aberdeen. I went on to complete my PhD in Food Science and Technology at University College Cork in 2004.

Becoming Dr Siobhán was something I was proud of. It wasn’t just about the qualification. It was about everything it took to get there, especially with dyslexia as part of my experience.

My career in food science took me into laboratories and industry environments. I worked in food research and development, moving between projects that ranged from chocolate to bread, from concept to product launch.

There were parts of that work I genuinely enjoyed. I liked solving problems. Loved creating something tangible.

But the pace was intense, and over time, it became too much.

Illness, Burnout and Reassessment

Living with fibromyalgia made everything harder. The fatigue, pain, and slowing down didn’t fit with the pace of life I was trying to maintain.

At first, I pushed through it, as most people do. But eventually, it became clear that I couldn’t keep going in the same way.

There wasn’t a single moment when everything stopped. It was more gradual than that. A growing awareness that something needed to change.

My body was forcing me to listen, whether I wanted to or not.

Motherhood and Transformation

Motherhood was the point where things truly shifted.

When my first child was born in 2007, I made a promise to myself that I would find a way to heal. I would be fully present for my clients and my sons. I would build a life that didn’t just function on the surface, but actually felt right.

That promise didn’t come with a clear plan. It was something I had to figure out step by step.

But it marked a turning point.

Training to Become a Complementary Therapist

As part of that shift, I began retraining. I became a Touch for Health Kinesiologist and went on to become a Reiki Master, Feng Shui consultant, mindfulness coach, and shamanic counsellor.

Each of these practices offered something different, but they all brought me back to a deeper awareness of myself and my connection to everything around me.

They helped me return to a kind of stillness I had known as a child but had lost along the way to adulthood. This was the healing I paid forward to my clients when I opened my therapy rooms in January 2010.

Returning to Creativity

Writing never left me, even when my life was focused elsewhere. It simply changed.

Scientific writing gave way to bedtime stories for my children. Those stories were playful and rhythmic, but over time, they deepened into something more reflective.

At the same time, photography became more important to me. It started as a way of capturing moments and developed into a way of seeing the world more clearly. I began to notice things I might have otherwise missed. Light, texture, small shifts in the landscape.

It became clear to me that poetry and photography were not separate; they are two ways of expressing the same thing.

Creating Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul

In 2022, I decided to bring those two forms of art together properly. That decision led to my first book, Journeying - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul, released in January 2024, and then to Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul.

Dawning is a collection of 52 poems and RAW nature photographs, one for each week of the year. Each photo and poem is a marriage of creativity. Sometimes the photograph came first, inspiring the poem. Sometimes it was the other way around.

I didn’t approach either book with a rigid structure. I let it unfold.

I did not want to explain anything to the reader; I wanted to give them space to pause, to feel, and to reconnect with themselves in whatever way they needed.

The Creative and Technical Process

One of the hardest parts of creating Dawning was deciding to do everything myself.

I had no background in Adobe InDesign, but I chose to learn from scratch. There were times when I genuinely felt like I had taken on too much.

There were tears, frustration, and moments when I thought I had to hand over to a professional.

But I kept going.

Slowly, the book began to come together. Page by page, I worked through every detail. Then I could see it becoming what I had imagined, and those stressful months made everything else worth it.

Holding the final copy in my hands was something I will never forget. It wasn’t just about the book. It was about everything it took to get there.

Challenges and How I Navigated Them

The biggest challenge, without question, was learning to let go of time.

I was used to working to deadlines, to pushing through, to getting things done quickly. That approach didn’t work here.

When I tried to rush, everything fell apart. I became overwhelmed.

I had to change how I worked; slow down and trust the process. I worked as though no one was waiting for the book, even though so many people asked in mantra ‘when is book 2 being released?’

Balancing the project with life as a business owner and a single mother added another layer of difficulty. There were days when everything felt chaotic.

My children were my support through it all. Their patience gave me the space I needed to keep going.

When things felt too much, I returned to nature. I walked. I breathed. I let everything settle, and then I came back to the work.

I took it one step at a time. That was the only way I could do it.

Writers Café Atop A Hill: A Place of Community and Creativity

Choosing Writers Café Atop A Hill in Rathfarnham for the launch of Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul on 30 April 2026 felt completely natural.

This is where I live, but more than that, it is where my creative life has taken shape in a real, grounded way.

In 2024, I created Writers Café Atop A Hill. It isn’t a traditional café. It’s a space where people come together to write, think, talk, or simply sit and be in a creative environment.

Every Wednesday morning, from 10 am to 12 pm, it becomes a relaxing and supportive community. There is something very real about this space. It’s not about performance. It’s about connection.

I wanted the launch of Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul to feel like that. Not formal. Not distant. Just a gathering of people who value creativity, reflection, and presence.

Writers Café Atop A Hill is where I balance everything. Work, motherhood, creativity, and the need to step back into nature when life feels too heavy.

Launching this book in that space feels right.

Looking Ahead: Future Projects

Later in 2026, I will be releasing a book called Mindfully Healing. This book focuses on mindfulness and meditation as a practical way to support mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. It looks at different techniques, including mindfulness, loving-kindness, shamanism, and breath awareness, and offers ways to build a sustainable self-practice. It’s not about replacing medical care, but about supporting it.

I am also working on a children’s photopoetry book. This has come from seeing how much children connect with the combination of imagery and simple poetic forms, such as haiku. I wanted to create something that invites children into nature and encourages their imagination in a gentle way.

Huge Thank You

As I journey forward with Dawning - Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul, I am filled with gratitude for so many who have shaped this work and supported me along the way. Each new day is a dawning, and I start each day by honouring it with a quiet, whispered thank you.

First and foremost, I give thanks for my childhood, when I began to see the world in fragments of shadows dancing on walls, light falling through trees, and words curling into stanzas before I even knew they were poetry. I believed that nobody would understand these words until I was encouraged to believe in my writing by Mr McGowan of St Colmcille’s school, Knocklyon, in 5^th and 6^th class, and Sr Magnier in Our Lady’s secondary school.

The 5-star reviews for my first book, Journeying – Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul, were humbling and the driving force to continue my quest to bring photopoetry to everyone. Thank you to the gift and bookshops across Ireland that stocked my book and to everyone who bought a copy.

To those who embraced my words with love, who visualised the photographs and allowed them to release personal memories, your stories of healing and peace grounded me and were the driving force behind the birth of Dawning – Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul. Your connection to this work has been invaluable.

To my parents, Joe and Bridie, thank you for your endless love and patience. To my siblings, thank you for your unwavering support. To James, Cathal, and Patrick, thank you for being my favourite humans, my constants in an ever-changing world.

To every soul who has stood beside my family, offering light in dark places and believing in the imperfect beauty of life, your kindness is woven through every page of this book.

A heartfelt thank you to my wonderful writing buddies at Writers Café Atop A Hill. Every Wednesday morning from 10 am to 12 pm, your support, laughter, and friendship inspire me to keep moving forward. Together, we are stronger and funnier!

Thank you to Claire O’Connor and all my friends at @indieauthorsireland for your amazing support, beta reading, and for always buying my books!

Sincere thanks to Nessa O’Mahony, distinguished Irish poet, for generously contributing the foreword to this book; your support is deeply valued.

Finally, to you, my future reader, I hope you step into your space long enough to pause, to let these poems speak to you, and the pictures help you breathe. May you lose your humanness long enough to rediscover your soul.

I offer Dawning – Photopoetry To Revive Your Soul with a simple intention that it brings a moment of stillness to your day, and helps you reconnect with yourself.

Event and Contact

Book launch:

30 April 2026 at 6.30 pm to 8 pm

Writers Café Atop A Hill

Killakee Road, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.

Booking is essential. Link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/book-launch-tickets-1986150200716