In this interview for You Are Here, Jet Moon talks to Debbie McNamara 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 think it’s so vital, because you’re sharing work with people who,
you know, you don’t have to put a filter, you don’t have to play down
any of these experiences, some of them are quite extreme.
And also because I think with psychiatry, and I think any
practitioner, any so-called mental health professional would
absolutely agree, that it’s a dehumanising experience. You know,
you can just feel obliterated, reduced to a diagnosis, and a set of
prescriptions for drugs…….
But I think, you know, with survivors there’s this huge warmth, it’s
about the person first.”
“Survivor writing, there’s a whole kind of magic to it. Even though
some experiences are really difficult and traumatic. It’s not just
for the writer being able to kind of exorcise some of these demons
and make your own load lighter, literally just by putting the words
on a page, you know, that page is very heavy and it’s a heaviness
that has come from you. And it’s not just about creating something
durable about the transience of life as well.
But it’s really about taking people into a realm where there are
stronger forces at play than you might get in your kind of day to
day life. It just takes you into a realm where you know that
there’s….it has a mythic kind of proportionality to it, things that
are charged in a way that they are not in daily life and to be able
to touch into that power by writing about it and then sharing that
power with other people, it’s a fantastic thing, it’s an enlightening
thing.”
Listen and read the full interview here
About the artist
Debbie McNamara is the Events Coordinator for Survivors’ Poetry, a registered charity which creates safe spaces for fellow Survivors of mental distress to meet and share our poetry. In March 2020 we moved online, hosting monthly Performance Parties, which are still ongoing. In May 2024 we resumed public in-person spoken word events in London.
Debbie is a writer and poet, and has been involved with the mental health Survivor movement for many years, working with numerous peer-led groups such as Mad Pride, Hackney Patients’ Council and the Mental Health Resistance Network. She was the first paid coordinator / fundraiser for Survivors’ Poetry, has worked as a TEFL teacher, an actor for ‘Word and Action’ theatre company, is a qualified Co-counselling trainer and was Bibi the Door Whore for a dominatrix called Mistress Melissa. She has a son, Rich, who is the light of her life.
Info: [email protected]
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.