Chatting with Joel Glover

Joel Glover lives in the woods of Hertfordshire with two boys and one wife. In a house, not a nest. He knows how that sounds. When not herding his two smøls to various extracurricular activities or performing his PowerPoint-related day job functions, he writes and consumes caffeine (black, strong, if you’re asking). His poetry has appeared in Little Old Lady Comedy, Pulp Literary Magazine, and Oddball. Follow him on Twitter (@booksafterbed) for links to work in a variety of lengths, genres, and forms.

Joel is the author of “I Was a Post-Doc Once” from Radon Issue 8.

Q: What brought you into the punk scene and what caused you to stick around once inside?

As someone who very much lived in their head as a teenager—someone who was angry about the unkindness of the world and could see the way that those dynamics played out, punk was something that helped me see my way through.

Now, as a writer, the ethics and values of punk; of self-reliance mixed with community; of an angry kindness; of a determination to be radical; these are things which remain enduring.

Q: How did an extrovert such as yourself become an accountant? Do the two realities ever conflict with one another?

I hadn’t realized how at odds they were until I started doing them—oh the ignorance of youth!

The way I practice accounting is all about storytelling, and that’s something rooted in the historical development of the profession. I say it is like poetry when done well. You take something abstract, and a set of prescribed forms, and combine the two things with narrative to convey your messages.

Of course, I have also been asked not to be myself in key meetings. So, there’s also that.

Q: How has the writing scene just outside of London, a notorious hot spot for speculative fiction, treated you?

To be honest, my community building has had very little “London” influence. My closest writing buddy is a fellow parent from the kids’ school who I got chatting to. It transpired they had sold a screenplay and was working on two novels. We spur each other on, and he does my covers. Outside of that a combination of an extended bout of Long Covid and my working and parenting patterns mean my writing scene is pretty international and online.

Particular nods are due to Tom Mock, Gwen Leonhard, Dani Finn, Tim McKay, and Steve Hugh Westenra. All of whom have been enormously supportive of me and are wonderful writers in their own right.

It is also worth saying spaces like Radon and Grendel Discords are massive parts of the way I get inspired and engage with people doing great work. And relationships with editors like the wonderful folks at Radon, Peasant, and Epistemic Literary are making me improve as a writer every week.

Q: You write in a myriad of styles and forms through your writing projects. How do you let yourself so easily maneuver between differing genres and tones?

There’s a compliment in this question that has me blushing.

If I am doing it successfully it is because I write what I am feeling on the day. My brain is like a shed full of hyperactive squirrels all fighting for access to a single typewriter. So at any point I will have from three to five poems in proper development, alongside maybe four active novel drafts, a handful of short stories, and a queue of ideas as long as it is weird.

This means that I’m affording myself the opportunity to write something scary when that’s what the day demands, or something sweet if that’s how I am feeling. I also don’t put the brakes on when a new idea starts trying to force its way out.

This does, of course, mean things get finalized in weird bursts and I have written two novels totally by accident.

Q: What enamored you with the pantoum poetry form, and why did you choose this form for your Radon poem’s narrative?

For “I Was a Post-Doc Once,” I actually started with the form and allowed it to inspire the narrative.

I am a French speaker, and I’ve been fascinated by the francophone styles of repetitive poetry for a while, particularly in trying to understand how their use in English does and doesn’t work.

When I came across the pantoum form it wriggled its way into my thinking space as a way of telling certain types of stories. The fact it is Malay helped make me want to do it, as my wife’s family are Malaysian and so it felt like a nice tribute.

I sat staring at the blank page for a while and realized that the form’s circularity lent itself well to a narrative about fracturing time. After that the flesh started to stick to the bones of the poem.

I have a bit of fun writing about academic mishaps and the dangers of technology, and that was the final ingredient which got me to a place where it would bear reading by others.

Q: How does your writing approach neurodiversity, and how do you ensure that your characters reflect the authentic experiences of neurodivergent individuals?

I love this question!

I have a bit of experience in the spaces around neurodivergence. I worked at a summer camp in upstate New York for kids with ADHD, and later I was on the board of a charity which provides support and in-home services for individuals with diverse and dynamic needs. There’s also a family impetus around issues about access to care in this space. So I’m personally invested.

When I was pulling together my novel The Thirteenth Prince, one of the key things I wanted to address, thematically, was the way in which the Chosen One or One Who Was Promised narrative perpetuates power structures. I was also interested in picking at threads around the ease with which a lot of those characters “level up” their skills, from tropey positions like “farm boy” or “blacksmith” to “King.”

So I wrote Gene, who is coded as a savant/precociously neurodivergent character who is brilliant at some things but constitutionally terrible at some other things. Hopefully if you read the book you’ll see that I am trying to reflect both the power that that divergence of thought can bring, but also some of its downsides. The character Baruck is a darker mirror to this, where those gifts are toxic, but where the family and his colleagues embrace him and support him towards happiness.

Now, all that said and all my good intentions laid out, I recognize that in matters of representation I am not always going to get it right. This is what beta readers and a heart and mind open to well-meaning criticism are for!

Q: Horror often serves as a lens to explore human fears. What do you think are the most pressing fears you confront in your romantic horror stories?

The horror I am most interested in thematically is the perpetuation of smaller unkindnesses that erode the mental and spiritual well-being of the characters. How those accrete, how things like coercive control and gaslighting erode happiness like acid on a plate.

As I evolve as a writer, I am bringing more of the straight-up visceral unpleasantness that is in the violence of my fantasy into the space, the uncanny and creepy, but trying to do so in the traditions of the genre by using it as a metaphor.

These things contrast against messages of hope, of love, of endurance, in a way which I personally find emotionally and thematically satisfying and resonant.

Of course, that’s a tall order for a writer to pull off and I’m not claiming I’m Stephen King here!

Q: What role does romance play in horror for you, particularly in crafting LGBTQ+ relationships? How do you avoid clichés while still providing emotional depth?

I am definitely of the generation of writers who have thought carefully about how realistic the representations of love and individuality in the books we loved as young readers actually were and come to the conclusion “this isn’t the totality of my community.”

This isn’t to knock some of the trailblazers—I think if you put the Heralds of Valdemar series, as an example, in the context of the frequently vile and open bigotry of the era in which it was written, then it looks a lot braver than the covers might suggest.

Now, dear reader, please take a moment to look up at my author photo. Note the shiny bald head, the thicket of beard, the twinkling blue eyes (yes, I do look like a young Santa) and remember that what follows next comes from a person who looks like that.

I want my stories to be as true as it is possible for them to be, in the context of someone who is writing worlds where (for example) larval dragons enslave whole cities of dwarves for their own economic ends.

So I want and need for my characters to have chaotic, messy lives full of love and angst and peril. That means you get characters who are living in communities where there is no homophobia and you can love who you love, religions and cultural practices which embrace or reject people for all sorts of reasons outside of their control. People who fall for the wrong person, people who have complex relationships with their parents . . .

I don’t plan that much when I am writing. This does mean there’s a risk that cliché will appear because we have (as much as we would like not to) frameworks of thinking that our native cultures embed. This is why I ask people who know how these clichés manifest to check in on my work and help me root out the subconscious shit that could creep in.

Q: As someone living in the woods with family, how does your environment influence the mood, and themes of your work?

Environment first:

This is a tricky one.

In a lot of ways, the idyllically English environs I live in is both enormously soothing (I know how lucky I am) but also a terrible trap for a fantasy author: who needs another Shire rip-off in their reading life?

Sometimes I kick against it, which is why the city layout in “The Thirteenth Prince” was inspired as much by Angkor Watt and Kuala Lumpur as it is by London, and the Empires in The Gods’ Paths series blend Ancient Greece with Malaysia and Indonesia.

Other times I embrace it, which becomes the worldbuilding in my sci-fi series An Oral History of the Cavendish Mining Company, which includes an upended global economic order and a drowned London, or pronouncedly English settings like the one in my weird/epistemic/horror/domestic/comic “The Guest.”

And when I look out of my window in my writing session and I have a flock of Guinea fowl wandering around my garden, or a flock of parakeets attacking my fruit trees, those things will pop up in the writing in some way.

On family:

I tend not to write a huge amount when the family is in the house. This is because they demand my attention.

But I did write a large lump of my first completed project “The Path of Pain and Ruin” on Google Docs on my phone whilst waiting for football and/or swimming clubs to finish.

There’s also the deeply personal aspect which pops up in poetry I write and my kid-lit: As a parent and a feeling human being, my internal reaction to things like the atrocities in Gaza and the withering of the social safety net frame and reframe themselves through my love for my kids and family, and the universality of that. I hope that sometimes people read my stuff and feel that love, and when I’m aiming at it the sheer anger as well.

I’m going to end on a hopeful note though.

One of the things about writing around kids is that they’re the best audience for some stories. I read my youngest my shorts, and reading out loud helps me find rhythmic issues. And he is also one of my best testers for the humor and themes of my kid books. I’m surrounded by joyful niblings and wonderful parenting by friends and family, and children being encouraged to be their best, most sincere selves.

I’m playing a trick, you see; I’m making my own audience, one captive child at a time.