Seed – Joanna Walsh

One of the UK’s most innovative and groundbreaking writers, Joanna Walsh, performs her digital-only novella Seed at Spike Island next month. Joe Melia finds out more

What drew you towards the digital format for Seed?

The opportunity to take my writing into the digital realm was both a natural progression and a vital development of the work, not only because Seed’s subject is an impressionable, intelligent teenage girl, grappling with the many cultural influences on her voice and identity, but because I am determined to reach new readers who are digital rather than print-oriented, as well as bringing readers of ‘literary fiction’ to a digital project. My aim in Seed (the digital book) was to create a navigable, non-linear narrative ‘space’. Though Seed is richly visual, I want my reader to have a sense of exploring an environment that could exist only on a digital platform, with a unique sense of orientation and volume inconceivable offline. I wanted to create a story that could only be digitally native.

How well do you think storytelling and digital platforms work together?

Like any medium, results are going to be varied according to what is put in (and this flexibility is one sign of a medium worth using). There are many traditionally-oriented narratives online that want to reader eventually to draw threads together to achieve closure, end of story. But I’m interested in the opportunities digital offers to create alternative narrative structures. Unlike a book, read left to right, with its expected ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ (even in a choose-your-own-adventure book you can tell approximately how much text there is to explore), there is infinite space available in an online document (just hit return and more appears). Digital offers the opportunity for mysteries that are not easily resolved. Some readers have told me they wonder if they have ‘finished’ Seed, whether they have explored all its possibilities – or that they feel the story goes on beyond what they have discovered.

Was the idea for performing Seed there when you wrote it?

No, I had to present part of the work at the Writers’ Worlds symposium in Norwich in 2016, and I realised that reading from it as a single voice wouldn’t adequately convey the ideas I was trying to explore in the digital work. So at the last minute I recruited Fern Richards, an MA Student at UEA, and Deborah Smith, publisher of Tilted Axis Press, who was also attending the conference. We rehearsed for half an hour – and I was delighted with the result.

Do you see writing as a kind of performance?

Well that’s an interesting question. I like reading my work aloud to an audience: storytime – that’s performance, and I read my work aloud to myself constantly while writing because I write for sound and rhythm, so maybe that’s like a rehearsal. The vital thing about performance for me is that immediate connection between reader and listener so, though the act of writing can be performative of various things, and though I often write with performance in mind, I don’t think writing (or private reading) is performance.

What do you hope the performance will add to the reading experience?

I wanted to bring that sense of mysterious dimensionality I tried to achieve in the digital version to life. I also wanted to work with groups of amateur readers, of all ages and backgrounds (sometimes I’ll be workshopping all women, sometimes with men and women, sometimes with university students, sometimes with volunteers recruited via a local venue). I wanted their voices to complete the work in the same way readers complete the text of Seed online, by choosing the order in which they read.

Have you any plans for performances of your other work?

I would love to do a semi-staged adaptation of Hotel. Or even an opera. Like Seed it has a variety of voices with different register (though in Hotel’s case they’re famous figures including Freud and Katherine Mansfield), talking to each other, and also performing ‘arias’ on their own. Hotel is (also like Seed) about kinds of performance: about talking and shutting up, about what can be said and what we’re told must be concealed, and about the contrast between the performative, public space of hotels and the ‘private’ space of the home. So if there are any composers out there who fancy having a go, please get in touch with me via the email form at the bottom of my website and I’ll send you the book.

Seed will be performed at Spike Island on December 5 by Joanna Walsh and women from Bristol. For more info, visit www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/performance-reading-seed-tickets-37577160298

Read more: An interview with Eley Williams

Photo of Joanna Walsh by Liam Bundy.