Joanna Glen: ‘Love is always a highly risky operation – and that’s what I found I wanted to write about’
BY Katie Smart
30th Jan 2024
Joanna Glen’s first novel The Other Half of Augusta Hope was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2019, and this was followed by All My Mothers in 2021, both books set partially in the hot south of Spain. Joanna is a passionate hispanophile who read Spanish at the University of London, with a stint at the Faculty of Arts in Córdoba. During her career in education, Joanna taught Spanish and English to all ages, was a School Principal in London, a visiting lecturer and education adviser. Her third novel Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly will be published by The Borough Press in June 2024.
Joanna is an invaluable member of the CBC tutor team; she is teaching on our upcoming online Finish Your Novel – Eight Months course and is the tutor for our next eight-week Zoom-based Fiction for Beginners course (starts 4 Mar, sign up now).
We caught up to discuss Joanna’s approach to teaching, how she creates brilliant characters and transportive settings, the inspiration behind her latest novel and her advice for aspiring authors.
We’re so delighted that you are part of our teaching team, and that you will lead our upcoming Fiction for Beginners course. What’s your favourite part of teaching creative writing?
All of it. Before my first book was published, I was a teacher, so it’s a nice combination of my two lives. You learn so much by teaching, and I love passing on what I’ve found out about writing by writing (as well as by reading, of course). But perhaps most of all, I love seeing what others write: the myriad stories and styles and voices, reminders of the uniqueness of every person alive, and of what a human thing it is to tell stories.
Do you remember what first inspired you to start writing creatively?
I’m not sure if I do remember. Isn’t memory strange? I often wish I could experience myself at different stages of my life – a kind of external and internal CCTV camera. I really can’t remember myself as a person who didn’t read or write, which I must once have been, before I knew how to do either. But once I knew how to, I was unstoppable. I never stopped reading and writing. I’ll read anything. If I’m in the bathroom, I’ll pick up a bottle of toilet cleaner and read that – the strange long names on the ingredients list. (Do we say ingredients? Or is that only for food? You see, there is always so much to learn. That’s the thing about language.) As a child, I constantly wrote stories and forced my long-suffering friends to let me read to them. Miraculously, some of them are still my friends. The first ‘novel’ I wrote was called Diary of a Plague Year. I was about seven or eight, and, by the sound of that title, a slightly exhausting child. I remember being dropped at the library one Half Term in order to make a glove puppet out of a striped sock, and absconding to ask the bemused librarian what would be a suitable name for a girl who turned ten in 1348. I make use of this as a scene in my first novel, The Other Half of Augusta Hope.
Your third novel, Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly will be published by The Borough Press in June 2024. It follows nature-loving Addie and grieving Sol who live on neighbouring islands. You’ve described it as ‘a love story between two people who don’t have the necessary skills to fall in love’ – what drew you to explore this dynamic of a slightly bumbling, tentative yet tender discovery of love?
I’m not sure I ever quite know what draws me to my stories and my characters. It’s as if my brain is a cement mixer, which holds everything I’ve ever experienced or seen or heard or dreamt about – and round it goes, and round, mixing and blending. Then out comes… stuff. For me, the most interesting people are the ones who aren’t like everybody else, and possibly the least interesting people are those who appear too sorted to have a complex inner life. Addie and Sol are deeply un-sorted, like many of us, and for very good reason, rather wary of other people, which makes love a highly risky operation. But then again, love is always a highly risky operation – and that’s what I found I wanted to write about. The huge risk of loving. And the equally huge risk of not loving.
Your fiction explores the highs and lows of human connection. Do you have any tips for budding writers looking to write about complex relationships that ring true?
Be brave. Don’t stay on the socially acceptable surface of yourself, but go down deeper, to the places you don’t (or don’t often) let other people go, to the things you think and feel that you find it hard to admit or articulate. Writing is a kind of unlayering. It isn’t always comfortable. Also, watch and listen carefully. Then you’ll have more material.
Settings also play vital roles in your work. Your novels often traverse multiple locations that contrast and connect with each other in surprising and poignant ways – the small English town and Burundi in The Other Half of Augusta Hope; London and Córdoba in All My Mothers and now the neighbouring islands in your latest novel. When you’re developing a new story, what comes first the landscape of the narrative or your characters?
Well, I think it happens like this. I get a feeling inside me, which slightly buzzes, and I know I’m onto something. With All My Mothers, the feeling was an urgent kind of longing. And the longing (for all sorts of reasons, linked both to history and to my history) took me to Córdoba. With Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly, the feeling was a heady kind of wonder, which took me to the wild fictional islands of Rokesby and Ora. The feeling and the setting seem to birth the main character(s). I start to get to know them. I put them in situations. The story evolves.
What’s your go-to reading recommendation for aspiring authors?
Anything the aspiring authors love. Read what you love, which will typically be the kind of thing you’d like to write. For me, it’s the quality of the language that mesmerises. Seeing how some writers arrange words in a way that feels almost like magic. I hunger for that magic when I read. Writers with the magic: Maggie O’Farrell, Niall Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Deborah Levy… and the list is long and keeps growing. That’s the best thing. That the list keeps growing. Somebody who’s about to take the CBC course might very well end up on that list.
If you could go back to a time before your first book deal – what advice would you want to share with yourself?
I’m not sure about advice because there are so many variables that affect the journey of a book, and many of them are out of the writer’s control. I would definitely advise myself to have Susan Armstrong as my agent, as she has been the best possible champion and companion on the journey. I didn’t know how great she was when I nervously sent her my work. Other than that, read and read and read, and write and write and write, and try not to compare yourself to other writers.
Get expert insights and feedback on your writing from Joanna Glen, she is currently a tutor on these online courses:
- Finish Your Novel – Eight Months
- Fiction for Beginners
Pre-order Joanna's latest novel Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly, out 20 June 2024.
Some of the books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our bookshop.org page.