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Joelle Taylor

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36

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2024-08-05

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2024-08-05

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1. “Money is Pizar. So there's a huge process of learning. The creative sector really needs to put that at its heart. If we want to read all of these diverse, contradictory stories that will become mirrors for all of us.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Pushed forward. We were able to learn to write better and we were able to access the arts, go to more events, learn how to write. But because to do this, Project certain at Target working class communities. And that means not just what we're teaching, but how they're going to get to the workshop. You know the sting revolution has helped a lot, I think. Plays I put on at uni, because I didn't have anywhere to stay at some points. I always made sure there was a bed in the place so that I could work in the theatre all day and sleep there at night. And those are the kind of things that you have to do. You have to have this inventive way of negotiating life if you come from that. If you come from no money. And if you come from no money, generally you don't understand.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Has to it the center of everything I write because it's been a center of my life as a human being. And certainly when I was younger, trying to break into a profession which is considered elite. And if you think about the mass on, the founding of the arts for the last 14, 15 years, we're seeing it across theatre, we're seeing it across film and music that the only people who can take or have connections because of their class, because the parents working TV or publishing, that they have these roots up. But there's a huge spoken word scene gave us a huge force of working class artists from different marginalized communities, you know, people of color and white people and being the thing that was kind of uniting us is this blockage to us, entering this art world. And because of that and because of some incredible people who really...”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “I mean, that's what attracts me, it's the contradiction between things that's compelling. You can't talk about poetry without talking about class. I mean, it's exactly as you said. It comes from, you know, spoken word, et cetera. The oldest form of poetry is the spoken word tradition. It's the oral tradition. But then that, of course, because it's such a powerful thing and such an effective way of passing on political messages and translating them into these emotional kind of bullets or bridges between people. It's so powerful that it was taken away from us and reduced simply to the written form. And as you said earlier, I love both the written and the spoken forms. But there has been a disempowering, and that's because of Klaus. You know, you don't teach the working classes to write back then so that you own poetry, you take this powerful thing out of the mouths of people.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “So there is also the sense that there'll be a moment where we'll recognize all of us that there is in the mid-80s and stand back to back again. So maybe the idea of what a queer state needs to radically change as well. Because I guess what I'm thinking about queer now, rather than just the collective noun, but as a word meaning to disrupt, so a space that holds and unifies also disrupts the way we normally do things. I mean, basically we should all get back to being 1970s feminists, you know, grow our armpit hair, knit our own tempons. Do you know what I mean? And go back. Back to personal contact, but that's more important. And our commonality is. important as our individuality.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “It was his own beast, it was alive and real. So it's less like that now. But as an elder, I'm telling you, it's coming back. It is coming. You can feel it in the air. And I hope I'm wrong. I go to quite a few queer spaces, certainly not queer cultural spaces. And also sometimes the club is like Butch Please.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “They shouldn't be able to happen because it is a magical space, there's a ghost, a ghostly space. So some people are going to be there from the 1920s and 30s and some from the future. It doesn't really matter. But our group of characters, what it was like then, I got hit quite a bit, just slapped. We would walk in groups, certainly as women, if you could. And certainly, you know, I worked in schools for years as well. And there was a real sense of it being a change in the way we thought about LGBT people as a society. And it was a much more open. The homophobia then was on your television. It was on the news. You were reading it on the way to work. It was on the way somebody looked at you.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Because we created our own currency. And if it wasn't for the Scots, I wouldn't have been able to set up a theatre company, put my first play on. It created a friendship group and a network of women who still know each other and are still friends. I know the Rebel Dykes as well. So in a sense, I mean, in the O'Maryville story, it's not necessarily in the 80s. I tried to make it a little bit atemporal. So things”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Yeah, I mean, it really has. So, the first thing is with great oppression comes great resistance. So I often feel like I lived in the golden age of the gay, if you like, to be shallow about it, which was 80s and 90s London. There were numerous bars I could go to as a dike that were just dike bars. There were numerous bars that were, you know, queer, that were gay male bars. There were literally, you know, there were so much to choose from and not just the bars, it was theatre, it was community cafes, you know, it was public speaking, it was writing events, it was a really rich and vibrant culture. And like you were suggesting, partly squatting supported that. That was our kind of arts council, you know.”

   2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Know because, and I know, I know that the major population of the world agrees with me, you know, and yet it still happens. What are we what? I think writing them becomes just political force within it because you're not just writing to name what's happening, but you're trying to imagine alternate futures. You know, and perhaps that's something I need to bring into my work more is to imagine the world in a way where it works better, it finds its own. its own breath again.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “at the beginning of the book I talk about this hyper consumerism there is nothing left to sell but ourselves there's nothing left we've invaded ourselves we've Every single capitalism itself. Now we're trying to sell out. I think everybody feels they are uncertain times where we are, you know, we're watching every night, an apocalypse. There's nothing I can write that's as brutal as what's happening right now on my phone. Right now I can go on to X or to Instagram and watch Children Blown Apart. I can watch that anytime, day or night. That to me is horrific.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “and they have to leave to make that happen. Why do the prices go up? That's a battle. Hackney's a battleground in lots of ways. And I think about it as a very queer. Think about it as a feminist space. I think about it as a space where Battles of our race were fought and continue to be fought. So it's a very rich, alive space, like you said, full of ghosts.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “That the prime question is the whole of London, which has its heart ripped out thanks to the Tories and successive mayors. Everything that makes London London, they try to get rid of and sanitise, you know, and I think in one of the stories I talk about them making a squat, but it's like a brand new squat. That's based on a real thing I saw when years ago I went to a cafe in Shoreditch and they'd done it up like a squat. They probably spent thousands doing it. And you'll let Jesus Christ land. We weren't because we had a choice, you know? So it's really interesting how gentrification is so appropriate. And then leave you in this kind of strange land where you really like the fact that there's good cafes and restaurants, but then why did we all have to leave? Or why did other people?”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “It was a cushion, it was a rebellion, it was, you know, all of these kinds of things. It becomes its own character, you know, the spirit of a place becomes in some way personified, I suppose. And I do see hackney as the last one to leave the party and is kind of a little bit of a dehydrated hipster in the corner now, probably. It's a place where the first around gentrification were first really fought certainly in my life like Shawditch coming back. In lots of ways, it's been wonderful to see Shawditz develop again in Hoxton and Dalston and places like that. But of course, gentrification is a hand swept across a table. And everything that's there just gets pushed off the side.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “So I came to Hackney in something like 1995 and the Hackney, that kind of is a part of my DNA, if you like, is a space of resistance. It was free gentle frequency. Dolston was a place you ran through. Hoxton equally moved very quickly through it. And I lived in Dolston at first when I first came though in an old squat. And in fact, the London Fields area, that whole area, in the 70s, there were about 50 terraced houses that were squatted by lesbians. It became London Fields area and Dalston and then, you know, areas like Stamford Hill, etc. They all became this kind of network of queer squats and spaces of resistance. That's what I entered into this place, like I was saying, where, you know, that's what? Isn't simply somewhere you slept. It was a community center. It was a collective idea.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Dying to figure it out, it might be. Question of it, and it applied, it becomes a feminist track because it's applied simply to women. We're talking about women. And within that, then you have to talk about the relationship or the gendered relationship between what is man and what is woman are symbols, you know, and patriarchy. All of that lovely stuff.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “That's the new ghost story. That's the other information we can put in. The problem with it is we've asked so many of the questions already is there a new way for the apocalypse to happen? Probably not.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “And I just like weird stories as well. So, when I was a kid, I remember Rowan Dumps, Tales of the Unexpected. Because I spent the entire program trying to work out what the twist in the tail was, you know, from like the monkey paw story about bringing the dead back to life. They look exactly like they did in the moment of death. All those kind of things really fascinated me. Like I say, it's the ghost story. So, speculative fiction is too. We're in such a cinematic age, such a digital age, all of us have this rudimentary, often flawed knowledge of, you know, metaphysics and quantum physics. What's it called periogenesis? I'm making it up now. We have this kind of understanding. We can all push a little bit. You can Google if quantum entanglement and ghosts is a thing, and it is, by the way, it's very interesting”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “I think a certain naivety or a kind of lord within your writing, that kind of is really important because if you know, then why are you writing? Where's the curiosity? How do we find this out in whatever way?”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “It's something that's really preoccupied me my whole life relief. I went to university in your first year, you can do these wild courses and I did philosophy. And I remember the very first essay I was like a, you know, a counselor's say kids. I'm like, Limby, wasn't a terribly good essay at that time? But the question was, you know, like, is there good and evil? And I was like, no. No, there isn't. There's only good. Even bad people do, they think they're doing the right thing. You know, obviously I got ripped to shreds for it. But that was my first thought. You know, it's a very intense book. And my ambition with my work is to sort of lighten up a little bit in all ways because it allows people in more. I think my rage has kind of finding different ways to translate itself now, finding different ways to talk about it.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “And then the revenge aspect starts. I don't know what if it's wise or not to give it away, but it's not what you expect. The worst punishment we can ever have any of hers is the full understanding of what we've done. And I think there's a moment in it where pipe fish understands fully and loves his daughters. You know, there's a line where he says he wants to protect them from men like him. I wanted to write something that made you feel almost sympathy or pity anyway for Amiga.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “this sort of this flower that grows toward the dark, if you like. And then he's online one day and he's kind of constantly getting battered away online. He has as much success online as he has in real life until this guy called Larson suddenly appears and begins to back him up and they become friends and there's this kind of relationship, very intense masculine relationship develops between Amiga and Larson, which is kind of internalized homophobia in some ways as a kind of homosexual thing. They don't know how to, or certainly meager doesn't know how to do with masculine love, with loving, you know, another man. And they set up a company together called Incel in which they film. They're terrible things they do to women. Three of the women die.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yeah, pipe fish is about this guy, this incel guy. I wrote to, well, started writing it in 2018. He's called Amiga and he's kind of the quintessential incel in his mother's attic. He's an absolute misogynist. But I wanted to write it from his perspective. And the reason I wrote it to begin with is that I was so shocked when I came across himself and I looked at some of the sites. So the things they're talking about in the story are real things. I didn't have to be terribly imaginative, you know, in terms of the way they talk to each other or the way they develop their campaign against women. It's a very surreal story. It starts in a, I think of it as social surrealism. So you begin with a very real thing, which is the incel phenomenon, this guy Amigo, who's very weak in lots of ways or considers himself to be there's a sense that he was ostracized at school, that he was never going to be anyone, then he's hit with these hormones around, and it creates.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Thank you. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to work with Neil is because, you know, who's a hero of mine growing up? He seems like he'll go mad. He's only like about four years older But I was watching him out on Tuesday on the television when I was little. And he's such a great chronicler of the gay or the queer movement and the artic representative of that. And I guess we have that commonality because not just do we write about it, but we were there. And that's an important aspect. So the tenderness comes from, I can see their faces. I know what it smells like in that room. I know what fear feels like In different ways, the different kind of nuances and grades of fear. And again, you can't feel fear unless you feel love, you can't feel grief unless. You feel love. So, thank you for saying that.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “So it's all about that. It's about the survival journey being the hero's journey. It's a common experience, like what you do with it. And as a sentence, and I work with to make the stage show Incredible author, but also theatre practitioner. And so he wrote this thing, there's things that happen women because they're women. That's what we find out in this first novel. But it's my hope or my intention that they will move it away from that as we go on the journey into the next book. We find out about the rest of the family”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “These kind of adventurers through time and geography and ideology and thinking, these very active things, it's something we seem to have lost a little bit. You know, when we think about the universal character, it's generally male. And questions I've been asked around the book have been really interesting in bookshops. And you think, would you ask that of a male author? As long as it's strange to have a book about women and loads of women in it, I'm always going to do it because I just find it so fascinating that it's something that stands out where I don't think it becomes something that we talk about. It was just a book that's generally predicated around men is not something that's even picked up on that we talk about something unusual, you know.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “Girls, I don't understand sexual terrorism. It's something that stuck between my teeth. It's something that we all experience. We constantly kind of think about ourselves in very separate units. When you look around the world and you compare thinkings about women, like you said, state or in an individual level, then it's quite frightening. It's really frightening, but something that I really needed to explore. But also I wanted stories about women and, you know, that feature women characters as these kind of adventurous almost swashbuckling in some ways.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “I think old novel writing is memoir. Even though I've just said the whole thing about the pronoun and I and the professional in poetry. When we were writing somebody's emotions, we draw on what we know, what we've observed, but also what we've personally felt. So it has this kind of memoir aspect to it. And my earlier life was framed by sexual violence. It meant it was very difficult to survive. And it took a long time, but I'm still preoccupied. I guess there's a naivety about Writing as well because I still don't get it. I still don't understand about male violence against women”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “Is taking the bases all the narratives based on the masculine morrow the masculine experience of life being quite linear, i.e. not broken by childbirth or anything like that. The sexual experience beginning, middle and end, one massive climax story. Females have a different experience that way. You know you have interruption in terms of and circularity. You have a main story, the mother would be inextricably linked to the main thing. And of course, you've got the idea of multiple climaxes within narrative. So that was the whole thing I really wanted to explore all that. But at the heart of it, I just love a good ghost story. So much of fear is about love, isn't it? So, yeah, that's why I was drawn to this particular thing.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “Know, or about society, whereas this allowed me to take some really real things I'd researched. Also parts of my life as a memoir is within it as well, like gutter girls is pretty much memoir. To some extent. And it just allows you to really pull that metaphor till it snaps. Slaps you in the face. This whole form, I call it the feminine morphology.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “Things don't happen to be as grounded in fact as a lot of spoken words is. Like I wouldn't go on stage and tell a story, a heartbreaking story, unless it was real. In the pro genre, you get this, or the prose form, you get this, the ability to follow the imagination, follow the pen a little bit, and to tell some quite bizarre parts of the story because I'm quite a surreal writer as a prose writer. But also It's the quantum mechanics of writing. Something can always be something else. And that tension is really exciting. But at the same time, you want to write a page Turner. Very few people, I think, can write experimental novels and sell books. At the same time, it takes a particular kind of gravity and expertise to do that. I just always wanted to tell stories much of Spoken storytelling, but it's about...”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “concerned with the pronoun I and it becomes this really powerful thing you know it's like a little spear you can pluck off the page or a little awe that will get you to different spaces you know so it's a very powerful thing but there's something deeply liberating about letting go of that and in the process”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “Mean essentially I've always written prose and it's always been this kind of experimental or poetic prose but it's also had elements of speculative fiction and like I said the ghost story the suspense I want readers to want to know what happens next and that applies to my poetry as well which is an unusual way of looking at a poetry collection poetry collection as page turner is something that really fascinates me and I mentioned Boatry because really that alphabet came out of a book I'd written called Songsmate and Retaught Me and this was another kind of conceptual book and it was looking at the state or status of women globally in a 24 hour period so it was just this idea of looking around the world to look about women and to look at females and everything that means and see what's actually happening as a kind of reportage the thing about poetry is it's really”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “We landed the body of a woman called Jones, who's of kind of indeterminate age, but we know she's pretty old, and she's running across the twenty third century dystopian acne, and she's running as hard as fast as she can towards this tattoo parlour. And this woman, Jones, is heavily tattooed, does not a part of her body that doesn't have a tattoo, it's inside her mouth, under her eyelids, she's completely covered because she's gone to this retro tattoo parlour to get one more tattoo. And this is the story more happens. And the tattoo she wants to get is a simple line that links all the other tattoos together. As they reach one of the tattoos is like a door and it opens, and you find out the story of the tattoo, but it's not in the normal way. You know, you kind of land in the bodies of people who had these tattoos.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “punk music that led directly where I am today in poetry. I really wanted to be able to express myself in some way, and the idea of being a writer grabbed me from being a really small child. My mum and dad read horror books. And I see horror really as the original story in lots of ways, you know, particularly the ghost story, you know, that original story. And also my mom was assistant manager of Unit 4 in Rottenstall, Lancashire, which is this Art Deco cinema. So as a kid, that was my babysitter. You know, I just ran around all the different stores. And all the cinema is the same thing. It's story.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “You know, I mean, it's always really interesting when someone's a writer and is from a kind of more marginalized background. My family were a very working class, so there wasn't the expected route into the arts. Wasn't that same kind of access to the arts? But I was really into punk music. And the reason I was is like I loved the lyrics. And so that was really my kind of the rope that got me and pulled me into poetry because in the old days, punk wasn't just, you know, like the pop punk, you see, of people running around spitting. It was also a way of educating our old generation of young kids from the end, you know, who taught us about feminism and taught us about racism and taught us about class issues, all that kind of thing. And because of that, they were constantly referencing other pieces of work like George Orwell or something like that. So it becomes this kind of little breadcrumb trail through.”

    2024-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Imagining London's Future through Fiction, with Joelle Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT