Emerging Writers Series: Lauren John Joseph
“With a novel you spend so long with the characters, you can find real profound depths, whereas with a theatre piece you are right there with your audience, feeling their presence, and able to make a decision as to whether you will play to their desires or not. All art is manipulation really.”
Fruzsi recently reviewed Lauren John Joseph’s debut novel, At Certain Points We Touch, and got me hooked!
Joseph has a distinct narrative voice, with stylistic prose that pushes and pulls the reader in equal measure deeper into the story. I knew I had to find out more about Joseph and did a deep dive into their artistic and creative practice - it was no short leap from there knowing who to interview for our next instalment in the series.
Thankfully, they agreed. Lauren John Joseph chats with me about their creative practice, writing for stage and the page, separating the self from the work, and shares some great insights for readers and writers alike.
You have an impressive creative career to your name, covering a breadth of mediums. At what point did you sit down and think ‘I’m going to write a full-length novel’ - did it feel like quite an organic next step in your creative outputs?
I had always wanted to write a novel, ever since I was a child I saw myself as a writer, though I was precocious in my awareness of the difficulties, not with regards to writing a book, but rather of having it published.
Owing to my personal blend of class pessimism and neurodivergence publishing always seemed an absolutely insurmountable citadel, while other forms (performance say, or fine art) were much more open and elastic.
Even so, all the work I made in other arenas was always focused on language, my stage plays were largely monologues and my film work too, even when I was experimenting with textiles it was with linguistic puns.
How was writing At Certain Points We Touch different from the other fiction work you’ve released - were there any key learning points you took away from your previous writing that informed how you developed this manuscript?
I really do believe that artists craft a body of work, rather than little fragments or isolated pieces.
Everything I’ve made before fed into this book, I think probably most noticeably in the narrative voice which is very direct, very intimate, and mimics a technique I used on stage, inspired by theatre artists like Penny Arcade and Karen Finely.
I’m really curious about your work in performing and developing plays and the intersection of writing for these mediums versus longer-form fiction. Is there a significant creative difference for you between developing a play for performance versus a story for the page?
It’s hard to say how I make the decision to stage something or write it up as a screenplay or a novel, perhaps it’s something to do with duration?
Usually, there’s just an unnameable pull towards a certain form. With a novel you spend so long with the characters, you can find real profound depths, whereas with a theatre piece you are right there with your audience, feeling their presence, and able to make a decision as to whether you will play to their desires or not. All art is manipulation really.
Likewise with developing work, novels are incredibly isolating, they take you away from the world when you are writing them, whilst theatre is an essentially collaborative form. Obviously, I write the scripts alone, but then the biggest edits are made in rehearsal, new meanings are drawn out, characters come into focus, and the dynamics and the arc emerge.
And that’s before you get it in front of an audience, where it becomes another beast entirely.
I love how At Certain Points We Touch covers universal and core human themes around love and loss while offering a more nuanced (and needed) voice from narrator Bibby. What are some of your hopes for readers and the key messages they’ll take away in reading?
I don’t think there’s a message to this book, I’m increasingly anti-meaning, or at least I’m pushing against ascribed meaning.
We are in such a flattened moment, drained of nuance, we live in the world of the hot take, every book and every play sets out its stall from the get-go, to let you know, “This situation is bad, here’s why it’s bad, and in conclusion, you personally should try to be less bad. You’re welcome.”
I’d like readers who’ve enjoyed this book to maybe feel emboldened to read other books that don’t exactly reflect their own life experiences, but I can’t say I want to teach them anything with it.
Something that comes up a lot when I’m chatting with authors about their work is the role of identity and the self in our creative outpourings. A lot of your work centres around identity - how much of your own narrative is entwined in Bibby’s and do you think fiction is a valuable way to take control of the narratives in our lives?
I like to consider this in reference to Virginia Woolf’s line, "the truer the facts the better the fiction."
Vita Sackville-West, on whom Woolf’s character of Orlando is based, did not fall asleep one day and wake up in a different body, nor did she live for 300 years, but there’s an emotional truth to the character because the germ of Orlando is Vita.
I’ve done something similar in a way, with At Certain Points We Touch; I’ve taken aspects of my life, isolated them, and magnified them, surrounding the central character with other people who are created on the page in a similar way.
There’s huge interest right now in how the lives of authors and the lives of their characters bleed together, but this isn’t anything new, it’s just that we are in a moment where authenticity and lived experience has significant cache. Isn’t In Search of Lost Time what we might call autofiction?
I understand how readers find it helpful to identify the writer and the writing, how the two can become conflated, and how that may be brings reader and writer a little closer, but this isn’t a memoir. I’ve gone to great lengths with dense, looping sentences and flashes of the fantastical to try and whisper to the reader, Hey, this is fiction, but ultimately if people see me and the protagonist as one and the same, what can be done? The author is dead baby, all that lives, lives in the reader’s mind.
Who has been some of the biggest influences on your writing? If you had to pick, what three books would you recommend others read?
Specifically for this book the big influences were Crudo by Olivia Laing, which I thought was the most radical break for a writer of her stature to make, and also Edmund White’s Nocturne for the King of Naples, which is where I found the tone for At Certain Points We Touch. The third book is a tough choice though, it’s either Cleanness by Garth Greenwell or the Bible.
Many of our readers are emerging writers themselves. What are three of your biggest lessons about producing creative work that you’d impart to others?
Buckle up for a long, bumpy ride, you are guaranteed to hate yourself and your work 75% of the time, and for the duration of the other 25% to become convinced you are the greatest living writer. Patience and perspective are your friends.
Read everything and watch everything, and commit to working through difficult, even boring, abstract movies and books. Not every time of course, but let one in five be a real challenge to you.
Study another language, even if it’s just on Duo Lingo, you will learn so much more than from taking a creative writing class.
And lastly, could you tell us a little about what you’re working on next or where we can experience some of your work in the near future?
I’m about 20k words into a new book. I’m not really talking about it yet, but I can say it’s a hell of a lot more fun to write than the last one!
The characters emerging are pretty outrageous, the tone is almost satirical, and it feels like I’m starting out on a fantastic voyage.
Lauren John Joseph writes for the page, the stage and the silver screen. They are the author of the plays “Boy in a Dress” and “A Generous Lover” and the experimental prose volume “Everything Must Go”. Their first novel “At Certain Points We Touch” was published in March by Bloomsbury. You can follow them on Twitter, @lajohnjoseph, and Instagram, @laurnejohnjoseph
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
