Protected: Transcript: An interview with SJ Lyon for You Are Here

Jet Moon

Okay, so um, let’s see how we go. So yeah, first of all, I wonder if you feel comfortable saying how survivor writer applies to yourself?

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I think I mean, I think both of those words, survivor and writer are both words that I’ve kind of struggled independently with applying to myself for different reasons. And there’s…there seem to be so many layers to that of kind of thinking, well, that’s…that’s other people that can call themselves survivors, or I haven’t sort of been that number of things on a list before I can call myself a writer and that if I sort of declare myself to be either a survivor or a writer, I’m going to be challenged by somebody else in some way. So it does feel quite interesting to kind of put them both together, because it’s kind of two different…yeah, like two very different kind of forms of insecurity.

I mean, I think I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to be a writer that it was something I was kind of working towards. And I must have had sort of some idea quite early on of characteristics of what I thought a writer would be like, it was something to aspire to. And like Survivor, I don’t think I kind of had the same sense of aspiration for, it feels a little bit murkier, I think and it’s, I don’t know, I mean, it seems so obvious to sort of say that I want to want to survive, although it’s, yeah, it’s not necessarily obvious. Because that’s kind of basic need. Whereas I think culturally, we have this thing of writing being more like a luxury.

And, yeah, maybe that’s something to do with the way we recognise and see survival in a way that we don’t necessarily with the process of kind of making books and art and the things that actually help us through that process. But I mean, like, I think as far as sort of my experience of survival goes it, it kind of comes down to you. I mean, I think it kind of comes down to a lot of things. I’m a survivor, I would say of like family breakdown, family estrangement. There’s been a lot of hostility and upheaval, kind of within my family. And yeah, just kind of quite a lot of sort of very, very hard and difficult things between my parents, a lot of instability. And I kind of consider like our move to the UK in 2001 as being quite a significant turning point, in a lot of ways. It was kind of a….it was a… it was a really significant culture shock.

And in a way it feels quite strange to be thinking about this in terms of survivorship because it wasn’t on the…on the surface of it. None of this actually feels like that big a deal. But it’s only kind of when I look at my life since then, and the sort of like depression, anxiety….I would say obsessive compulsive disorder and I think, yeah, I don’t know quite…quite what it is. But I feel like I’ve been connected to trauma in one way or another, whether it’s sort of through my family history. I know that my parents fled Lebanon in In 1986, at the height of the hostage crisis, so and that was always very high a kind of in

my, in my understanding. And yeah, I think, and professionally, I sort of came to have a lot of contact with people living with complex trauma. And that kind of helped me understand that there’s a lot of…well, I think, when it comes to sort of understanding what somebody is dealing with, it’s not necessarily all that helpful to kind of simplify or to…or to pin it down to, you know, substance use, for instance, or kind of drug or alcohol addiction or homelessness. I mean, these are all important words, but then there’s so many stories behind that there’s a kind of…it’s not about what’s wrong with you, what’s your diagnosis, it’s kind of what’s happened to you. And that’s something you learn about somebody over a period of time. So, yeah, go ahead.

Jet Moon

I was gonna say that, the more I’ve listened to other people, the more I feel that some questioning of belonging or whether the personal experience is valid or not, seems to be quite a common experience of survivorship. Actual questioning of you know, if you’re actually real enough in some way, and I am wanted to just come to, again, to speaking about how you came to writing or whether there was a process that made you realise you wanted to write and how you began.

S.J.Lyon

How I began…I was very lucky. I think, like I, I read really early, I was really, I was really young to read, I remember kind of just looking at chunks of text and kind of willing them into understanding. And I think and it was, it felt like a very easy step from there to be like making up little stories, and usually like drawing pictures with them. And I always wanted to listen to stories, I always wanted to be read to, I always wanted to understand kind of what was going on, asking a lot of questions before I was necessarily old enough to and looking at adults a lot, like always wanting to kind of figure out what their world was. And collecting, collecting things, collecting little objects just for their own sake. Looking at things, like really being quite obsessed with memory, and wanting things to be preserved and not lost, I remember was always really important.

And I think, yeah, I mean, there was a period of time when I sort of started thinking about writing, as not just something that I could do that, you know, would entertain people, but as something that I needed for myself, when I was maybe 14 or 15 and going through a period where I was, I was actually speaking very, very little. But I was writing, and it was it kind of felt like something that kept me tethered. Even if, yeah, the actual, the actual words that I was writing, I’m not really not sure what they are like, but that it kind of feels a little bit beside the point. So yeah, it’s just always been a compulsion really.

Jet Moon

So I can, you know, I read your story, “People that might be like us” and I wanted to just read like a little piece from it, and then ask you, you know, to talk about what it encapsulates. And it says…I mean, you mentioned this thing of like reading looking at blocks of text and it says

“I was reading Carson McCullers, and came across the phrase, the we of me, I literally placed my palm on the page and thought “Yes, yes, yes, yes”. I was flooded with the desire to find my “us” my “we”, what I would like to call “the queer community”. I wanted to be seen by people who had all once had the same thing to hide. I visualised a new tribe of chosen family waiting and ready to step out of the wings. The world would open up for me the day I was ready to stop encasing myself in brittle solid

solitude. Or so I thought”. There’s…I mean, there’s just so much in that isn’t there? You know, if you wanted to just, yeah.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I realised that I think that’s the first time I’ve actually heard that read by somebody else. That’s, yeah, that felt like he was very, very strange. But yeah, I think I mean, I remember, I remember that book. I remember that phrase. And it, I think it’s when I hear that, I sort of think about how, you know, we’re kind of… we’re kind of trying to find an answer to loneliness a lot of the time as writers while also kind of pursuing this quite lonely thing…or habit. And, but I do think that there is a need for community. I mean, I struggle a little bit with that word, I don’t think I completely know what I mean. But yeah, like, I definitely sort of think about that. That particular passage was sort of my feelings at the time of really wanting to wanting to relate and feel connected at a time when I really did not know if I ever was going to find anybody to relate to, at all. I was…I felt very other I felt very much like I’d been transplanted out of like, a living situation that felt very singular.

I felt like I was somebody that didn’t really have a culture and trying to kind of make my way in… Yeah, it kind of seemed that, like being on the outside of things was just kind of what I could, what I could expect. And it’s that yeah, there is I think this kind of need to find people. And that’s what…yeah, I think that’s what writing is for it is a paradox a lot of the time because, like, writers do tend to be quite fluttery singular people and it’s a generalisation but I think a lot of the time, the reason we write things is because we find it hard to be with people to be honest. And yeah, sorry, I feel like I’ve lost my lost my thread.

Jet Moon

Okay, I was just thinking, um, there’s a book that I read recently called “Small Bodies of Water”, and its Nina Mingya Powles and I think she has like a Malaysian and also New Zealand heritage; but she’s talking about moving around lots of different places, and how, for her, that was an experience of – I mean, in the book, it’s very beautiful – because in the end, she talks about being connected to every body of water that she has ever, you know, visited wherever. But in the process, at the beginning, she’s talking about what you spoke about this thing of like a loss of like where do I actually belong because I’ve been in so many different places, which is, I can also relate to, you know, so, yeah. Again, I mean, you had spoken about feeling untethered, and using writing to, you know, feel that.

And I’m so gonna just come in with another question: So I have heard you read your writing live, at the “Playing with Fire” survivor writing workshops, you speak about being in the company of other survivor writers, like how that felt for you, anything you gained from the experience.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, so I attended that workshop, obviously. And I’ve, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the kind of narrative nonfiction community who do tend to sort of draw a lot on their own experience in writing. So I’ve kind of come across other survivors since then, who also write and it’s always very interesting. I think that particular workshop felt to me like a space that’s very intimate but also very temporary. And there’s something kind of about the boundaries of that space that allow people to share, to speak up and I think there’s a sense of maybe giving each other permission to say things. That the fact that

everyone’s a writer, everyone’s kind of got a piece of work, even if it’s just a piece of work that they’ve been, that they’ve been developing that afternoon, there’s still a kind of…there’s an opportunity for people to share.

So even if people wouldn’t necessarily kind of stand up and speak about their lives or their experiences in a particular way, they might read something they’ve written because it’s them, but it’s also a piece of work. And I think, yeah, it’s just really powerful to be in a space where everybody recognises that it’s both things that it you know, there’s something really…there’s something really special about kind of that I mean, I guess this is the difference as well between sort of fiction and nonfiction but really kind of knowing that a piece of work is connected to a person, and that there’s a real person sort of behind this, who’s kind of…who’s taking up space and might not have that much experience of taking up space.

And, yeah, I think like, I’ve been in sort of similar groups that weren’t writing groups and there’s often been a sense of carefulness; nobody wants to reveal too much, nobody wants to kind of overstep what they think they are allowed to say. But reading work gives you permission.

Jet Moon

I mean, I felt like I put you on the spot a bit there, you know, because I mean, you could…you didn’t have the right to be like “Oh, I thought it was crap” or whatever, I asking you about, you know, a workshop that I facilitated. And, um, I felt also there was a difference, because it wasn’t about, you know, like, how…the merit assigned to the writing, or it was about, okay, primarily, we’re survivors who use this tool of writing, and we’ve come to kind of see each other kind of. So with the…. so you’re part of the Spread the Word London writers, alumni. And being part of that creative nonfiction group, or the narrative nonfiction group, as you say.

How is it to bring very sensitive material to a group? And then again, I mean, there’s that stage of being with a writers group, but then more broadly, to think about producing it for publication.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of an ongoing process still, even though that part of the programme is now over for me. In one sense, it was quite easy to share work with the group, because we were six people. You know, we were, we knew that we would be together for a year, at least. And, you know, I think we were kind of talking quite early on about hoping it would be for longer, and we have stayed connected.

And I think something about the fact that we’d gotten a place on the programme maybe helps with already feeling quite validated as writers. And then it was almost like, we kind of knew that the hard work of sort of mining personal experience was, I mean, I think all of us recognised quite early on that that was going to be difficult, but we all sort of saw it at the same time it….yeah, just because we were kind of going through the process at the same time, even though we were at different stages with our projects. So sometimes, yeah, I mean, I feel like we had a lot of trust with each other. I never had any concerns about the group. I think sometimes it could get a little bit…I think it could be difficult, I think where, you know, everyone’s…I think we will all aiming for publications.

So there’s kind of moments when constructive criticism, however well it’s delivered, can just be quite hard to hear because it’s so personal. And so, you know, it feels like it’s you that they’re that they’re going after, even though you know nobody was attacking anyone obviously but it does kind of feel a little bit like “Oh, like I’ve really, I’ve really tried, and I’m not sure how much more I can give” and the way that you give, and the way that you get good can sometimes feel like exposing more and more and more and more and more.

Jet Moon

Well, I was interested that you talked about this mining of personal experience, you know, and as an expression, I mean, for me, I was like Oh, well, that’s interesting” I don’t know if that’s me reading too much into it. But why is it not like assembling personal experience, or collating or making sense of or finding a shape for, you know, because mining is like a process of extraction, and, you know, finding things of value that then have a commercial, you know, output. You know, and publishing is, as we know, super tough, very exclusive and I, yeah, I just wondered about that way of phrasing it and whether that has anything, you know, of merit and where you kind of got to have, you know, thinking about the process of personal, and then what goes out, and criticism.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I mean, I guess I use the word “mining”, because I’m thinking about stuff that’s quite deep, or like, that’s not on the surface that I don’t necessarily even know is there to be assembled. And there was sort of more than one occasion when somebody else in the group pointed out a connection that I wouldn’t have made myself or that I kind of hadn’t really been aware of, because it’s very hard to be objective about ourselves, I think, or to see, even just, I mean, I think there’s a lot of power in just kind of hearing somebody else say this story is interesting, or this story is a story. Because I don’t live my life thinking “I’m living in a story”.

I mean, I’m used to sort of thinking about other people’s stories. And it’s…yeah, so that was, that was always really helpful. I think commercially, like, I’ve definitely got mixed feelings, we’ve all got mixed feelings. People who identify as women, people who come from kind of any background that could be considered underrepresented in publishing, I think often feel this pressure to, to expose, to expose sort of, I don’t know, I guess the kind of unusual – unusual to the publishing world – side of themselves. And, and for so many people just because of the society that we live in, and the culture that we’ve that we have, that means exposing trauma.

And I think that’s I think that’s really difficult. It’s…I don’t think I don’t really have an answer to this, I think it’s just something that needs to be negotiated and navigated. And it is helpful to me to kind of see more underrepresented voices to have the community that I’m kind of putting together, assembling, that I know are kind of grappling with the same questions. It can be a little bit jarring to talk to an agent or to kind of talk to somebody who, you know, could potentially be influential. And it’s like, I don’t know, coming up with the sort of top five, “what do you need to know about me?” and I don’t know, it is just quite a complicated story. You know, it kind of feels like being asked to justify why anyone should care about me. And that’s, that’s, that’s really difficult. Really, really difficult.

Jet Moon

Yeah. Well, I mean, that question, you know, that it does get asked is like, oh, whoa, you know, ‘how are we going to market this?’ Or, you know, ‘is there a market for this?’, and that’s really hard, when it’s something that’s vulnerable, but also important to you, you know, like grappling of those different worlds.

There’s a show on BBC at the moment called “Dreaming While Black”, which is about a guy who’s, oh you’ve seen it, you know, he’s wanting to get into this thing. And I thought that that representation of those schemes, those representation schemes, where you win a place and then you bid for whether your idea should be taken up and how he gets like shoved into this pigeon hole in order to get a break, I was like “Oh my god” it really…to me it completely rang true. Which…which is not to say anything awful about like, there are some really great…I love Spread the Word. But you know, there are also…there’s some (organisations) I think quite exploitative; and that whole thing of you know, all good organisations that, you know, they are just people’s jobs and incomes.

But anyway, so that piece…But I just…we’ve spoken quite a few times about this idea of like macro and micro ideas. So, you know, both of us write about personal stories, and we feel that there’s a broader political meaning. And I’m also, you know, like “survivor” being like this category, it’s like, vast but invisible, so it again has like this, you know, extremely personal, but then a huge, you know, maybe like, you know, mycelium or whatever, you know, that is then spreading out and unseen and enormous.

Do you want to talk about how you see those that macro and micro ideas, maybe in your own work? If you could think of an example?

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that has actually helped me a lot. Thinking about it with sort of…the just talking about in terms of thinking about publishing and marketing. I do wonder if it changes things slightly. When you address the question “Is there a market for this?” with kind of “Is there a community for this? Are there’s people that need this story?” And “Is it the story that it wants to be?”

I mean, I am writing about family estrangement, I’m writing about my relationship with (X). I’ve struggled to kind of, to understand it myself. And at the same time, I kind of know that estrangement is very common, it affects one in five families in the UK. And I’ve sat with…I’ve sat with people in sort of other support groups that have always been kind of very well attended, literally just focusing on the subject of estrangement without kind of needing anything further. I don’t recall sort of…yeah, I don’t I don’t recall sort of the group saying specifically that it was for survivors of anything in particular. And I think that that did slightly sort of open things up a little bit.

That people I’m not 100% sure I would have gone if, well, I don’t know, a lot of…a lot of groups tend to be kind of for survivors of sexual abuse, survivors of this survivors of that and I think at the time, I just sort of thought I just kind of want to talk to people who I know are going through the same thing. And I and I don’t know, you know, there were so many differences between us, but there was also a lot of commonalities. And like with any kind of story, well, it was in that room that I thought something is going on here, something is happening here. This is obviously something that I know, I want to say otherwise I wouldn’t have come. And I can see that there are other people kind of desperate to share the same

thing, but who all the one thing everyone says is how lonely it is on how you know how they that what they get out of it is being able to kind of share with other people who gets it, like people who get it that was that was constantly coming up.

So I think I mean, yeah, like when it going back to the sort of macro and micro thing, like in any kind of story, you can’t really…it’s very difficult, I think, to write about sort of social or political themes change or kind of, like, a big phenomenon without a lens or a way in, or a character and we all kind of have these huge stories with us all the time. And I think because I was… yeah, because I was…because I was half Lebanese and sort of lived with parents from two different cultures, it was…I think I kind of had an understanding that not everybody, not everybody was like me, that forced me to kind of look to other people and to sort of draw what commonalities and shared experience because there was no choice. It doesn’t,.. it feels like there’s kind of nothing ready-made.

And yeah, even though…yeah, I mean thinking about sort of when you say…it’s interesting, when you say sort of survivors’ group, that button is also invisible, because I think that really makes me think a lot about migration and how the migrant experience is so vast, and it’s not always visible, like an in lots of ways…like my Lebanese heritage doesn’t feel particularly visible, it’s not really there in my name, or my accent or my appearance, particularly. And it’s also something that I don’t talk about very much. Yeah, I really don’t – like unless I’m writing about it. I think there’s from quite a few people who are surprised to discover that connection. And yeah, but obviously, Lebanon is a small country, but there’s a lot of people who have had to leave the place where they were born. And that…I feel like kind of that’s where, yeah, that’s where the connection happens. That’s, that’s sort of where we draw from shared experience in….in being open to hearing and seeing other people.

Jet Moon

And that kind of overlaps into the next question. Because do you have anything to say about geography, place, time, in your reading, in your writing? So obviously, you have just talked about, like, you know, that coming from Lebanon, having, you know, this being like, part of your makeup? And, um, I mean, for me, I often think of writing as a form of time travel, you know, in a way, if I’m revisiting places or emotional states, and really feeling that I’m in those, you know, very much there. Do you have anything to say about this? Because I know that when we’ve talked about your book, you talked about knitting together, you know, telling like a history but with a present, and how those things would come together. So I don’t know if you still would say this.

S.J.Lyon

Um, yeah, I think geography and place and time have always sort of been a really big preoccupation for me. Like, I think about sort of the different phases of my childhood as being associated with different cities, like, I think about ages as sort of being “oh that was that country”, “that was that school”, “that was that sort of…yeah, there was that time” and, like, because we moved around so much, there was so much to pick up on. And like, in lots of ways, it was an incredibly…it was a childhood that was incredibly rich with experience. Like, I don’t want to make it sound like I didn’t enjoy it. Like, I mean, it was difficult, but I did…I feel like I can understand the differences between countries. I wanted to learn about other people, I wanted to kind of understand sort of the fact that I had two families from two different cultures. And I often felt uprooted. But I think this also kind of brought in me this really fierce

determination to kind of commit to places somehow or to put down roots and establish myself, because I really, yeah, I kind of knew how to fall in love with places. And when it comes to sort of my writing, I’m like, I’m always trying to remember I’m always like, I feel like I used to have a really, really good memory. And it annoys me that it doesn’t feel as good as it used to. I’m constantly asking people what they can remember and trying to sort of strengthen the story, because it does feel like a preservation as well, that there was something precious and significant and also quite bittersweet.

I think there were kind of echoes of that every time I had to leave somewhere. And, yeah, it’s…. it definitely feels like very important for me to kind of hold all of those places because yeah, like, I don’t really understand people who sort of think about life writing or writing about the past, or even thinking or speaking about the past as, as wallowing because wherever you are, in that moment of recall, you are not the same person that you were, it’s always…you’re always going to have a slightly different perspective that kind of comes from the present, as well as the past. So, yeah, go ahead.

Jet Moon

The thing that I hear from you is not only that you’re looking at your own experience, I mean, it was this thing where you said, you developed this ability or, you know, to fall in love with places and to commit, you know, it was just like “wow” and then I was, here, …continually, as you speak this thing of a real attention to not only your own experience, but other people’s, you know, it’s not just like inward looking, it’s this real outward observation that keeps coming up again, and again.

So, from there I would just ask, you know, like, is there a specific way that cultural identity in any form feeds into your experience of survivorship? I mean, you’ve kind of you’ve talked about it a little bit, because there’s been a thing of like, tethered-ness, or, you know, like, trying to track yourself in like, time and place, you know, to acknowledge the two families. Could you…Is there anything that you want to go like, deeper there?

S.J.Lyon 37:02
Yeah, I think. I mean, I guess I think about this as something that goes back generations really, that…in terms of where my mother…just want to think, I know what I’m trying to say, I’m just trying to think of the best way to get there….Yeah, I think I mean, there’s definitely some sort of more recent examples where cultural identity has been quite key in my thinking of survivorship. I’ve…I’ve worked with many survivors of…of all kinds professionally as well, where it was kind of my role to think about their stories and to understand them as, as people sort of through their experiences, and obviously, culture….culture was a large part of that; cultural ruptures, displacement, exile, kind of long family silences. And it’s…in terms of my family, and it’s always hard, I’m trying to think of the best place to start.

(redacted section)

Jet Moon

Right okay. To get a bit of clarity. I was thinking, you know, in this experience of survivorship about being queer, and the piece of the story (of yours) that I read, and then at the end of the story, (“People that might be like us” ) you know, there’s this really nice thing of like, coming together and seeing community in the scene and in the picture-theatre and like, seeing other people like yourself and feeling

like part-of,… and how that changes, you know, the character or self. And then I, then it says “oh but I didn’t expect the pandemic”. And I wonder if there’s something to say about you know…particularly marginalised communities and this experience of extreme, you know, another kind of isolation because of the pandemic. You know, that disruption of social bonds in what are often, you know, kind of…can be quite mobile communities.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I mean, I was kind of speaking about this as somebody who really believes that the lockdowns were necessary, and, at the same time, I do kind of feel like the justification for them was predicated on quite a narrow definition of vulnerability. And there wasn’t a huge amount of space or consideration given to – well, there wasn’t any really, there was absolutely none at all – kind of given to people who yeah, whose sort of whole social culture, whether it was queer, whether it was non-monogamous, whether it was kind of founded on certain kinds of shared experience, (that) were vital, and just suddenly didn’t have access to.

It was…yeah, it was…it was definitely not something that I’d expected. But I think it did give me a certain amount of space to reflect on what I cared about, I guess and I think, a kind of protectiveness towards other people in sort of the various communities that I belong to, that I maybe hadn’t quite felt in the same way before. But this kind of sudden, mass vulnerability, just felt so, it was, it was yeah, it was very moving, and a lot of ways to just kind of realise how important these people were, to me.

Jet Moon

So I’m in this thing of, like, micro and macro and like, connections between different, you know, like…I think we’ve talked a bit quite a bit about this idea of survivorship and that not being strictly based on any certain experience, you know, it’s more that people come with a sense of needing the space or feeling some sense of belonging coming up.

And I am…I mean, for me, I am like a big kind of like, interconnecting person. But I do think also about this idea of like, false equivalences or, or the, you know, that there is a practice of people making false equivalences. And do you think that that applies in terms of collective survivorship because I am, can be prone to say, you know, like, I mean, we all have, well, the people who have survived the pandemic, are survivors of the pandemic, and have a commonality, you know, and I feel that there’s lots of hidden commonalities. But I also don’t want to get into that thing where everything turns to mush. Do you know what I mean?

S.J.Lyon

I do. I really do. Yeah, I think…for me, it’s kind of a question about whether drawing any kind of equivalence is useful, like, 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 kind of quite easy to say well, we’ve had other pandemics in the past that have had a very different response. If we kind of talk about the, you know, 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 kind of talk about how, you know, we can still kind of talk about the commonalities, without necessarily eclipsing the past. I don’t think it should be done to kind of to, yeah, to sort of cover up

somebody else’s experience to kind of step on somebody or to talk over somebody. I think it should be used as a way of relating to other people. And yeah, I’m doing something useful. Basically, I think it…yeah, I think it’s like with everything else, it’s something that’s kind of constantly being negotiated and navigated.

But 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 kind of hearing other people’s perspectives. I mean, I’ve definitely sort of felt like when I was talking about my support groups that I’ve been to for estranged adult children, I mean, I’ve sat through some of those just sweating and shaking and listening to kind of people who’ve been disowned by every member of their family, or people who’ve endured just…just horrific, horrific things that I didn’t feel I could relate to, and just thinking, “How can I….how can I sit here? How can I? How dare I?”.

But you know, it’s…. I think it can be, it can be empowering as well, just to just to kind of 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 kind of 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.

Jet Moon

That was very clear. And um, yeah, that helped clarify it for me as well, you know? So has the writing of other survivors been important to you? And could you say, who or how or why, who’ve touched on different things?

S.J.Lyon

Wow. I mean, I’m reading so much memoir at the moment that I guess it’s kind of easy to turn to that. I suppose I found Jeanette Winterson, very influential, kind of the most consistently influential, sort of through my life, as a writer, and her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal. There’s Sins of My Father by Lily Dunn, which is about…which is kind of also about her relationship with a parent who was absent for a lot of her life and sort of drawn to cults and extreme communities and ultimately, addiction. Negative Space by another Lilly Dancyger, whose father was kind of an underground artist in New York in the 80s, who also struggled with addiction. Yeah, like I…I’m…what else…I guess I’m kind of…I literally just finished one that came…has just come out called Seventeen by Joe Gibson, which I really cannot recommend it enough. It’s an amazing…it’s an amazingly well written story about it’s a….he’s using a pseudonym but it’s about how he was as a 17 year old boy; he was groomed and abused by a 35 year old teacher at his school, who he believed himself to sort of be in relationship with and that can,…yeah, I mean, I don’t want to say too much about it, other than I recommend it.

Jet Moon

I think I’ve read a preview section in a review of the book.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, yeah.

Jet Moon

Do you want to say something about like, why the writings important to you, you know, of all of these pieces. Like what it actually is that you glean from that? Because earlier on, you had said, you know, like, um, you know, the idea that there’s this imaginary or can be real criticism, but the idea, you know, that if you say something other people are gonna, like, pounce on or that there is this idea of people who imagined that memoir is like a kind of a form of wallowing; you know, and yet, here you are reading these memoirs. And for me, I’m interested in like, you know, what is it that you get from that?

S.J.Lyon

Yeah. I mean, I think…I think I’m also…I kind of consider myself a little bit of a student of memoir, just because I’m, at the moment so deep in that process of sort of looking at other people’s texts and thinking “Oh, how have they done this? How is this something that I might be able to use?”

I think that Jeanette Winterson book is really interesting, because obviously she published Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit as a work of fiction, and then she essentially came back 30 years later and wrote exactly the same story as memoir. And I just, to me, that’s kind of…I just take so much from but in terms of the cultural shift that we’ve kind of seen in the way memoir is regarded, really. Sins Of My Father, I don’t know. I mean, I think I kind of read that and just felt like, I mean, we have very different fathers. But I think there was a lot there in terms of the similarity of men of that generation, maybe, and a certain kind of…yeah, the agonising shared experience, I think. And seeing what it’s like to grow up in somebody’s shadow a little bit or kind of reconciling feelings that you have about a parent who’s absent.

And I think it’s through her book, and also Negative Space that I really kind of understood how it was possible to write into the absence. Because I think, for a long time, I sort of thought “well, I don’t really…I don’t really have a story. There’s just what happened….what happened is what happened” and it was, yeah, I think, sort of, through seeing how a family relationship can completely shape a perspective on the world, even if that relationship is kind of in the deep freeze, you know, in their case their father is dead, mine is estranged it’s…yeah, I think it’s just kind of really interesting to sort of see somebody else, puzzle things out, and kind of…yeah, fight, creating different pictures.

Jet Moon

And it sounds, you know, that idea when you say, you know, I mean, the title was negative space. But when you talk about learning that it’s possible to write back into that space it sounds like quite a reclamation, and, you know, like some discovery of you know, how you can occupy that.

(redacted section)

Jet Moon

And I mean, it sounds a really powerful thing. And I mean, you know, that thing of being the authority on your own story. For me, this thing that I could write my own story, find, find it you know, that it wouldn’t just be this circling of fragments in my head, you know, that I could actually find my way through it, and it was my action. I think that’s, you know, you talk about the sort of…the story is not all about (another person) It’s, you know, it’s your story.

Could you say something to survivors who wish to write, you know, anything like this? Really, I think, like words of encouragement of like, why people should write or…and also, why writing privately or publicly? You know, I feel that both of those have their own time. It’s not that one is better than the other.

S.J.Lyon

Yeah. I mean, I always love this quote from Cathy Rentzenbrink who’s work I also really recommend. I think it’s her, I hope it’s her: “you don’t owe anyone the whole story”. And I think that’s always just really, really important to bear in mind and it reminds me as well, that kind of whatever I’m writing, or whatever I’m making is a lot bigger than publication. It helps me sort of think beyond that, too. Yeah, like, and I think that can be available for anyone as well, that…write for yourself, really, really do that…write for yourself. And then, and then worry about it like it’s…it’s constantly going to change and it’s possible to sort of pitch book after book or idea after idea that won’t end up being what you really want to write. And that’s an easy trap to fall into, I think. But, yeah, as long as you’re…I think the most important thing is to keep writing. It’s kind of one of those annoying cliches that everyone says and the reason it’s annoying is because it’s true. Yeah, I think that’s…I think that’s my, those are my words of encouragement.

Jet Moon

Yeah, I mean, I really like that thing of you know, that the writing is bigger than publication. And also, you know, harking back to this thing, at the beginning, where you’re talking about writing is like, this very odd kind of preoccupation or habit, or, you know, like running through all these kinds of things of like, well, what is it? But you know, it’s this thing that we, I mean…for me, I’m very attached to it, as a process that I can be with.

S.J.Lyon

Definitely. I always find myself writing by hand and maybe that helps. I hadn’t thought about this before, actually. But maybe that helps me kind of keep a lot of that process to myself because I wouldn’t publish my notebook. I might, I might type it up and make it into something else but that initial connection between pen and page is just for me.

Jet Moon

Do you think all record keeping is a form of survivor writing?

S.J.Lyon

In a way, yes. I think record keeping or, or just…or bearing witness. Yeah. Especially at the moment, it feels like.

Jet Moon

Anything in your work that you want to mention or put out there in any way?

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, I’ve actually just had a piece published in the latest edition of Hinterland, which is a creative nonfiction journal. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. But, yeah…I’m sorry. I can’t share an easy link to it but….

Jet Moon

Can you tell us the title or the edition number?

S.J.Lyon

Yeah, so it’s issue number 13, I think and so the magazine is called Hinterland and my piece is, ‘Did you know you can swim in the morning?’ And it’s a piece about sort of me and my mom hanging out on the beach in Beirut together. It’s their family history edition, It’s really worth subscribing to actually. Yeah, I really recommend them.

Jet Moon

I think I’ve come to the end of my questions now. Thanks so much. Is there anything else that you want to add in or….? Yeah

S.J.Lyon

I don’t think so. No. No, I think we’ve covered quite a lot of ground

Jet Moon

All right, I’m gonna turn off this recorder.