Jen Calleja
Evading Capture: On Writing Two Experimental Memoirs
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I’m publishing two experimental memoirs within nine months of each other. My year of oblique self-obsession? You might think so, but you’d be wrong! As my partner recently pointed out, in actual fact all my books up to this point have in a sense been experimental forms of memoir, so I’ve been at it for years. I’d go even further and say that everything I’ve ever written has been experimental memoir, even my book reviews, even my translations of German-language writers’ books. They all have a trace of my life within them, they might be charts or diaries of who I was – what I noticed and knew – at the time I wrote them. But let’s not get sidetracked (though both memoirs are comprised solely of sidetracks).
Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (recently out from Rough Trade Books) and Fair: a literary translator memoir (out from Prototype in June 2025) aren’t so clandestine in their nature as memoirs. Each book focuses on a specific facet of my selfhood; one is a personal history of goblinry, the other an autoethnography of becoming and being a literary translator. Goblinhood takes the form of six erratic-frenetic essays, with a series of poems threaded between them that act as a quest narrative where ‘I’ go on an adventure around the town where I live. The essays are themed associative monologues on different aspects of the figure of the goblin within popular culture and my life, but also include surreal forays into other forms of writing. Fair, on the other hand, takes place in a fictional book fair/art fair/fun fair, where anecdotes from my life and explanations for how I comprehend the art of literary translation are seemingly random set pieces in the circus-like memory palace of this make-believe structure that I’ve ‘built’ on a pier off the south-coast of England.
Why not simply write a cultural history of the goblin, or a literary memoir about translation? The straightforward (not sidetracked) answer I have is that I have simply always written experimentally, it’s just what’s always made sense to me. When I write it, realism feels absurd and uncanny, like there’s something under the surface of it. Experimental writing, the way I usually summarise it, is where you’re reading a story while simultaneously aware about the made-ness of that story, that you’re being entertained while being informed about the nature of storytelling. It’s also a matter of form matching up with, undermining or enhancing the content; an active attempt not to assume or believe that a realist mode is a ‘neutral’ or automatically ‘better’ vehicle for a story.
Writing is always playing with balance.
Once I understand and think I can perform in a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing, I want to expose it and undermine it or meld it with another form of writing to see what it can allow me to do that standalone genres and modes don’t. In the case of these books, I wanted to create hyper-personal and experiential accounts of two different phenomena by melding cultural criticism (Goblinhood) and a creative practice (Fair) with memoir while making use of fictional and poetic devices and voices. When I set out to write something, I’m thinking about how the form, voice or style can wink at the reader, connect apparently disparate ideas or uphold the constant hum of something thematically or emotionally, constructing another layer that has to be held onto at the same time as the narrative. I’m truly apparently incapable of writing something that is not in some way experimental – I’ve joked with fellow experimental authors H. Gareth Gavin and Roy Claire Potter on separate occasions that to write a realist novel would be our form of experimental writing.
But to counter the idea that these memoirs came out fully formed this way and were the first structures that came to mind, I want to talk about the many years of trial and error, something that happens during the writing of most books, but especially when creating something that is attempting what could be considered formally and stylistically unusual. In fact, these books went through complete transformations – and although they changed in different ways, in certain aspects it was for the same reason.
I wrote Fair as part of a fully-funded PhD in creative and critical writing where I was researching life writing by literary translators, with the other half of the project being writing my own work of experimental translator memoir. When I started, I was feeling triumphant about where my self-taught German and endless self-motivated work had got me. I’d overcome so many hurdles to become one of the most sought-after literary translators from German into English and writers about literary translation. I pictured a tower. Each floor would have something I’d learned as a translator or something that would communicate my knowledge and passion for the vocation, working up from the ground floor to some kind of penthouse of acclaim (I know, I know). Then a simple question from one of my supervisors changed everything: ‘What’s in the basement of the tower?’ I realised that I didn’t want to go in the basement. Once I started to descend its ‘stairs’, however, I realised that I was lying to myself about my origin story, my confidence in my abilities, my sense of connection as a bookworker, and that I didn’t feel very successful at all, quite the opposite. It was as if the traditional memoir structure had infected what I thought was an experimental memoir, and even my perceptions of my practice.
I finally had time to explore this lower level while on a two-week residency, and the light came on when I started writing out the same old story I told whenever anyone asked me how I ended up in Munich aged eighteen. I wrote down: ‘I moved to Germany when I was eighteen in order to improve my German.’ But it was the automatic way I wrote this simple sentence that alerted me that I was not telling the truth. This was what I told people at the time I was moving, it’s what I told people in the year and a half while I lived in Munich and it’s what I’ve told people ever since, but I realised while sitting at a desk looking over a little lake in Scotland that this wasn’t why I left, or why I began focusing on German: I left to move out of the family home, to get away from my small hometown, to create distance between me and a boyfriend I was too cowardly and conflicted to break up with. I needed to escape because I felt the oppressive weight of my life having already been written, like a memoir with blanks to fill in.
The foundations of my life as a literary translator were built on this teenage escape from my life. The tower fell, but I didn’t know how to replace it. My partner brought up the structure of a book fair, those huge conferences I’d regularly gone to in London and Frankfurt set out in cubicles and blocks on a horizontal rather than vertical plane. This shape would allow an exploration of experiences but with no value hierarchy, and could also reflect the sense that though I have been translating for over a decade, I feel like I’m still right at the beginning in terms of figuring out why I became a literary translator and the creative and financial challenges literary translators face. It also meant I could map these various spaces – art fair, book fair, fun fair – onto one another, imagining a blurred triangulated space that represented the confusing and illusionary nature of such places: professional/fun, serious/absurd, art/capitalism, familiar/disorientating, open/out of bounds. It also broke the temptation of chronology – both Fair and Goblinhood inhabit a space where time is simultaneous – past, present and future all experienced at once, something I know I feel every day.
What we set out to write isn’t always what we end up writing.
I actually wrote Goblinhood: Goblinhood as a Mode as a grimy slimy byproduct of writing the academic thesis counterpart to Fair. My academic writing was (as it had to be) scrutinised, my perma-bad grammar flagged, my jumps in thought and logic cordoned off. I felt like I was second-guessing what had always been an intuitive practice for me, and in response I wanted to write in a flurry, impatient way, about apparently trivial things, full of jumps and asides and dead ends. In my long periods of procrastination from researching, I sank more and more into re-watching films and TV shows, all the while locked into a researcher frame of mind. My brain wanted to do comparative and socio-cultural analysis, so it gobbled up social media and ‘bad’ TV, ‘low’ culture rather than ‘high culture’.
I had originally imagined its form to be a kind of rock opera or libretto, where all of the references and figures from my goblin research would be characters and cameos in a quest, either with new lyrics to my favourite goblinesque punk songs or told only in song. I felt, however, like this would inhibit my ability to include as much as I wanted – I would be forever personifying objects and cultural artefacts before they would waddle off moments after; it wasn’t the right vessel for the thousands of drops that make up the book. But the poems are the legacy of this earlier concept. They mirror the essays’ more subtle and winding quest narrative, while also creating a dynamicism in the form – they allow pauses and breaths between the frantic essays. The poems also create a key for ‘my’ state of mind in the essays, giving a kind of explanation as to why the ‘I’ of the essays is meandering through a sea of cultural references.
Goblinhood was never intended to be a memoir at all, not to begin with, and Fair certainly wasn’t going to go so deeply into exploring my sense of self. I thought I was writing about how my childhood experiences and interests had set off a fascination with writing and languages, and how my favourite childhood film, Labyrinth – along with other programmes and films I’d watched as a child – had taught me lessons about good and evil, power dynamics, and fairness as an adult. But what we set out to write isn’t always what we end up writing, at some point the writing takes over, and in the case of both these books, there was a pool of repressed memories and feelings that I inadvertently tapped once I loosened a few bricks in the oubliette of the labyrinth, the trapdoor in the basement.
Politics runs through everything.
This dormant pool flooded these books, it used my writing as a way out, attaching itself to my thoughts and memories until they couldn’t be detached, re-forgotten or discarded. It suddenly felt like the writing would be incomplete without including what I had learned through finally engaging with my often complicated and chaotic childhood, which had snuck over the threshold of these writing projects. But I didn’t include everything. The first response was to put everything in, before experimenting with the right balance, where the connections and details made sense and felt helpful or revelatory. Writing is always playing with balance, and it’s even more important when trying to judge how much and in what way we want to include personal information – we change as people over time and, who knows, perhaps in the future I might regret or cringe at what I ended up including. But the fact remains that I included what felt necessary for the writing, for the potential reader.
And it wasn’t only my childhood, but other pressing things that forced their way into the writing, simply by dint of being a constant tone droning in the background of everything I’m doing and thinking about – climate crisis, colonisation, labour rights and human rights. I couldn’t just write a book about goblins, about the art of translation – politics runs through everything, and demanded to run through the writing. This is also how these books connect with my previous works, my novel Vehicle, my long poem Dust Sucker: our preoccupations and what is pressing sometimes cannot be paused, even for the duration of a story, of a piece of writing. Are they also Hastings memoirs? Nature memoirs? Immigration memoirs? Working-class memoirs? Anti-memoirs? I couldn’t help but make them all these things at once.
Perhaps from my background as a literary translator where I know that there can be many different ‘correct’ translations of the same text, I think that we each have not only multiple stories we can tell about our lives, but many forms for them, too. While Goblinhood is viewing my life through the goblin lens, and Fair through a literary translation lens, these are only two perspectives on my life. Choosing one thread or theme for a memoir can be a fruitful constraint – it sets the parameters, and instead of trying to include everything, you try and exhaust one facet of who you are. We’re also completely in control of where the story begins and ends, the order of the story, how certain things are prioritised and homed in on, we do have that agency, and maybe experimentation helps us to have that agency.
Though these memoirs are very different in scope and form and voice they are knitted together by design. The subject matter and focus might be very different, but I think that you can tell that the writer of a book about a figure of mischief wrote Fair and that you will be able to see that a literary translator interested in language wrote Goblinhood. The different sides of me purposefully bleed across these books, all my books, because it’s important to me to show that this TV obsessed goblin translates award winning writers, and this poet and experimental writer is fixated on snacks and trash. It’s fundamentally my inability and active rejection to write a ‘straight-up’ memoir that binds them. Even writing a memoir (let alone two, or theoretically more) by age 37 and as someone perhaps not deemed worthy of one, cracks open the why and when of writing memoir, and was part of the experiment from the beginning – how can someone like me, someone like you, write about undervalued subjects like pop culture and literary translation in a way that would interest someone else. The results: bring some life into them.
I like to imagine someone reading both of these books simultaneously, maybe even all of my books all at once, and making a conclusion about who I am. I’m tempted to say: you’ll never capture me! But then again, it’s possible that my fullest self can only be found in my writing, and that’s why I want to be read. Incidentally, a singular voice is not a priority for me as a writer; though I adopt many voices, I believe you can always tell that it’s me. That, too, is part of the experiment – I don’t want to be represented by only one voice in writing, where’s the fun – and nuance – in that? One voice, one form, cannot contain me, are not the authentic me, the real story. You’ll find me in the space between, within the combination of multiple forms, inside that lack of wanting to be confined.
What writing these books gave me alongside the chance to be a complex person on the page, was, dare I say, most importantly (from someone who often says the best part of translating literature is befriending authors) the impetus to make changes for the next phase of my life, to seek out counselling, to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and to step out of the (necessary) period of isolation writing them required. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have been able to develop and finish these books without the counselling services provided by Wellbeing in the Arts, and without my (sometimes underused) support network. These books that defy rigid forms aren’t simply a form of legacy, but hopefully promises to myself that I can break out of the usual patterns and habits and old chronicles in my actual life and work. That will be the real experiment.
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Image credit: Robin Silas Christian.
Jen Calleja is the author of Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (Rough Trade Books), Vehicle (Prototype), Dust Sucker (Makina Books) and the forthcoming translator memoir, Fair (Prototype, 2025). She has been shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize and longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experiment in Text, and her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, The White Review, Wasafiri and elsewhere. She has translated nearly twenty works of German-language literature and has been shortlisted for many prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize 2019. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, a small press dedicated to Maltese literature in English and English translation.
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