Five Children, One Voice: Juliano on Crafting The Steps
Interviewed by Katie Barr
Your poem “Strasbourg” famously inspired the album Dance Fever. When you wrote those lines, did you envision them having a “choreographed” or rhythmic quality, or was it a surprise to see them translated into the medium of baroque pop?
As a poet, the flow and sound of language has always been important to me. Although I love reading and writing and have devoted my life to both, the thing I would be most unable to live without would be music. And I always wished I could have been a dancer, or a singer. These are things I have no physical ability for, but I’ve always wanted to write things that can sing and dance where I cannot. ‘Strasbourg’ especially I wanted to evoke a sense of franticness, dancing and singing to breathlessness and transcendence.
Florence Welch described you as a “constant purveyor of literary delights.” If you had to curate a “starter pack” of three obscure books or poems for someone trying to understand your own creative DNA, what would they be?
How obscure are we talking?! The first that comes to mind is Anne Carson’s beautiful novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, which is so rooted in the queerness, classical mythology and poetry, and weirdness, that informs much of my creative drive. Next up would be a Stephen King deep cut, Lisey’s Story, which is hauntingly beautiful and deeply disturbing, and touches all the raw nerves of grief as well as the vast potential of the creative act. And lastly, Sara Baume’s handiwork has lingered in my mind since I first read it six years ago. Though she’s probably better known for her (excellent) fiction, her first memoir has guided me in its style, its sense of creative practice as meditative and devotional, and its deceptively simple use of form.
Your PhD focused on how Shakespeare’s plays are cut for performance. In your own creative writing, do you find yourself “editing like a dramaturg”—thinking about the “staging” of a sentence—or do you have to switch that academic brain off to let the prose breathe?
“The staging of a sentence”!! I love this and might steal it, sorry. The fragmentary nature especially of the first half does feel very dramatic at times, presenting these theatrical vignettes often in a single (domestic) setting… but I think in general the academic brain shuts off in the writing, and in the editing gets a little more airtime. Many of the same questions apply: what is getting in the way of the story itself being clear and tight? What adds necessary texture, and what is superfluous? What is crucial to characterisation, and what is inconsistent? I love the theatre, but theatre-makers have a duty to respect their audience’s time, and the same is true of books: every second should be earned.
Given your background as a professional reviewer and “compulsive reader,” did you find it harder to find your own voice for The Steps without the “ghosts” of the thousands of books you’ve reviewed sitting on your shoulder?
(Quick clarification: I wouldn’t describe myself as a “professional” reviewer by any means – I don’t believe I’ve ever been paid for one of my reviews!)
I think the nature of The Steps is such that all those ghosts are not only inevitably present but also quite welcome in the text. I’ve always been interested in metatextuality and intertextuality, in stories that are aware of both themselves and their traditions, influences, etc. There’s a lot of Woolf, for instance, in The Steps, much of which is actually accidental – it was only when I finished writing that I realised how much To the Lighthouse had influenced the text (a book I’d not read in full for nearly 10 years!). And as for finding my own voice, I think the personal nature of some of the material really helped to keep it all grounded in my own mind, and to say what I wanted to say.
Writing five children is a massive technical challenge. How did you manage the “group mind” of the siblings while ensuring that characters like the volatile Angelo or the delicate Jules didn’t just become archetypes of trauma?
I modelled the siblings after my own family unit, to a certain extent. I grew up as the middle child of seven, and was always the quiet type, watching from the sidelines. Now, as a still-introspective adult, after some therapy, a lot of reading, thinking, talking with family and so on, I can see very clearly the ways in which me and my siblings responded to our own situation growing up (for instance, our parents’ ugly divorce), and how that has shaped us all differently now. We all share certain references and experiences, which does lend itself to something of a “group mind” – but we are all so different, and were all so different. I tried to give each of the siblings their own distinct passions, habits, weirdnesses, just as I saw in my own family, while still giving them a sort of collective language.
Sophie is “raw from tragedy.” In many Gothic novels, the mother is either the victim or the villain. How did you navigate writing a mother who is allowed to be human, flawed, and perhaps even frightened of her own children?
There’s a beautiful quote from the singer Anohni, who says “If you had to divide humanity into two groups, I would sit with the women.” I feel like this statement sums something up about how I view not only my own view of gender but how I relate to others. I owe a debt to my own mother especially. I spent most of my time growing up in the company of (older) women, usually mothers, and have always felt more comfortable around women, more in sync mentally and emotionally, and drawn to women and mothers as characters too.
As a kid, I think we can see our mothers as a little 2D, caretakers who are either good or bad – whereas adulthood is realising your parents are human, and often understanding that who they are as parents is so informed by who their parents were, and so on. I wanted to honour this complexity through Sophie, who is in turns loving, traumatised, aloof, hopeless, and eventually a mysterious lacuna of projection and wonder. Which I always think is more true to life: how much can we ever really know the people we love?
All content is original to The Literary Lounge.
Questions asked and original to Katie Barr. Answers provided by Juliano Zaffino with minor proofreading edits. Featured Image sourced from here.
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