Protected: Jet Moon and Olumide Popoola in conversation

Jet Moon and Olumide Popoola in conversation: On peer knowledge, mentoring, and the action of writing 

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. Alongside this Jet had time to write and finished their novel Artists Are Demons, with Olumide Popoola as their mentor. 

Listen along as you read

Jet Moon

So, I’m really interested in this peer knowledge, obviously, I think, because I’ve had to be interested in it, and how we find ourselves reflected or make sense of things and have a sense of empowerment through that recognition. And there’s this baffling at times thing of what’s invisible, what’s dismissed, what’s denied. And it can be so glaringly obvious when you’re around your peers and yet other people don’t see these things that feel very integral to your life. And you mentioned this idea about how you said something, and I don’t know whether it was meant to be significant or not, but I took it as such, you’re like, oh, yeah, you know, I can really place people according to what they know. And so I am, I’m interested in that idea of like knowledge in terms of communities, but also survivors’ writing and how we find our voice or our audience.

Olumide Popoola

…I thought about peer knowledge and I thought, what is it that I seek out? And I’m at my best when I have very intimate intellectual friendships, or creative friendships …….So that’s what I thought of when I looked at this idea of peer knowledge. There’s people I love in my life to challenge me on my journey, but I for that to work really well, it works best when I have this sort of quite intimate relationship with them, so that trust is there.

Jet Moon

Absolutely,…… …when I said this thing about knowledge, I think it was probably in the first meeting that we had, it might have even been before I sent you the manuscript of the book. And I think that we were probably talking about ideas of knowledge around navigating institutions, navigating publishing, navigating writing or the arts, where sometimes I feel I don’t particularly have a lot of knowledge about how to do it. I don’t have that…it hasn’t come from somewhere, like some kind of line of education or whatever. And I felt that you were speaking about something like this.

Olumide Popoola

I have a little bit of knowledge, but only a little bit, I still, I think I have some knowledge of it in a sort of outsider-ish sort of way. So what I mean by that is, you know, I have an independent, small publisher, so you’re always still left out of how it really works, you know, in the mainstream area. But also, I work a lot on that. (To)give people access to at least what I know. So what is the idea? How does it work, like, to get on board of publishing? What are the steps involved?….. What money is involved? How can you make money? And nobody talks about that…as this, so you know, romantic notion of the writer and toiling away and all that and, yeah, and how do you survive y’know?

Jet Moon

Just going to hold with that peer stuff first because we’re talking about, on the one level this kind of institutional knowledge; And then in the writer’s groups, what I found (is that we) had people from very different experiences, and yet – I was really pleased – that they were somehow in solidarity with each other. And it was amazing, you know, and it gave me a lot of hope about small organising, … ….So the experiences where, you know, you’re battling to get health care, you’re dealing with mental health provision (or a lack of) – dealing with experiences of different kinds of discrimination, and being alone with that – it can feel very invisible – and it can also feel, like people are being pushed down. But then suddenly, when people were speaking together in the group, and that isolation is suddenly just blown away, it becomes something where it’s not an individual experience anymore. Other people know it. There’s a real recognition: “Yeah, we know exactly what you’re talking about” and it gains another context.

Olumide Popoola

and maybe that’s what I meant with ‘what people know’: is to have a space where you don’t feel like you’re…you’re grappling with these things alone, but also that you’re an outsider;… So when I am, for instance, in white publishing spaces, even though I am published ……a certain trajectory is not available to me in the same way because of the reality of institutional racist society…so then to sit with people where that is knowledge, they know this in their own bodies and their own experience, and we are doing two things: we’re acknowledging that, we’re there for each other, but we’re also stepping out of that because we’re creating…I’m not going to call it safe space, but we’re creating a different space…because that’s important to me, also trying to find the spaces where we can create outside of these… constraints, oppressive structures, lack of structures (in terms of supportive structures etc). So what can we create, at least in that moment, or in the duration of a course, or peer group, even in a friendship, etc.

Jet Moon

In like, really, very simple terms, you know, thinking about like, inclusion, whatever that…who’s named who isn’t. You know, because I always feel that even if there is this language that gets used in inclusivity,…….. I’m really aware of when I’ve been in spaces, in spaces where some of my needs are not counted. And so I’m always trying to think of like, what is not seen? What are the things that are peripheral, in terms of our knowledge of what people are having in their lives, so it’s not like: ‘Oh, *this* is inclusivity, *this* is it.” You know, like, it’s a different way.

Olumide Popoola

this is very interesting: what is not seen and what cannot be imagined, because you cannot imagine for another person. So in a way, actually, we have to maybe start in a moment of, yeah, acknowledgement, you have to start from this, ‘I do not know’. So this inclusivity as a tickbox is ‘oh well if you need this, then I have this’. That isn’t, you know, that can’t really…that’s not an inclusive starting point, because that assumes that everybody knows – both sides – because until you arrive somewhere, you might also not know what you need in that moment, (…..) …So the building of, I think, building of structures that are different, and that model something different, which I assume you have done in your writers group, your survivors writers group, just to really rethink the format of gathering and producing together.

Jet Moon

So I was gonna, like, talk about this concept of mentoring, of practice; you’ve used the word ‘generosity’ when we’ve spoken together in the past, and for me, it’s been so helpful, and I feel that I’ve experienced that generosity from you – as a practice,

Olumide Popoola

what I think about mentoring is that it can be so different,… ….for me, the most interesting part is that yeah…is making…is that moment of the encounter, what is the actual encounter? And I always think we change the world by changing these encounters and making ourselves available. I think that’s my overall project in life.

Jet Moon

I see a lot how much others can struggle to have a voice, and that what has helped me is to be encouraged not to like scrunch up what I want to say and try and stuff it into a form, but that encouragement: to be told that my voice is needed. And I say with other people… “All of the voices, we don’t have enough of the other voices.”

Olumide Popoola

as I already said, I’m really interested in small gestures and encounters, as well as a site where change takes place. So, I don’t believe there is writing that is not political, there’s maybe writing that doesn’t speak to…political meaning, maybe, thinking about change. I think there’s writing that you know, maybe it doesn’t speak particularly to current issues etc. But for me, these small encounters – I’m a novelist – these small encounters are what you will find throughout my work; really tiny moments you could overlook, but where I think there are models for society or models for community. Living models for healing, models for transformation, and that’s what I mean with this ‘in -between’, and also a lot of marginalised characters or people who are not considered, with voices that are not heard, who don’t feature. We are in the shadows, often and things happen there, and that’s also what I’m interested in: what happens.

Jet Moon

Absolutely. And I think that I can get really overwhelmed by “How do I deal with the world? There’s so much going on”, or “How do I deal with my day? Oh, I’ve got a million pieces of health care…” or “How am I surviving with money?” And, for me, it is small moments that make it possible to survive, to feel supported, feel love from other people. And I think… I had said this to you about the writers’ group: the things that happened within the group and how people were together, gave me a lot of hope.

Olumide Popoola

(affirmative noise).

Jet Moon

….to witness and be part of it…somehow gave me…not the way, not to set aside what’s happening in the outside world, but to think it matters, this small stuff.

Olumide Popoola

Yeah, I can relate to that very strongly…very strongly. And I don’t think they are small things, …… …….which comes back to those small moments, right? It’s small encounters or gestures. I was…years ago, I became…was very obsessed with gestures and gestures in daily life, a gesture you make to somebody else and, not physical gestures, not this, but a gesture…of care, you know, of care or doing something differently of… there’s so much potential in these.

Jet Moon

……….But I still feel that, for me, there is always a gap. And I see for other people, there’s a gap between…it might all very well be what we do, and what we’re doing with our groups of people but there’s a gap in terms of wider visibility, there’s a gap in terms of like, the over-culture.

Olumide Popoola

…so what I’m hearing about the writers group, and then some voices maybe not getting recognition in the mainstream. Because yeah, I would agree – is that the goal? What is the goal? …. …I think with the mainstream and writing is a lot about gatekeeping – who gets in, who gets lauded. (…) But I think by doing schemes, by creating…I remember when you were talking I almost thought – it’s a bit like a clearing, – right? Making a bit of space, somewhere that you can gather, create together and hold each other. And that enables you to put something out and then it enables somebody to read that and the interest to grow. And in a way we have to believe in that, that that’s valuable enough.

Jet Moon

.. the last thing you said …was a super good point to end.

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.