Jen Calleja’s Shelf Life
Jen Calleja is a writer, literary translator and publisher based in Hastings, UK. Her books include Vehicle, I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For (both from Prototype), Dust Sucker (Makina Books), and the forthcoming essay collection and libretto Goblinhood: goblin as a mode (Rough Trade Books). She has been shortlisted for many awards including the Man Booker International Prize for her translations of German-language literature. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which publishes Maltese literature in English and English translation.
How and where are you?
I’m in bed in my house in Hastings, in between leading creative writing classes in Hastings New Town. It was poetry this morning, and it’s experimental fiction this evening. I’ve been getting cold and tired this winter/spring, so have been working or watching TV on my laptop in bed in the afternoons a day or two a week.
What are you reading right now?
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Daunt Books), which takes the form of a series of boxing matches that make up a day-long girls’ boxing tournament. It’s really interesting, especially how it veers from being very much in the present then going into the days before the tournament and then way back in the girls’ childhoods, but also shooting way forward in their lives, decades after this tournament takes place. It’s such a clever structure, where characters repeat and fight one another, making it almost like a linked story collection. Yesterday I read Sorcerer by Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski (Prototype) on the train back from London; it’s part play text, part novella, part short story-in-appendices, an intriguing challenge that required attention. I recently read Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me The Wreck I Am Today (Notting Hill Editions) by Todd McEwen and it made me so happy. It’s less about the films – he could have been talking about anything and I would have read it because it’s really about his enthusiasm and his eye. I felt such an affinity with his writing, and I haven’t laughed like that while reading in ages or maybe ever. I’m flicking through about a dozen more books but they’re all annoying me for different reasons. I think I need to get a fresh reading pile, like when you swap out all your letters when playing Scrabble (played travel Scrabble on a late train back from London the other day with my husband, I always get annoyed if I don’t win).
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
To celebrate passing my PhD, I binged Guy Ritchie’s new eight-part series The Gentlemen. I love Layer Cake, Lock Stock…, Snatch, and it’s all of those films rolled into one, so I was doing chef’s kisses at the screen. It’s not only a lot of fun to watch, it says something about class, immigration, empire, ambition. But I don’t really want to get all intellectual about it, it’s just a comic-violent romp. I watched American Fiction the other night and though I loved the premise (I will read Percival Everett’s novel Erasure when I get a chance), I found the film unsatisfying, kind of like a made-for-TV movie, which was extra disappointing because I love Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown and Tracee Ellis Ross. On the subject of book adaptations, I hated Poor Things (again, I want to give the Alistair Gray novel a try) and I hate that I used up a recent rare cinema trip to see it. I’m going to watch The Zone of Interest this week. I’m glad I got to catch the Philip Guston show at Tate before it finished, it was incredible. India Harvey’s exhibition ‘Challenging Behaviour’ at VOLT in Eastbourne about childhood ‘normativity’, play and risk-taking is brilliant – full of squishy dangerous things like chainsaws and matchboxes. I saw Figs in Wigs latest play Big Finish at Battersea Arts Centre last week, straight after the last day at London Book Fair, which my friend Rosie Ridgway did the sound design for. It has everything from golfing dinosaurs, a toilet ice cream machine, and the greatest send up of both a post-event Q&A and undergraduate dance productions. It's also all about precarity and competitiveness in the arts due to lack of funding, so the humour makes the stark reality go down.
What did you read as a child?
I didn’t read much as a child, we didn’t have many books at home. I think I assumed everyone just had two or three books as a kid and you just re-read them. I’m big on re-reading, re-watching, re-listening. We were big TV watchers, and I liked watching the same video tape over and over, and I listened to the same album for years at a time. I still listen to the same playlist every day. Later as a teenager I read Roald Dahl’s Someone Like You, and that got me into short stories, and I think the big a-ha moment was when one summer during A-levels our teacher Mr Savage gave out copies of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for us to read during the holidays just because he thought we should, and it was a whole, complex world that changed many of our expectations of literature. He also taught us Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber with gusto, and I think you can see that book peeping out in all my books.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
Well, the main character of my novel Vehicle is actually called Hester Heller as a little nod to the impression Catch-22 left on me. Vehicle was also very much inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Lolita through what I found in them about the subjective nature of academic research, translation and biography, and how a character always believes that they’re good. I saw something recently where an actor was given direction while acting drunk that a drunk doesn’t act drunk, a drunk acts sober, and it’s a similar thing; Nabokov’s characters are constantly justifying their bad behaviour, not basking in villainy. I was also influenced by the formal experimentation of various writers and poets like Alejandro Zambra and Claudia Rankine, plus many examples of found poetry; they gave me confidence to play with form in Vehicle. And having read Dracula and Frankenstein in my twenties, I immediately latched onto epistolary novels, with their letters and documents that make you feel like you’re rifling through someone’s stuff. I like novels that feel like that, that are framed as being found documents.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
The worst/funniest has got to be a Goodreads review that described my pamphlet memoir-essay Goblins (Rough Trade Books) as ‘Pretentious British art pixie gibberish’. Rough Trade Books are publishing my book Goblinhood: goblin as a mode this Halloween, which is a set of six essays with a libretto (some poems) and for which the pamphlet was a kind of prototype, and I sort of want to have that review as a blurb.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I feel both lucky that I’ve been published, and just as lucky that what at the time felt like misses turned out to be very much for the best. My first book came out of sharing a manuscript of poems with the poet SJ Fowler – who I had met through his collaborative and cross-cultural poetry event series The Enemies Project – around a decade ago. He recommended me and the manuscript to Test Centre (now Prototype) and they invited me to meet them, which I thought was a formality to turn it down, but instead they wanted to publish it – my collection Serious Justice came out with them in 2015. Prototype subsequently published my short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (2020), my novel Vehicle (2023), and we’re doing another book together next year. Being published by Jess Chandler at Prototype is a dream come true, and I will never take it for granted. I shopped around my short stories and my novel before Prototype started their prose list myself, and there was interest and even prospects of Vehicle being published with a larger publisher, but the repeated thing was that the writing was too political or the forms too complex and/or that they didn't want to wait for me or support me to get it to its final-final form (I just needed a couple more months and a kind word really).
That Vehicle especially has almost sold 2000 copies and has been well received shows that trad publishing has low expectations of both literature and readers. I would have always regretted changing my work for the sake of being published by a larger publisher, but also I don’t think I could cope with having a hyped book or one that has a huge marketing machine behind it – I would never be able to believe a single review or sale, whereas my mental health benefits from knowing people have picked up Vehicle because they were interested in its themes, that it came to them probably through word of mouth, and that the reviews are honest. I also love Rough Trade Books, and that they published my pamphlet and have now supported me to write my very weird book that puts a goblin gaze on culture is so dreamy. What more could I want as a writer than writing the books I want to write and being told Yes and being given not only support but real care and full-hearted interest? And then finding that readers like what I write?
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I get obsessed with an idea and then have to process it in writing until I’ve used up every avenue of possibility/I’ve gone as deep as I can go into what in it makes me feel joyful or uncomfortable/I’m satisfied with it/I’m bored of it and/or I hit the deadline. I have to be completely motivated, otherwise I can’t write a word. I couldn’t be a journalist or a writer for hire, I can only write what I really want to write.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
‘Anyone can write’, which was from my best friend Helen when we were 14 and I was dumbfounded that she had written her own short story.
What are you working on right now?
I’m finishing Goblinhood: goblin as a mode for Rough Trade Books, then redrafting my second novel and doing a final draft on my next book with Prototype. Plus a couple of big translations for Fitzcarraldo Editions and Faber & Faber. I’m also working on my work/life balance, but hey, I’ve got to make a living.
Photo: Robin Silas Christian