In this interview for You Are Here, Jet Moon talks to SJ Lyon about their journey into Survivor Writing and why it matters.
You Are Here – peer to peer survivor writing – is Jet’s second survivor writer’s platform; building on the first: Playing With Fire which took place in 2021. You Are Here offers an expanded series of workshops, a survivor writer’s group, via Spread The Word, and a series of interviews for the Wellcome Collection archives.
Listen along as you read
“…I feel like that has actually helped me a lot. Talking and thinking in terms
of publishing and marketing. I do wonder if it changes things slightly, when
you address the question “Is there a market for this?” with “Is there
a community for this? Are there people that need this story?” And “Is it
the story that it wants to be?”…
“There’s a question about whether drawing any kind of equivalence
(between survivor experiences) is useful, whether it’s a true or a
false one. I feel like it’s really hard for any one person to say, but
I think the intent is important.
So with the case of the pandemic, it’s quite easy to say well, we’ve
had other pandemics in the past that have had a very different
response.
If we talk about the HIV AIDS pandemic of the 80s. It was very
different. And there’s a lot of reasons why it might have been very
different. So we can talk still about the commonalities without
necessarily eclipsing the past.
I don’t think it should be done to cover up somebody else’s
experience, to step on somebody or to talk over somebody, I think
it should be used as a way of relating to other people. And yeah,
and doing something useful.
It’s something that’s constantly being negotiated and navigated.
I don’t know if I’ve been lucky, but I think a lot of my experiences
with other writers has been that people are quite open to…
to sharing space with each other and to hearing other people’s
perspectives.
I think it can be empowering as well, to take a step and
experiment with drawing some level of equivalence, it doesn’t
mean, you’re saying your experience is identical to somebody
else’s, because it can never be.
But respecting somebody else’s story means you have the
capacity to give yourself that same respect. And that same
validation, and I think, I genuinely believe that’s the most loving
thing that we can do.”
Listen and read the full interview here
About the artist
SJ Lyon is a London-based queer writer of fiction, narrative non-fiction and memoir. They were shortlisted for Spread the Word’s Life Writing prize for ‘People that Might Be Us’ and their personal essay ‘Did you know you can swim in the morning’ was published in Hinterland. ’They were selected for the London Writers Awards in 2022 to develop their first long-form memoir. Their short fiction appears in Water: A Collection of Stories. They are also a charity worker, visual artist and gardener. You can find SJ on Instagram.
Jet Moon is a multi-disciplinary artist who writes, performs and collaborates on fierce work for radical social change. Collaborating for many years with the LGBTIQ, kink, sex worker, disability and survivor communities they belong to, dedicated to creating intimate spaces of sharing, visibility and resistance.
In 2021 Jet launched their peer – to – peer survivor writers project ‘Playing With Fire’ and completed ‘Peachy,’ a novella based on Jet’s teen experiences.
‘You Are Here’ expands Jet’s survivor writer’s platform; including interviews and a collaboration with Wellcome Collection. Jet has recently completed their novel ‘Artists Are Demons’: a glittering time capsule of a queer city. Dealing with themes of friendship, collectivism, grief, displacement and migration. It explores the collapse of idealism and what happens next. Based on Jet’s time in Sydney, Australia as part of the Anarchist left in the early 2000s.
Jet lives in London. You can find Jet on Instagram and Facebook.