In this interview for You Are Here, Jet Moon talks to Jason Barker 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
“You know the daft thing about this, I know I sound like I’m
‘finally’ learning things, but I sometimes get this about the
writing that I’m doing now is I think…like occasionally I get
like this internal critic voice saying, “Who do you think you are?
You’re too old, how dare you call yourself an emerging writer, at
your age? Surely you should have emerged now? How could you
possibly be new? What do you have to say when you’re so old?”
Or all of these things that are really mean, mean thoughts and
then I think about it, and I think well, you know, but why not? I
just have to really unpick all of those thoughts.
When I was younger, I definitely would believe all of that, I
would apply it to me, I’d be like “if I can’t see a person like
me doing any of the things that I want to do, then that is an
impossibility and cannot be done”, rather than thinking “Oh,
okay, I’ll be that person”…”
“I really wanted to tell a story about that time, because that
time marked to me a kind of a change, .. So it was the Gender
Recognition act of 2004.
…So we all took the piss out of it but now, it’s like “I don’t want
it taken away” and it’s become this symbol. But also, I think
there was a change in how we saw ourselves as a community,
how we thought about being trans. And so I’m kind of writing
about that through a character…
…who starts out wishing he wasn’t trans, and ends up being
really glad that he’s trans, who starts out thinking that trans is
a curse, and ends up thinking that being trans is a blessing.
… so it’s an interesting time for that, in that I think that there
was a shift in…a shift in how we thought about ourselves and
the kind of knock-on effects to where we’ve got now.
…as a community, we were changing. We were changing how we
thought about ourselves, just a sort of different sense of, dare I
say the word “pride”, you know, that walking on pride, being part
of the trans group on Pride and feeling like “yeah, I can stand
with this. And this is a word that I’ll use about myself”.
Listen and read the full interview here
About the artist
Jason Barker is a filmmaker, writer, occasional actor and sometimes stand-up comedian based in the West Country. He is currently developing a feature film called Mister Uterus with BFI Film Fund, Delaval Films and Tigerlily Productions. He was selected for the BBC Writers Voices 2023 and the Bafta X BFI Flare mentoring scheme 2022.
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.