Episode 5: Home Writer

Reading List

MoDA Reading List – Writing With Objects

Home Writer Podcast: Transcript

Ana: Our guest for the podcast today is a very long standing friend Josie Barnard, she’s worked with us at Middlesex University, welcome Josie, it’s great to have you here again.

Josie: Hello, good to be here.

Ana: Josie is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at De Montfort University. She’s an award-winning writer of theory, fiction and non-fiction. Her works include studies, novels, creative non-fiction, books, print and radio journalism. She has taught creative writing widely, and her key interests include how the ‘digital turn’ impacts writing and publishing, a subject that she explores in her new book ‘The Multimodal Writer’.

Ana: And we work with Josie on countless occasions using objects from MoDA as prompts for working with creative writing and journalism students and working across multiple genres as well, from fiction to non-fiction, journalistic articles, these are just some examples. And you can find these on the website at MoDA in the page Co-Creation.

And today we’re going to delve into the subject of writing and how we create a sense of place, especially in relation to our homes, because this is what the topic of our podcast series is. And in her new book, The Multimodal Writer, Josie writes about how writers are expected to be more present online, and I think this is something that links to the way in which we relate to place specially when we think about being offline and being online. So we will discuss about how we read, write and think across these different platforms, but also how we think and write with objects, and we have lots of objects here in front of us today that we’ve got from the collection that relate precisely to this practice of writing especially paper, so I feel paper is really going to come up in our conservation today. And in that sense, how we might also feel at home or displaced in the act of writing, depending on where we are, and that’s something that I’ll want to begin asking Josie.

Home Writing

Ana: Ok Josie, so in all the podcasts that we’ve recorded so far, I always want to start with quite a broad question, but which can also be tricky to answer, and this is quite a personal question to you as a writer and it’s where are you, or what place are you in when you write?

Josie: Writing is a very very personal personal thing, and it depends very much from writer to writer, and I think one of the things that can make writing feel actually so exciting and so kind of adrenalin rich is because you are in a number of different places at once. So in your, in one way it’s very very interior, you have to mine your own memories, you have to kind of consider all your senses, you’re creating even if it’s a non-fiction world you’re still having to recreate that world in your head in order to write it and translate that and get it on the page or on the screen.

A lot of writers like to work at a desk with very familiar objects, or, completely differently, in a very noisy space, for example, in a café, and so you’ve got all these different experiences, memories, intellectual drives, all feeding in so writing is a highly charged experience.

Ana: And I want to ask you more about that interior space that you’re describing, because I I think that there is a question of how one might feel at home or perhaps kind of uncomfortable maybe in the act of writing, and what’s that interior space like and how does it relate do you think to this sense of of home or unease I guess in the act of writing? Is one at home when one is writing?

Josie: I think one is at home in different phases of writing and I think one of the things that I explore in the book that’s really important for writers, is to have a really good understanding of their writing practice. So, a lot of writers, , talk about the difference bet- the difference between the kind of person you are, the kind of persona you have to inhabit when you’re drafting, as opposed to when you’re editing for example.

So if you are drafting you probably want to feel a bit freer when you’re editing you have to feel tough, you have to feel clear you have to be able to ruthlessly get rid of the dead wood. And those could be very different personas, and they might be personas, and they might make you feel more able to draft. If you’re in an in an office or a library that might make you feel more able to edit to be quite tough, so the interaction between the external space and how domestic or er formal that feels can have a very direct relationship with the with the internal writer who you have to become in order to in order to perform effectively at different stages of the writing process, and indeed for different genres.

Writing and materiality

Ana: It’s really interesting I think what you’re saying, because it’s making me look back on the collection that we have at MoDA, thinking about the designs that we have in the museum, and almost I wouldn’t speak of design as a as a writing process, but definitely as a coding process that perhaps has similarities in terms of how we engage with different spaces and materials depending on what product we’re designing, and what I’m thinking about specifically is different uses, sorry I should say uses of different papers depending on the stage of the design process that you might be.

So you might have so we have some book jackets here that we’re looking at and they’re kind of test pieces that one of the designers of the Silver Studio, which is the large collection that we have here in the museum of designs was producing in the late nineteenth century, Harry Napper, and how actually this is, you can see it’s quite final in stage that’s going to be sent to the publishers because it’s quite thick paper, it’s really been, it’s not quite finished, but it’s almost there as opposed to say much more of a draft stage, where you would have had cheaper paper and different uses of materials and perhaps more pencil as opposed to this piece, which is already almost in full colour, and these sort of dark hues, blues, so I like this idea of just thinking about how different materials, we engage with different materials depending on what stage in the thinking or writing, designing process we might be.
I don’t know if that sort of relates to the practice of writing in the materiality of it too.

Josie: Absolutely, I think that one thing that many writers do is they have tools that are very particular to the different stages of the writing process and or different genres. So Rhianna Pratchett for example always hand writes her to do list, that has to be something that she carves out on a piece of paper, i it’s always important really I think for a writer to have a sense of whether they prefer to draft on scrappy pieces of paper or Moleskin notebooks, you know which works best for you, is important to know that because for some people a really beautiful moleskin notebook it will actually kind of be quite off-putting…

And you won’t be able to do any rough notes, because it will feel that you ought to be producing something beautiful and finished, so the more scrappy the bit of paper, the better for some writers for that draft, and I think it’s really interesting that that that is a process that’s essentially, you can see that happening through the through the in the collection here, and that you’re that the paper that you’re using will be of better quality as you progress through to the final stages, and I think that absolutely is reflected in in writing process.

Ana: Can I throw that back at you and ask you about your own writing process, how do you engage with different materials what it, what does it look like? And yeah if you could just describe that a little bit that would be…

Josie: For my own writing process I start with scraps of paper, those are where my drafts begin to emerge and it’s I have to interact with the paper, with the pen, I do like to I can’t work with the pencil for example on the draft that’s not going to work for me.
It has to be a pen, it has to be a pen with quite good flow, but it doesn’t have to be a fancy pen but by any means. And I will do a mixture of free writing where I just literally see what comes out, and some quite careful planning, but all of that tends to happen on a on a piece of paper with a pen, in a room often with maybe some Bach or some Mozart, and then when I get to the final stages of course you can’t really do without a computer, a computer is so fantastic because you can cut and paste, you can chop, you can experiment.

And so I think that one of the things that’s wonderful about that that I really enjoy is a kind of bricolage feel to the process by that stage, so that you can literally start moving paragraphs around and experimenting and tinkering.

So my writing process goes moves not from lower to higher quality paper, but from fairly scrappy bits of paper which I always collect in folders as I’m moving along to a computer to online, but there and the same is true of the reading, because reading is a really important part of writing, and I do tend to prefer reading hard copies, and I tend to like to make quite a lot of notes, so at that point I do use a pencil if I’m, I wouldn’t write in pen on a book, but I would maybe make a couple of notes in pencil and I use little stickers and things like that.

Writing and time: marginalia

Ana: On that subject of the sort of marginalia that you have in the as you’re reading and the annotation that sort of register that experience, do you ever find yourself being surprised by them when you return to them, or is there something also about encountering you know a past, I guess a past version of one’s self in a way, say that it is a book that you haven’t returned to for 10 years for example, how, that there is something quite interesting there, but in terms of the kind of place that we return to, no?

Josie: Very much so, I think one of the other things that’s interesting about the marginalia is I usually find that I’m actually already thinking about three different projects as I’m doing the marginalia, so that so that you know I will have some relates to the projects I’m working on currently, and some is starting to relate to things that are very much in a kind of you know emergent form there, they haven’t they haven’t fully formed yet. And then then I might have a question mark, so it’s always interesting to go back to see where the question marks really essentially have been removed, because I now know what that project has become. But the mar marginalia I think is really important it’s always fascinating to see other’s people’s marginalia as well, not that you can usually make much sense of it, but to know that that very interior investigation has been going on, and little bits of evidence have been left little, there’s a little paper trail of evidence of people’s past, memories, thoughts, passions.

The Multimodal Writer

Ana: And I want to ask you how you think that translates or doesn’t translate to the online environment, because you write about new platforms and social media to podcasting in The Multimodal Writer as being something that writers are required to adapt increasingly to a fast changing environment, and I think in terms of marginalia there’s something about the sedimenting of time, or the there’s a sort of slowness in that practice, whereas with the online media, it’s very different, how do you see (short pause) that writer’s need to adapt to this fast changing pace of writing, and how is this something that is lost in that process, or is there something that’s gained possibly as well?

Josie: The digital age presents a lot of challenges for writers, and my book The Multimodal Writer addresses, not just the challenges, but how it’s possible to manage them in order to be effective and productive and really thrive in this very fast paced digital environment. Which of course still involves hard copies, so books haven’t suddenly died, artisan books, artisan journals are being published more, you know, there’s an increase in enthusiasm for them.

Similarly literary festivals that they’re growing exponentially, the number of literary festivals keeps on going up, because people want that human contact, one of the problems with digital is that it can be very alienating and you, and it can feel as if you have lost agency, so the agency goes into the digital sphere somehow, and you on the end of your keyboard don’t have agency anymore.
And so some of the really interesting research findings in my own work with students, and also by organisations such as the Carnegie Trust, Carnegie Trust works with disadvantaged young people, is that teaching online actually starts offline and a sig- significant proportion of the ongoing work to enable digital literacy continues offline. So one of the key things to beg to improving digital literacy is actually engaging with tools, with paper, with human beings in a real world environment.

Writing with objects

Ana: I want to ask you about, well our work together in fact and with students, because we use objects, and I think there’s quite a lot of I suppose interest and investment there in the haptic engagement that students can have with objects that are not in a digital environment, and I’m seeing some of the objects that we have here: there’s this moquette, there’s some different fabrics, but also there’s um, you know, other kinds of objects like paper envelopes. So, what do you think when students are engaging with these objects? What is that adding to their practice of writing?

Josie: When the students are working with items from the MoDA collection, they are physically connecting with things from the past with things that maybe feel soft, or hard, or rough. They’re interacting with objects that somebody else has chosen to collect and keep, the reasons we may or may not know.

And it’s really valuable for students to be in a situation where they are given the opportunity to think really carefully about how s- how an object affects them, so to think about it afresh, and one of the things if you are writing fiction that that really is important for literary fiction, is to be able to find a kind of poetic truth, and that kind of poetic truth often involves unpicking what you take for granted and looking at it in a new way, and that’s what is wonderful about working with MoDA objects with the students, is that they look at things that they take for granted and find a fresh approach.

So for example, if I just quickly pick up (rustle noise) an envelope, so this is actually just an envelope from the Charles Hasler collection, and he was a designer and he collected bits of ephemera, and this particular piece is an envelope that he’s ripped apart and flattened, and the outside of the envelope is fairly straightforward it’s just yellow, but the inside of the envelope is extraordinary, it’s a 1970’s design, with really, I mean I’m not even sure you can call these flowers bold, they’re kind of excessive. They’re bright pink, bright yellow, purple, they’re really out there, and it’s very surprising to see them inside an envelope and so so these envelopes have actually been incredibly inspiring for the students. This one with the flowers is is magnificent and so it means that when the person was opening the letter, they would have had this this kind of riot of flowers greeting them along with this personal communication. And so on that level it forces the students to think about people who are not there, we don’t know who they are, we don’t know why they were sending each other letters, but it for precisely that reason it provokes them to begin to imagine.

The envelopes are also incredibly useful because it helps the students start to think about communication in hard copy as opposed to via for example WhatsApp, Snapchat, not so much email, but thinking about the casual communication, so if you want to communicate good news or something casual, you know your student is more likely to go via Snapchat or WhatsApp or some kind of other social media, but the idea of actually sitting down to write a letter is very different, and so it forces the students to rethink social media communication that they would otherwise very much take for granted and assume is just how you do it, and the idea that there is an alternative is very important.

Ana: Yeah and I think on that it makes me think also of how people have talked about cyber space as being this sort of empty space, or that that sometimes it seems to be beyond our sensory reach. Do you think that the envelopes then are also encouraging students to rethink the way in which they are engaging with cyber space? So it’s not only about understanding how communication changes when you have to sit down, perhaps for hours, composing a letter as opposed to very immediate communication, but do you think then they maybe take this back to reflect on their own experience of writing, and how that might lead to, I don’t know, critique or change, or you know, yeah…

Josie: Yes very much so, I think though the statistics are only really starting to come out regarding the effect that the new digital environment has on creativity and on output and on you know what is digital literacy? It’s a thing that it’s may it’s extremely difficult to think about how you can define digital literacy, because digital literacy is now everything, it’s going in to get your bank details, it’s, you know, buying your shopping online, it’s ordering a cab, so digital literacy is now it now permeates everything really. I think it could be more worrying, it could be that actually cyberspace as you say is this is this alien removed space and that people are becoming more passive and, more nervous about putting stuff into cyberspace and actually creating something that might potentially kind of back fire, go wrong. it’s hard to know what impact this is having on writing, but it’s very clear that it’s having an impact, and that writers need to really begin to, as I say, assess their own creative writing process.

Writing in online spaces

Ana: Well, one of the things that it might be having an impact on I think is in that blurring of the boundaries between a more public and private division of spaces, so I’m interested in that because it relates I think to the idea of where we feel at home and what does home mean? Is it a space of shelter? Is it something that sort of bleeds into the public sphere? And even the notion of home as a sheltered space, is it even sustainable today?

So, yeah I wonder if you have some thoughts on that from the perspective of how one writes and how one writes in in a way that inevitably becomes public as soon as you’ve already produced it, it’s so public all the time isn’t it?

Josie: Well I think one of the things that has really come to the fore is the is the need for individual writers to gain a sense of what is home for them, in terms of different writing environments. So some young writers feel that they really ought to write a blog, that’s the thing that they ought to do, you ought to have a Twitter presence, you ought to have an Instagram presence, but for some people Instagram is going to be absolutely inappropriate, because images are not are not are not their thing.

For some people who write very quickly and very confidently a blog might be fantastic, but for somebody who has to craft every sentence, a blog is not going to be a very good environment, it’s going to feel like pressure and I think that audience expectations are very important.

But the, actually to an extent the person whose publishing these outputs can set the guidelines. So it would previously have been publishers, you know, publishers might expect a popular writer to publish every single year, so a commercial writer really has to have a book out every every year. Literary fiction, a bit longer, maybe three years, four years, whereas on social media it’s up to the individual writer to essentially indicate what kind of output they’re going to be producing. And I think having the confidence to do that and essentially not do not respond to the platforms kind of, system of likes and approval which is external and which really is designed to try and encourage people to post more often, but to kind of push that away and decide well what makes me feel at home in this platform, and what do I need to do to ensure that I feel at home here?

Ana: It’s very challenging though I imagine especially for younger writers and maybe some of your students, I don’t know if this is something you would discuss with them in the sessions that you have and in your teaching because, managing those audience expectations and being able to separate it from your own practice as a writer seems like a tricky thing to me because it is so pervasive as you say, and but there is also another way in which these platforms are almost overly visual I would say when they rely so much on a certain visuality and I was wondering as I was hearing you speak, you know like Instagram, Twitter as well, but especially Instagram, what that focus on the visual, what impact does that have on writing do you think? How has the relationship between images and words changed, if it has?

Josie: Yes it absolutely has changed, I mean in a in a text in a text heavy production you’re describing the visuals, whereas obviously with things like Instagram, Twitter increasingly, the visuals come as well, and so you’re supplementing the visuals and there is tension between which has dominance, and that takes quite a lot of skill, but I think one of the things that is interesting is it takes skill if you’re trying to do it as a professional, but if you’re doing it just for fun it’s something that develops kind of quite naturally.

One of the things that’s become very clear during y programme of research, which has resulted not only in this book, but also in a number of articles and chapters, is that actually one of the things that’s very hard for students, is to transfer skills that they have in a in a leisure context into a work context and that that’s really difficult, and that’s one of the things that it’s possible to really help with in the classroom, is actually you do have the skills, you do have the expertise, and really it’s a question of working out how to transfer it.

I think there’s another element to your question which is regarding voice, creative writing traditionally has set a lot of stall by an authentic voice, and this term authentic voice has become really quite problematic, because the idea of an authentic voice is applied generally to the fiction that is produced, so that you will get the Dickens authentic voice, and all of his novels you can feel that they are Dickensian, you know, and he’s voice comes through really strongly, or Raymond Carver he’s got this strong voice.

But if there is just this single authentic voice, then clearly the minute a writer starts a website or starts some other social media platform account, then one of them is not authentic, and so then that becomes very problematic because, and it often really freezes, freezes the students, the idea that they’re supposed to be authentic on all these different platforms.

So I think that one of the, certainly when I’m working with students and teaching, one of the first things that I do is actually problematise that, so you say well, you know, if you were talking to one person of one age and one of a completely different age, you would do what’s called code switching, you know, you would you would speak in a slightly different way, you might use different terminology, you would use more or less jargon and you would be more or more or less casual or formal, and this kind of code switching doesn’t mean that you’re inauthentic, it’s appropriate, it’s polite.

Ana: Just to go back to what you were saying about authenticity, it also makes me think of the vulnerability that comes with putting your voice out there. Is that something that you problem problematise with students as well, or how do you think sometimes they might feel vulnerable in terms of what they’re putting out there?

Josie: Well this actually comes back to human beings and real world environments, so that one of the key things I found when I was when I was trying to work out, you know, is there a set of quite simple and straight forward exercises that can be rolled out, assignments that that can be used to teach some of these skills.

And one of the things that came through loud and clear is that some very simple things helped enormously, and one of them was for the students to just be sitting next to a friend when they when they start on a social media platform, that either they’re not familiar with, or that they’re using in a new a new way as a professional tool instead of a leisure tool. And just the simple act of sitting next to somebody with whom they feel comfortable makes it all much more doable and less intimidating, and that’s not just a finding in my classroom, that’s a finding across the country in all sorts of different environments.

So with various individuals and groups digitally excluded, one of the key things is finding a way of creating, so whether this is grass roots organisations, charities, local government organisations, maybe it’s going to be in a library, or some kind of local safe space, somewhere that isn’t literally home, but that feels homely, that can be crucial to helping citizens who feel digitally excluded, digitally disengaged, to overcome those err feelings of wariness, and to and to and to begin to enjoy.

One of the quite kind of surprising statistics that came out this year is that 53% of people in work don’t have the digital skills they need for work, so that’s a huge figure. And so that’s 53% of people who are feeling nervous, who are feeling uncomfortable, and that’s not a good state to be, if that’s going to be the majority of the time, or even a significant proportion of the time, that that isn’t very healthy, you know so it’s really important that people find out ways of feeling comfortable online.

Feeling at home in writing

Ana: It makes me think of really you’re saying go back to this question of writing and feeling at home, and feeling familiar or unfamiliar, with a quote that I came across when I was doing some reading for this podcast, which is: “The writer is not at home, in the sense that every act of writing puts us in a place that is to some degree unfamiliar, this kind of symbol making activity.”
So I wonder if you have some thoughts about this, do you feel at home when you write? Or is there, it seems to be perhaps that the writer is somewhere in between a familiar and an unknown space, and it’s that that kind of threshold of experience maybe is what pushes you to write as well, because you don’t quite know what you’re going to produce, but you’re also getting to know it as you produce it, right? I don’t know how it is for you, but for me I think it feels like that.

Josie: I think that often when people are writing, and they’ve got in the flow, so there are various phrases, you know, in the flow, you’re in a different head space, these really are indicative of how kind of removed you can become, and so actually you go into a different home, it’s a kind of removed home, it’s a very exhilarating version of home, where you are just, all you are doing is writing and exploring. And I think that there’s a writer called Peter Turchi talks of it being like map-making, so that you’re having to map the territory, you’re creating, if you’re writing fiction, you’re creating an imagined an imagined space, but you’re having to make it concrete for the reader, you have to, so as a writer you have to find yourself walking around in that space as if it is real, and but you’re mapping it as you go, and so it’s exciting, it’s exhilarating, it’s transporting.

Writing and technology

Ana: And what I like about what you’re saying as well as that you’re, it’s a space that isn’t static, it’s one that occurs in motion, you navigate. This idea of mapping is also about charting a certain territory, and I think that’s something that you work with your students as well, we’ve done some walks together from the campus to the museum, we’ve looked at objects that include maps, but also some different kinds of illustrations of place.

Josie: Well I think mapping is really helpful as a way of thinking about the writing process for students, partly because there are so many books out there that suggest that there are rules, there are, you know, seven types of stories, so that you know, this is the this is the correct method. Whereas the idea that actually a lot of it is them mapping their own creative process and them mapping their own story, (clears throat) is actually very helpful for them, and I think it’s also helpful for them to realise that it’s about mapping on experiences from the past that they have.

So all technology was new at some point, a pencil was once new technology, and so all of us have experience of having had to tackle something that was new, that was unnerving. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is something that I call remediation of practice, and the idea here is that is that remediation is applied to things like photography, so a painting is something that was familiar, then photography came in that was new, a lot of the conventions of painting were simply applied.

So if you think about the kinds of icons that you get on computer documents, they are remediations of pencils, scissors, so the scissor the icon is used to indicate cutting, a paper clip indicates that you should add an attachment, or that you have added an attachment. And in the same way that these codes and conventions can be remediated to help us understand new technologies, our own practice can be remediated to help us negotiate these new challenges.

So, one of the main ones is that we’re used to thinking of books as very linear, very ordered, you start at page one, you go through, page two, three and so on, until you get to the end. Whereas of course in a game, or on a website, it’s not linear, you might enter in one place, come out at another, while a different user is going in at a different place and coming out at a different place.
So that’s the user’s experience, or the reader’s, the writer has to be able to account for that mobility, that unpredictability, and I think actually map-making is something that really helps students with that.

If somebody, I don’t know, reposts a social media post from ten years ago, you may not necessarily spot that it’s ten years old and it may look as if it’s just, you know, been posted just now. And I think that can be quite tricky for writers, I think it’s particularly challenging for young writers who are making their name and essentially of course once it’s online, once it’s published, it’s out there. And so definitions of self-publishing have had now really have to take account for the fact that every single tweet is an act of self-publication, every single Instagram post is an act of self-publication.

And so students have to be much more aware of some of the legal and ethical implications, as well as of the fact that the stuff is just out there, than writers who were starting out used to. And I think that that that you as a as a teacher you have to help students become aware of this, because it is a very different environment now.

The future of writing

Ana: Yeah exactly, and I think that you know we’ve sort of come a long way really, from starting to talk about, you know, home and writing, and I think in a way we’re talking now more about what’s coming next. So I would like to end with asking you some thoughts on, how do you imagine writing will change in the next twenty years or so?

Josie: Well I actually think we are in a very exciting place, and I think there are some challenges that have to be faced face down really, for individual writers and as a society as well. Because obviously you know, we’ve got to try and make sure that everybody is digitally included, if they don’t want to be then they have to, then it has to be possible for them to live life offline. But for those who want to be and who will benefit, then then obviously everything should be done to make it possible to be digitally engaged, digitally included.

The pace of change is so fast, that when a student shifts from being a new student to a graduate, even within that time frame, technology will have changed significantly, new jobs will have emerged, and so the one thing that we can be sure of is that change is going to keep on going, and things, and it’s going to be fast paced. And so, in that kind of environment, there’s no one particular set of digital skills that will prove future proofing, and what’s needed is creative flexibility. That is what is going to see people through, they have to be able to see a new challenge, work out what the main components are, and how to deal with it.

And I think that the availability of all the online publishing tools frees new writers up to experiment and work out what it is they want to get out of the writing process. So actually, I think that these are very exciting times.

Ana: Thank you very much Josie, it’s been wonderful to have you here and to talk about these, well, I guess sort of mind bending, but also really exciting topics, so, yeah, thank you very much.

Josie: Thank you Ana.

Credits

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