The Suite (212) Sessions, no. 8 - Joanna Walsh

In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic and shutting down of much of the UK's cultural life, we have decided to bring you a series of interviews with contemporary artists, writers, filmmakers and other cultural figures, conducted via Skype (so apologies for the diminished audio quality), about their practices, the political issues that inspire them and the socio-economic conditions that have shaped their work. In the eighth of these Sessions, Juliet talks to writer and artist Joanna Walsh, the author of seven books including the short story collections Fractals (2013), Vertigo (2015) and Worlds from the Word’s End (2017), the novel Break.up (2018) and a work of creative non-fiction, Hotel (2015). They discussed Joanna’s Zines in Dark Times project, launched in response to the Covid-19 crisis; how writers might resist the pressure to react quickly to the epidemic and instead produce more considered work, and Joanna’s new piece of writing ‘The Dispossessed’ (2020); Joanna’s career in illustration, including her cover for Juliet’s book Trans: A Memoir (2015); her digital work Seed (2017) and new illustrations for her short story Grow a Pair (2015); the @Read_Women campaign that Joanna began on Twitter in 2014; her activism on ageism in literary and artistic circles, particularly in awards; and her feelings about the London-centric literary ‘scene’, and how literature might move beyond it. A full list of references for the programme, with links, can be found via our Patreon at www.patreon.com/suite212, and are available to $3 subscribers.