Sloth Week: Dai interviews author Joanne Askew

DHR Interviews Joanne Askew

CW: depression, brief mention of suicide

So, what made you want to write? When did you start writing?
I’d always wanted to be a writer but I never had a point in my life where I could, and I think that is the case for a lot of working-class people, women, millennials; we don’t have that backup of being well-off or having a rich family to support us while writing a novel. So it’s one of those things I always wanted to do but never had a break in my career to do it. I got that break in the middle of 2018 when I went freelance and part time, so all of a sudden I had the time to write and that’s when I started.

I started with a book called Green Again, which was an eco-sci fi thing, and it was my learning curve. Writing that book taught me how not to write books! Saying that, it’s not one of those things that’s in the vault and won’t come out. I might one day publish it, but it taught me everything I didn’t want to put in a book. It taught me how to work with editors as well, because I threw a lot of my own money at it when I didn’t need to.

So that’s what I started with, and when I finished with that I just started writing short stories and I loved it. It’s so nice to write and not have to commit to a whole character, world, vibe… you only have to commit to it for about three thousand words, and I love that because it gives you a chance to dip into different worlds. It was the case with Sloth that it started as a short story with a word count of three thousand, but then by the time I finished the short story it was five thousand words… and I just kept going, and it turned into a novella. So yeah, Sloth was born out of my love of short stories.

I really admire anyone who’s got the discipline to finish even a short story. I don’t know about you but I’ve got a massive pile of unfinished work…

It’s really funny because I never used to be like that, when I first started I would finish absolutely anything but now that I’m established I keep writing half a short story and saying “Oh, I’ll finish this next week, or when that new Billie Eilish album comes out.” and then I never do.

What would you say are the biggest influences on your writing? Who or what inspires you the most?

It’s music. One hundred percent, it’s music. That’s what inspires me the most. I was a musician, I did it semi-professionally in London as a folk and country artist… Yeah, music takes me places. I think that’s what happened with Sloth, I was listening to a lot of Brandi Carlile, and she is just the lesbian country queen, she is the best queer role model ever who has been breaking all these barriers in country music, because it isn’t traditionally a good place for LGBT+ folk, and she won a Grammy last year. Her music is very much about the wild and the road, journeys and stuff like that, which is a big part of Sloth. Brandi Carlile, her six albums (I think she’s got a new one out now), and music in general is a big part of my inspiration, which will always be the case, it will always be the thing that keeps me going.

I’ll have to check her out! I can definitely see how that all played into Sloth. So while we’re talking about lesbian role models… what sort of queer rep do you look for as a reader? And what do you aim to put out as a writer?

So there’s this trope in lesbian fiction where it’s a from-hate-to-love thing, and I don’t really like it… I like the opposite in my fiction, my TV and so on, I like long-term, solid, trusting relationships rather than all the tired queer tropes, because there are so many! A sapphic thing is a tough woman with a princess woman, and it doesn’t have to be like that! Lesbians aren’t stereotypes! They are normal people, and that was a huge thing in Sloth, I just wanted to write a normal couple.

I was struck reading it, it was very refreshing to see an established adult couple, as it feels the mainstream until recently has been dominated by coming out stories.

Yeah, I think Morgan Freeman once said in an interview, he was asked “How do we stop racism?” and he said “Stop talking about it! Stop representing it in the media, and start representing a world that we envision” and that’s very much how I feel about queer content, music, fiction and stuff; let’s portray the world we want, and they’ll think that should be normal.

Why are we a subgenre? Why on Amazon are all these LGBT subgenres? We’re normal fucking people, we’re not subgenres in ourselves. We are the protagonists in our lives, and we shouldn’t be filed away. Why is there queer horror and queer sci-fi? Why can’t there just be horror and sci-fi? That’s what my aim is: to mainstream queerness in speculative fiction.

You’re bringing the gay agenda, I love it.

Yes!

So what draws you specifically to sci-fi and horror?

There were never any other genres in my head, nothing other than speculative. There is not a chance in hell that you would catch me reading something that doesn’t have magic, sci-fi, or some paranormal element! Why would I read a book that could take place in real life? That’s my opinion, why would I escape to somewhere that is exactly the same as the world I live in? That’s why I like horror and sci-fi, because it gives you something that is impossible. I don’t want to read stuff that’s possible.

I want to ask about where apocalypse narratives fit in here, but they’re not looking so impossible…

That’s a weird one because I wrote Sloth before coronavirus…

Yes, I was going to ask that

My first novel, Green Again, was about the apocalypse, I’ve found myself writing these two things in a world where we’re living in it, and I thought “This isn’t going to get picked up at all…” but the trends show that apocalypse fiction has picked up during the pandemic… and this is the thing about the book, right? All the stuff I wrote about the British Government… it all played out in real life! It’s crazy, isn’t it? I wrote all that before I heard the word “covid”, and the government behaved like a dystopian nightmare. I think a lot of my work is politically motivated.

Yeah, that definitely came through.

Yeah, when I think of the enemy I think of institutions and government, and the decisions they make… how one person with a shitty ego or small man syndrome can literally affect millions and millions of people, and they don’t realise that and that annoys me.

I’m with you completely. And the thing that struck me as well with Sloth and its apocalypse was how it shows both the best and the worst of people, as well as Lana and Tali you’ve included Mohamed and the group that help them along… Was that a political point as well, about solidarity?

Yes, especially as I lived in London for about ten years, the folk there were very much a hardworking and diverse group, and I don’t see that in British apocalyptic fiction. This country is so multicultural and diverse, it’s fucking beautiful, but we don’t see any of that. 

A huge part of it was that my best friend is deaf, and I know there’s things I have to do (her name’s Natalie by the way!), like I have to stand on one side of her when we’re going shopping, and when we go to the movies we have to go to the subtitled version… so I wanted to get Deaf representation in the book for her, and I hope I did that because there’s something so beautiful about not talking, and communicating in other ways.

The NHS as well, having an NHS worker, you need that. Because with covid, nobody listened to NHS workers, and they’re the ones dealing with it. There’s no clapping in Sloth at 8 o’clock on a Thursday, but I think you need that perspective.

So why do you think the apocalypse is selling well in this day and age?

I think it’s because it’s the one thing we know is inevitable. We don’t know what it looks like, we don’t know when it will be, but that will happen. Earth is not going to be around forever. It’ll be soon if we don’t sort out the climate crisis, or it’ll happen in a million years, but it will happen, and I think people like imagining what that will look like. And people also like wondering if they would be one of the survivors, do you know what I mean?

Oh yeah, like “What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?”

Yes exactly! Me and my best friend make plans for this sort of stuff; where we would drive to, whose car we would take, and that sort of stuff, I love it. I love it because I was a huge fan of The Walking Dead comics, The Hunger Games, anything in that sort of apocalyptic world is really inviting to me. I feel like I’m one of those people who would thrive really well in the wild, because I’m a survivalist and a forager, I collect mushrooms and stuff like that. I just feel more at home in the wild than I do in a house, so that’s why I like apocalyptic fiction; I can strip back all of civilisation and make my own rules.

So it’s kind of an empowering thing?

It is empowering yeah, because like in Green Again all the survivors have decided they wouldn’t eat meat, and I don’t eat meat because of the environment and the fact that I love animals, but making that decision for the entire world was really empowering.

There’s another element to that I think with the past century of apocalyptic fiction, we had the Cold War, our zombie thing a few years ago… Why do you think we’re still doing specifically plagues in covid times?

I think it’s a fun narrative thing to do, because you can take away something that is so integral to human nature via a disease. Octavia Butler wrote a story, and I can’t remember what it was called but it won a Hugo Award and it was apocalyptic and the entire world had a stroke and lost the ability to speak to each other [Note: Speech Sounds, 1983] and it was what the world looked like after that. So she took away their ability to talk, what happened to the world then? And with Sloth, I wanted to do that. I wanted to give them a bodily challenge to overcome because the whole book is about mental challenges. And I think virus fiction gives people a physical challenge to overcome, which then ricochets out into the world and tests people. Like in Crank [Note: 2006 film starring Jason Statham] he’s been given that drug and he needs to keep his heart rate up the entire movie, and I thought that was crazy! And from that, I was in the Sloth world.

So did it start with the idea of a plague or with wanting to keep them moving?

I think it started with the idea of watching somebody die very very slowly, that’s where it came from. And I wanted to explore this established married couple and what would happen if one of them was taken very slowly mentally and physically. That’s why the disease Sloth became what enabled that narrative to happen.

The way I was reading it, if you’re happy to get into this, was that - as well as the genuine depression the characters are going through - Sloth itself is depression as a virus, I suppose I’m saying? It’s like a mental illness manifest, which I thought was interesting.

I actually hadn’t thought about it like that, but you’re right because it slows people down and that’s what depression feels like, like you just don’t have the energy, the will to carry on. And with depression it’s not always a case of “I want to end my life”, it’s “I want to go to sleep and not have to wake up in the morning” a lot of the time. It feels so tiring to be here, to be present. The most exhausting thing in the world when you’ve got depression is to be alive, and Sloth does that physically to them as well. And while I didn’t want to glorify suicide, I did want to give characters the peace they deserved.

A thing you wanted to talk about as well was Eastern European representation, would you like to expand on that now?

So I’m Ukrainian, I have lived a life of stereotypes of Eastern Europeans. I grew up with the comment of the day in primary school, people asking me to tarmac their drive, and that kind of thing. Then in my adult life, I spent a decade - in my day job, I’m a copywriter - hiding my real last name because I never got a job interview using an Eastern European last name.

Oh shit.

Yeah. So it’s so important to me to put British Eastern European people in my work. Because my granddad was a refugee from the war, and there’s this whole generation of war refugees who were given the option after WWII, they said, “You need to go into asylum, you can go to Australia, Canada, or England.” and the majority, just because it was closer, came to England. And where’s that generation in our media? Where is that group of people who came over here, married into white British families? I feel like they’re lost, and it’s really important to me to do a story - and I’m trying to keep this consistent within all my work - to have an Eastern European main character.

It’s the same for Jewish characters as well, especially in British stuff, there’s not much representation, and I want that to happen. I want to watch sci-fi and not see the only Eastern European as fucking Chekhov, with his stupid fake Russian accent… and also, Russians aren’t the only Eastern European people in sci-fi too, there’s other countries, Eastern Europe is fucking huge, where’s our rep? Where are those generations who grew up eating sauerkraut and kabanos like I did? Where are those conversations about what it feels like to be asked if I can speak English all the time? And it’s really tough; I set up a joint bank account with my partner about three years ago and I got asked ten more questions than them because of having an Eastern European last name. I got “Were you born in this country? Is English your first language?” that kind of thing, and I’ve had it all my life. I’ve had “Where are you really from?” and it’s really frustrating because nobody knows that there’s second generation refugees from Eastern Europe in the UK.

Last one, any advice you’d give to new or aspiring writers?

There’s one, but I don’t know if I’d follow this myself… Push back on edits. I think I just naturally assume that anybody who reads and edits my work is correct, and in some cases they weren’t. I would trust the other person and then think “Well hang on, that’s just making my writing really vanilla…” So Elle is my editor [Note: our lovely editor Elle Turpitt] and she taught me that. She taught me to push back, because she saw some edits from a different editor on my work and she was just like “Ignore all those”... 

So I think the advice is to know your writing. I know I’m lyrical, and that’s fine because I’m a songwriter too, there’s going to be some overlap. Some people read lyrical prose and can’t get their head around it because they’re very literal people. If you want to write lyrical prose, do it, because that’s you! Because somebody doesn’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Absolutely, and I love lyrical writing, I enjoy it when there’s a certain art to it. Functional prose has its place and has an accessibility, but give me all the flowery words

My favourite thing is to go into a really wrapped-up deep metaphor, and then end it with something so literal it’s like a snap. All this flowery language and then boom! Something really literal. Sorry to quote Taylor Swift but that’s what she does with her lyrics, she’ll do all this flowery metaphorical language with hidden meaning and then she’ll say something so direct it hits harder, and I love that kind of style.

Alright, thank you very much, is there anything else you’d like to add?

If anyone is reading Sloth and they want music to listen to, can they listen to Brandi Carlile Right on Time? It’s her new album, and it’s about relationships that have been going on so long, it’s about established relationships, and appreciating other people.

Interview by Dai Baddley

Twitter: @PrepareToDai