D.D. Johnston is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Cheltenham and works at the University of Gloucestershire, where he is a University Teaching Fellow and a senior lecturer in Creative Writing.
Cover for the Spanish Edition of Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs
His first novel, Peace, Love, & Petrol Bombs, featured in The Sunday Herald’s Books of the Year for 2011, as a choice of Helen Fitzgerald, who said “Peace Love & Petrol Bombs, the debut novel by DD Johnston (AK Press, £8.99), is a non-preachy coming-of-age story set amid the complex and chaotic backdrop of anti-capitalist politics. It’s also funny as all hell.” Popmatters wrote, “this genial, engaging, yet serious search for meaning in a commodified global culture deserves wide acclaim” (John L. Murphy). While The Morning Star wrote that “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs has a very urgent relevance now and for the immediate future” (Paul Simon). Peace, love, & Petrol Bombs has been recorded as an audio book for audible.com, and is published in Spanish as Paz, amor y cócteles molotov (Hoja de Lata, 2013; translated by Raquel Duato García).
His second novel, The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub (Barbican Press, 2013) , made the judges’ longlist for the Goldsmith’s Prize and was a 2013 book of the year in The Morning Star, where it was described as “determinedly extraordinary”. The Warwick Review called it “an ambitious, erudite work with a profound interest in the world as we find it,” while Libcom.org described it as “A historical epic, a story about love, revolution and the university, with echoes of Luther Blissett’s Q and a lot of laughs.”
His third novel, The Secret Baby Room, is set for publication in July 2015. As far removed from Thrub as is imaginable, The Secret Baby Room is a page-turning mystery suspense thriller. Crime fiction authority Lee Horsley describes it as ‘a tense and compelling psychological thriller':
Claire Wilson’s investigation leads her not only towards the dark knowledge of past crimes but towards an understanding of the damaged lives of those around her. Johnston offers us a wonderfully gripping read, but also a compassionate and moving story of people struggling to survive at the margins of a rapidly changing city. — Lee Horsley, author of The Noir Thriller
D.D. Johnston also writes a bit of short fiction, and you can read one of his stories, ‘The Invitation’, online in issue six of the lampeter Review. An earlier version of the story was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. In his spare time, he runs the writing advice website onlinewritingtips.com.
Links are also available to online interviews with the author, essays by the author, and – in a nod to social media culture – pointless lists of stuff the author likes. Thanks for reading and please see below for latest news, events, and ramblings, or follow him on Twitter.
My new novel, The Secret Baby Room, is set to appear in July; six months to wait for it, and then you’ll read it in a single sitting. (If you don’t, I’ll give you a year of writing advice videos completely free.)
Cover design for The Secret Baby Room, by Rawshock Design
As far removed from Thrub as is imaginable, The Secret Baby Room is a page-turning mystery suspense thriller. Crime fiction authority Lee Horsley describes it as ‘a tense and compelling psychological thriller':
Claire Wilson’s investigation leads her not only towards the dark knowledge of past crimes but towards an understanding of the damaged lives of those around her. Johnston offers us a wonderfully gripping read, but also a compassionate and moving story of people struggling to survive at the margins of a rapidly changing city. — Lee Horsley, author of The Noir Thriller
I’m delighted to be able to share the brilliant cover produced by Jason Anscomb at Rawshock Design. The Secret Baby Room is one of several new books slated for publication by Barbican Press, the indy press that keeps making waves. Recent books include Kate Horsley’s The Monster’s Wife, which was shortlisted for Scottish First Book of the Year. And their new list includes Brian Lavery’s The Headscarf Revolutionaries, which former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott predicts could become the next Made in Dagenham; Hana Sklenkova’s translation of Martin Vopenka’s The Fifth Dimension (a modern Czech classic that includes meditations on the ideas of Kip Thorne, as made famous by Interstellar); and much more. Visit Barbican’s website for information on forthcoming titles, and remember to pre-order your copy of The Secret Baby Room: order it now and it will arrive, as a surprise, one sunny day in July.
New writing advice site launching Jan 2015
Several times a year, someone starts a debate about whether Creative Writing can be taught. It’s not clear why – after all, those who oppose the teaching of writing are ankle-deep in the ocean, yelling at the tide to retreat – but the recurring debate has been on my mind for some weeks, ever since the Guardian featured me and my experimental novel, The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub. The Guardian didn’t, you see, run a double-page spread in the Review section, allowing the usual luminaries to inform us that Thrub is the best thing to have happened to British literature since Tristram Shandy. No, I was in the Education section, displayed as an example of an author who has benefitted from – and who now delivers – formal education in the craft of writing. And while the Review double-page spread would have been nice, I’m more than happy to be associated with the teaching of Creative Writing.
The case against Creative Writing has two fronts. On one flank there stand those who claim that writing can’t be taught. Nobody doubts that music can be taught – we don’t read column after column questioning the existence of conservatoires. Nobody doubts that art can be taught – we don’t need a tri-annual debate on the value of the Royal College of Art. But writing, apparently, is a skill that defies instruction. This curious distinction may owe its roots to the ancients – to the distinction Plato made between poets (who brought new worlds into being) and painters (who merely imitated) – and certainly it’s inspired by the romantic myth of the creative genius, but, I suspect, it’s sustained by the self-images of certain writers who would like to see themselves as something more special than products of a good education (whether that education be formal or autodidactic). Why else do teachers such as Will Self and Hanif Kureishi draw salaries teaching writing while simultaneously condemning the teaching of writing as a waste of time?
On the other flank, there are those who allege that the emergence of Creative Writing has a negative impact on the diversity of our literary culture. In demographic terms, Creative Writing can only help increase diversity: in the last thirty-five years, every British-born winner of the Booker Prize has been white, and all but three of them were educated at Oxford, Cambridge, or LSE. But what of the argument that Creative Writing courses teach authors to produce ‘McPoems’ and ‘McStories’ – work that is formulaic and uniform? Well, the current generation of major American novelists have almost all had some university-level training as writers. And if we’re honest, we’ll admit that American fiction is miles ahead of what’s currently being published in the UK.
I’ve been teaching writing for five years now, and I love it. I hate our market-Stalinist universities with their awful combination of neo-liberal ideology and centralised bureaucracy, but I love working with the students and helping them to develop their writing. Hanif Kureishi thinks 99% of his students have no talent and are wasting their time; my thinking is closer to that of Gordon Lish (who must know a thing or two about developing writing), who said, “I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.”
In 2015, assisted by my colleagues Lucy Tyler and Tyler Keevil, I’ll be launching online writing tips.com. The idea is to take some of our best tips for developing writing, make them into short videos, and share them with the world – for free. Like the sound of it? We’ll be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and WordPress, and your early support won’t be forgotten.
Until then, enjoy the last days of 2014, have a brilliant Hogmanay, and here’s to a happy and healthy 2015.
I was grateful to read a review of The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub in Issue 62 of Writing in Education (p-86), and I appreciate the reviewer, Holly Howitt-Dring, engaging with the book. There’s something very undignified about authors quibbling with criticisms of their work, and I never challenge criticisms of a novel’s structure or style or subject or concept – apart from anything else, most of the time the critics have a point.
But the main criticism in this review is that the book is sexist:
Starting with the narrator’s love-interest, Lempi, who is initially characterized as not much more than pretty and “petite… with disproportionately large breasts”, female characters do not fare well. (…) However briefly female characters appear in the story, they are often superficial, unable to resist any sexual encounter submissive or otherwise. Elsie herself isn’t even able to shrug this off; she can’t resist her lover, Ramon, and is a sexual plaything for others throughout her story. It seems a shame that these characters play such highly genderized and sexualized parts, though our narrator seems to realize this reductiveness on a foray into Amsterdam’s Red Light district.
As a self-proclaimed feminist, who claims to have written a feminist book, I’m probably obliged to dispute this reading. Here’s a quick attempt:
1. A book is not sexist because it contains sexist characters. We have to consider to what extent the author endorses those characters’ views and intends for readers to identify with them. In The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub, the eponymous professor is a comic caricature of a disgraced, ageing chauvinist, and the narrator’s lust for his love interest is doomed, pathetic, and ridiculous: for instance, when they’re first alone together he defecates himself and throws his soiled pyjama bottoms from his bathroom window. Further, the narrator’s crush, Lempi, spends the last quarter of the book deconstructing herself as sexual object while foregrounding the consequences of hegemonic ideals of female desirability.
2. Regarding whether the narrator’s historical fiction is sexist, we need to consider whether it’s told from a biased perspective. For example, if a book is in part about sexual relations, are those relations invariably described from a male perspective with female characters presented as the objects of a male gaze? In Thrub, only once is sex described from a male character’s perspective, and then the character is a youth who, during the Ukrainian Civil War, tries and fails to lose his virginity with a prostitute. All other sexual experiences – including those of Elsie, Yulia, and Magdalena – are described from a female perspective.
3. To the charge that ‘women do not fare well’, women did not fare well in mid-20th-century Europe, and it would not be a feminist writing that sought to deny the exploitation and sexual violence that women faced in the past and continue to face today. For instance, it would be wrong for a social history of the Ukrainian Civil War to neglect the prevalence of prostitution and rape.
4. To the charge that ‘Elsie can’t resist her lover, Ramón,’ why should she resist her lover? Surely post-sexual revolution we can accept that women are not asexual and have as much right as men do to enjoy having sex with their partners.
5. To the charge that ‘Elsie is a sexual plaything to others throughout her story,’ besides Ramón the only other character with whom she has described sexual contact is her predatory boss, Menzies Flynn. It is accurate to describe her as Flynn’s sexual plaything, but as this traumatic incident is told from Elsie’s perspective, a better way to put it might be that she is a survivor of a sexual assault.
6. Finally, I agree that women in the book usually have ‘submissive’ roles during sex. The politics of desire are complex and beyond the scope of this response, but we should remember that all the sex described in the book occurred almost a century ago. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed plausible to me that the sex lives of my characters would in some ways reflect the prevailing patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. This is not meant to imply that there weren’t also alternatives: for instance, while in Barcelona, Elsie encounters women active in Mujeres Libres (Free Women), the revolutionary anarcha-feminist organisation whose members rejected church and state, mocked the idea of marriage, and in some cases pursued same-sex and polygamous relationships. But it was not my intention to write about these revolutionary heroes, and to readers who wish to learn more about their inspiring social revolution, I heartily recommend Martha Acklesberg’s Free Women of Spain.
I had hoped to write a feminist book, and I apologise if I have failed.
I’m excited to be talking literature with Rob Newman at the University of Gloucestershire tomorrow night. Rob is a “goosepimplingly brilliant” comedian, the author of four acclaimed novels, and the star of television shows including The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, A History of Oil, and A History of the World Backwards. We’ll be talking literature, politics, philosophy, history, and his new novel, The Trade Secret – an outrageous, continent-crossing epic that is described by The Guardian as “a rollicking Elizabethan yarn that has much to say about the origins and nature of modern capitalism.”
Tickets are £5 (free to UoG students and staff) and you can book your place here.
As the year ends, I want to say thanks for a few new media pieces that have appeared recently. The photo by Marta Calvo was taken on the terrace of La Central bookstore in Barcelona, when I was visiting to promote the Spanish version of Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs. The picture’s in the top Spanish literary magazine, Qué Leer.
I’m also grateful to author Christopher Burns for his intelligent and thoughtful review of The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub, which appears in the new issue of the venerable Warwick Review. The review is much fuller and more thought-provoking than can be conveyed in a sound bite, but here’s a sample:
Readers are likely to find Thrub either exciting or precious, but few will disagree that this is an ambitious, erudite work with a profound interest in the world as we find it. This interest encompasses unexpectedly vivid sensory descriptions, scenes of violence such as those found in Babel, a junction of philosophy and farce reminiscent of Stoppard, a B.S. Johnson like use of distancing, and an ongoing dialectic between Kantian and post-Kantian theories of being and action.
In addition, last week I had the pleasure of chatting with journalist Michael Donnelly, who’s recently launched an independent media venture: S:News. The interview’s available to read here.
Finally, if you’re still shopping for presents, have a look at The Morning Star‘s review of the year’s best left-wing fiction. There are some great titles mentioned, so I’m grateful to Paul Simon for including Thrub. He writes:
As expansive in its scope and even more ambitious in its characterisation, DD Johnston’s The Deconstruction Of Professor Thrub spans poverty-stricken Belfast, the Spanish civil war and Hungary 1956. A galloping discussion of free will and skit on academic life, it’s a book that frequently explodes with raw and unexpurgated humour.
The good people at Libcom.org – ‘a resource for all people who wish to fight to improve their lives, their communities and their working conditions’ – have just published a review of The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub:
‘A historical epic, a story about love, revolution and the university, with echoes of Luther Blissett’s Q and a lot of laughs, this is a great book which entertains, confuses and educates in equal measure.You should read it!’
