Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to award–winning novelist Jenn Ashworth. 20/04/2022
Jenn is an award–winning novelist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Professor of writing at Lancaster University.
In this episode she speaks about her childhood Mormonism, class, the turbulence around identity and free speech on university campuses, and how society is thinking more about trauma and what that might mean.
You can read a full transcript here:
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the stories that shape us, and how we could grow in empathy and understanding in our very divided moment. Each episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform, from politicians to poets, Archbishops to academics, journalists to entrepreneurs. Turns out that there are not many professions that begin with a J. I try and host a conversation that gets beyond the usual positioning or promotional interview and dig into the real person in front of me. We try and create space for deeper self–reflection than we often have time for in our hustle ridden society. I believe, and this podcast has reinforced the belief, that everyone is more interesting and more complicated than they seem. And that paying attention to people in all their complexity and fragility is a vital discipline for democracy. It’s a spiritual discipline, it helps us remain fully human and treat other people as fully human, in an age where a range of factors are forming us in the opposite direction. Gosh, that’s a manifesto. And it makes it all sound really heavy. But it’s also just an opportunity for me to have a lovely chat with someone interesting, and experience that deeply pleasurable sensation of my brain having a new thought, or seeing things in a new way.
As usual, we massively value it when you leave a review, or a rating or send an episode to a friend. Loads of listeners come via personal recommendations, or actually because a guest has shared the podcast and said that it’s been a really life giving experience to them, which just warms my heart.
In this episode, I spoke with Jenn Ashworth. Jenn is an award winning novelist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Professor of writing at Lancaster University. We spoke about – well, I actually felt like we spoke about everything. But some of the things we spoke about were her childhood in Mormonism, a really troubled and difficult childhood and teenage years. We spoke about class, we spoke about the turbulence around identity and free speech on university campuses at the moment, we spoke about trauma and how society is thinking more about trauma and speaking about trauma and what that might mean. And much else besides. It was a really rich and enjoyable conversation. And I hope you enjoy listening.
So I ask guests what is sacred to them, if they have a sacred value, really as a way of just hopefully gifting a different type of reflection that is normally asked of us. So you can reject the premise, you can take it in a different direction. But having had a little bit of time, did you have a sense of what bubbled up? What might be sacred to you, or whatever your equivalent, whatever language feels right for you?
Jenn
I guess my absolute first gut response was something to do with curiosity. And it seems when I look back over the way that I’ve lived my life, when I’ve been happy, when I’ve been doing good work, when the harm that I’ve been doing to others has been reasonably limited, it seems I’ve been guided by curiosity. And I guess under curiosity, there were a couple of other values, things that made curiosity possible. And for me what makes curiosity possible? First is doubt, I cherish doubt, or cherish the discomfort of not knowing, not trusting, I was thinking about Flannery O’Connor where she talks, she asks in ‘The habit of being’, how comfortable are you with walking in the dark, being in the dark. Being uncomfortable walking in the dark is one of the things that makes curiosity possible. And the other for me is gratitude. Maybe we’ll come back to gratitude later, but it gets a bad rap, it is not very cool. And there’s something about gratitude that I think makes us incredibly vulnerable. We have to say, here is this thing that I need, that I cannot do for myself, that I need something or someone else to give me, it requires us to be connected to the world and open to the world and to other people. And I think also a practice of gratitude kind of, it puts us right size. It reminds us of our limits, as does curiosity. Loads of other things I could say that my, I don’t know, act as nice introductions for things that we might talk about – our profit and the profit of others, would have allowed me to advertise myself in some way. But actually, when I am feeling offended, or impinged upon or depressed or oppressed, it is generally because my capacity to be curious, to have space, to honour doubt, and to practice gratitude have been, I guess, prevented or constricted in some way
Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s so powerful. Also, I love how you can’t help but be mentally structuring the conversation in your head, what thread do we plant here that I can reference back as an echo. And that’s why you’re amazing.
Jenn
I am a control freak.
Elizabeth
Possibly both again. I want to hear about your childhood. And there’s lots that we can talk about here. But I try and at least frame it to begin with as big Ideas: philosophical, religious, political, that have been really formative to you in your childhood, so paint us a bit of a picture of Jenn growing up in Preston?
Jenn
Yeah, I was born in Preston, in the early 80s. Very ordinary, working class family, my dad worked as a machinist in a factory that made paper and my mom did various things, a playgroup, and she did some cleaning jobs, she works in a primary school now. So really, really ordinary background. The thing that maybe wasn’t ordinary, that was extremely formative was that I was also raised a Mormon. And I guess for those of you who don’t know, Mormonism is a kind of Christianity. It’s a very high demand group is one way of putting it. I think, if there is a God, she can find you anywhere. And yet, I would find it difficult to grow well in that environment. And so it was an environment characterised for me, in my experience, very much by obedience, very works based. It was very patriarchal. And there was a kind of white supremacy to it that was and is very troubling, homophobia. It was not the best of what Christianity has to offer. And yet it was the soil that grew me. It was the air I was breathing, it absolutely formed me. It gave me an appetite and a curiosity about faith, and that has never left me.
Elizabeth
A lot of Scripture, right? You write about…memorising in a way that I have never done.
Jenn
Yeah, I went to seminary which, for Mormons what that means is it’s a class that children go to. And you go through the books of Scripture, you spend four years doing it, you spend a year on the New Testament, a year on the Old Testament, a year on the Book of Mormon, which is an extra book of Scripture. And maybe we’ll get onto that, and a year on the Doctrine and Covenants, which are the writings of one of the first prophets, Joseph Smith. I skived, and failed cemetery. I skived, and failed cemetery. Oh, what an amazing, amazing Freud slip, keep that in, don’t edit it out. I skived and failed. seminary, I was not a good seminary student. But part of what we did was learn scripture off by heart, which certainly came in useful. And there was a lot of public speaking involved as well. And there was a monthly, it was called a fast and testimony meeting. And during that meeting, which was held on a Sunday, anyone could come to the pulpit, and speak about anything, women, children, anyone, and there was a pattern to it. And it was normally a testimony about how God had moved in your life that week. But I remember, even as a very young child, listening to these testimonies, and giving them and being enormously interested in what it is we do when we try and explain ourselves or advertise ourselves, or confess or sell ourselves in a particular way. What is it about first person spiritual autobiography, and I learned that as a kid, super interested.
Elizabeth
What – the language is also insufficient, but God, the divine, the thing beyond? Was that a thing? Did you have a presence? Did you have a belief, was it just a set of practices that you’re going through, because you’ve been told to?
Jenn
It was certainly a set of practices, and I was rewarded for obedience, with a great deal of warmth and approval, which I enjoyed. It was a community that could be, when you were obedient, very nourishing, there are people who I grew up with who are like family, who’ve known me since I was born, people who have grown, you know, grown up with as if they were siblings, and all of that was valuable in a certain way. But no, I did not have any experience of something beyond because I was so focused on behaviour, on getting it right. And that the standard for behaviour was so high and so invasive, in every aspect of life, even as a teenager, I was interviewed about sex, about my sex life and not to protect me but to assess me, it was a kind of surveillance. So what that did was just put all the effort, all the emphasis on behaviour. So I got really good at pretending. And I was a very, very anxious, very depressed child and teenager, I might have been any way, I might have been no matter what kind of environment I was brought up in. But that was not an environment that made it easy for me to find any kind of connection with anything that was beyond. But I saw that some people did, or I saw that they said that they did. And that intrigued me, the possibility of it was always there. And I found that really intriguing. And I guess this leads me on to the other thing that has influenced me and formed me. I said I was very anxious and I was very depressed. By the time I was 12, I was refusing to go to school. My hair was falling out in handfuls. I was very, very distressed and I was very aggressive. I was very angry. I was refusing to go to school. I was medicated before I was 12. There were education, welfare officers, school psychologists, and psychiatrists, all kinds of things. And from that point until, really, until I went to university at 18, I was given a series of diagnoses, I was medicalized, who I was, and my experience was named for me through medicine. And that’s not something that’s useful for me anymore. That’s something that I had to fight my way out of. As I did that kind of religious community as well. But it was definitely really the words that we use to describe distress and suffering, and whether where they come from, and who gets to decide what they are, have been of interest to me my whole life. And that’s one of the reasons why.
Elizabeth
And there’s another thread that I’m aware, I don’t want to kind of press on a sore place. But my reading of your memoir is that your dad, who wasn’t initially a Mormon, and then it sounds like converted, was, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, I was reading him as abusive. But do you mind saying a little bit about him?
Jenn
No, I don’t. I mean, my dad is alive. And I think it would be unfair to tell his story. But I can certainly say that my experience was that for a lot of my childhood, I felt afraid. And I felt shamed. I was subjected to violence, I was subjected to emotional violence, physical violence, and I witnessed that as well. And it was, yeah, I guess, if that’s the way that you are brought up, the difference is it’s not something that happens to you. It’s something that makes you, it forms you. And so part of becoming an adult for me was in thinking about these quite violent religious systems, or family systems or systems of medicine that had formed me, almost against my will, and what was I going to be aside from that? What languages would I find to describe my own experience, aside from the ones that not that I’d been offered, but that had been inflicted on me by others
Elizabeth
And you write in your memoir about, you mentioned that early kind of encounter with memorising scripture in the sense that Mormonism is a very kind of literary, or definitely word based culture, which encourages journaling. It sounds like writing your experience was something that started very young.
Jenn
Yeah, yeah. And there were gifts of my childhood as well as difficulties. Mormons are encouraged to keep journals, to keep spiritual autobiographies. They’re encouraged to read, they’re encouraged to create texts and share them with other people, to share their family histories with each other, their testimonies with each other. Mormonism has got its own publishing company, which, you know, is this huge industry of stories by and about Mormons. So the idea that I could tell a story about my own life, and that that would be important, and that that would have value to someone else, that was always expected. And that was something that applied to women and girls, as well as to men, which I was really grateful for. I mean, the pressures that are put on the way that story is told, and how it should be told, are perhaps not ones that were particularly fertile for me. But the idea that words were powerful, that, you know, Joseph Smith, the first prophet, the founder of Mormonism, he was a prophet, or he was a novelist, or he was both and I find that idea of the anarchic, disruptive potential of stories and words. I was gifted it as a child by Mormonism, and I am grateful for that.
Elizabeth
Yeah. One of the many astonishing things about your story is after really significant, and again, the language is challenging, but for shorthand, significant mental health challenges, and then years and years and years of school refusal, which it sounds like you spent mainly in the library, you got into Cambridge, and were in a completely different world. What was the sort of emotional landing like in that transition?
Jenn
Yeah, I, you know, when you asked me to think about what these formative influences were of my growing up years, and I thought first about Mormonism, and then I thought about medicine, psychiatric medicine, and the third one was about class. I don’t suppose there are lots and lots of people who have experience of people–referral units and of residential and child psychiatric care and local authority children’s homes, these types of institutions, but they do tend to be an interesting preparation for the institution as a Cambridge college and you know that the idea of existing inside someone else’s structure was familiar to me. I read a really great book that that you probably are familiar with, this is Lindsey Hanley’s ‘Respectable’. And she writes about growing up in the Midlands, kind of respectful working class and then going to uni, and becoming different, becoming middle class, but not quite and never being working class again. And that idea of moving, of being between, of not quite belonging, that is something that I felt as a child where I was never a kind of ordinary working class kid, because I was a Mormon. And something I felt as a Mormon, because I was always kind of faking it. And something I felt at Cambridge as well. These are gifts for a writer – to move through all these spaces and belong so uncomfortably to them.
Elizabeth
You have this great phrase, when you say when you got to university, people asked you if you had a lot of other books in your house?
Jenn
They did. They asked me that. Yeah, quite a lot. I have a really nice memory of someone telling me that in the north, they sold lots more dog food than there were actual dogs, and looking at me meaningfully. And it was like, well, I didn’t know at the time, but many months later, I realised that they were implying that we ate it. Which do you know, these people who I was in touch with, who I was living with, they were exactly the same as me, which were bookish, bright, 18 year olds. If you’re not allowed to be a bit of a wally at 18, then when are you really, so I kind of don’t hold too many grudges about that. And I became aware that I was working class and that I was Northern in a way that I hadn’t before. I hadn’t had this kind of huge class awareness or a huge awareness of a regional identity until I went away to university. And I could say that I went to Newnham College, it was a women’s college, it was one of the first places that I had felt safe. It was one of the first places where I had been able to really have what I wanted, which was a library ticket and to be left alone. You know, so both of their stories are true. Both of them are true. Are you weeping? Sorry. I love that
Elizabeth
You as an 18 year old who’s never felt safe feels worth crying for me.
Jenn
I was aware at 18 as this working class kid, I knew that the story I was supposed to tell about Cambridge was one of inhospitability, to that working class self. And I do have stories like that, and I can tell stories like that. But there was another story there that was true as well, which is I was surrounded by women who wanted to read, who thought reading was important, and who did not use language of religious obedience or medical diagnosis to describe me. And that was, I think I bloomed, I think I flourished there, despite everything.
Elizabeth
And I want to just kind of dig a little deeper in that thread a little bit about class, and it’s one of the divides or the tribal framings that we use in our common life. But I didn’t know if you’d agree with this. But it feels to me in a moment of heightened, much more increased awareness of identity and group based identity and forms of injustice and conversations about these differences, class still doesn’t seem very high up that list. What do you think’s going on there? Well, you can disagree with me obviously.
Jenn
No, I do, I agree with you, which is not to say I think it necessarily needs to be higher up the list. And I wonder if it’s because it’s so unbelievably difficult to define, and that our attempts to define it tend to limit or offend people. I don’t know what I am anymore. I have a spare bedroom, I can work at home if I want. I had a miserable lockdown. I also had a very, very comfortable one. And I don’t even know if I pass as middle class. I suspect not. I’m a university…
Elizabeth
Imaginary police that we all think exist because we’re British people. And it’s in our DNA
Jenn
I don’t know, I don’t know how I am read. I know that my kids are middle class and my parents aren’t. And that that is a really interesting place to be in. And I try and teach my kids that they’re lucky. But I was taught that as well. You know, don’t all parents try and teach their kids that? So yeah, I don’t think we do particularly well on our conversations around class. But I think the idea that our identities are intersectional, and that we can claim different identities as we progress through life, we can put them down, they can claim us, it can be such a fluid thing, that to me feels like a more important thing to embrace and to get to grips with than trying to peg me or someone else on a scale, which is partly to do with education, partly to do with money, and sort of not either.
Elizabeth
So you have this kind of double experience of liberation and inhospitable–ness in Cambridge. But obviously it was effective in lots of ways, because in your 20s, you started writing and publishing novels, that’s a very shorthand way of saying something that was really… did you know, were you like this is what I’m going to do? And I’m going to write novels and, and the expectation that that is something that you could do, or was it a slow, finding your calling in the world and the confidence to seek that?
Jenn
I wanted to be a writer from when I was tiny. And I asked for a typewriter when I was three. I know that working class kids from my background aren’t supposed to become novelists. But I didn’t know that until I’d already decided I was going to be one. It hadn’t occurred to me that not knowing any novelists, not knowing how books were made, having no idea about the publishing industry, no connections, never visited London until I think I was about 19. It did not occur to me that these could possibly be obstacles. It was the sheer arrogance of what happens when you raise a child in Mormonism. Telling that child, their job is to evolve to become a god. Of course, they’re going to come up with some crazy ambition to be a novelist! So I did. But I also wanted to be a murder detective or a pathologist. I was quite keen on that. And if there is a doppelganger or a Jenn clone out there, in another world doing that job, I would be so thrilled. So thrilled.
Elizabeth
Yes, the gory and the dark. Horror is definitely a thread in your aesthetic that feels like it’s stayed. I love this idea. That’s the carrier side hustle. That’s just coming through.
Elizabeth
You wrote several critically acclaimed novels, hailed as a, you know, up and coming, bright young writer, and then had this very traumatic experience of labour. I find it hard, as I was reading it, I found it horrifyingly familiar how normal it seems of my friends who’ve had children. I was like, Well, yeah, Hannah and Jan and Rachel, they all nearly died too. But your memoir ‘Notes made while falling’ is really this process of trying to process the…And again, I don’t want to label you and you’ve helpfully kind of raised questions about psychiatric labelling. But you use various word, forms of words…How would you describe the kind of post period of that traumatic day?
Jenn
So after the childhood that I’d had, I went to university, I shrugged off these different identities that I had been given by medicine. I was no longer an imposter. I was no longer depressed. I was no longer a godless rebel. I was no longer anxious, delusional, personality disordered. Instead, what I was going to be was successful. So I went and got my degree and started publishing novels and I settled down. I became a functioning adult, that was the plan. And then I had a baby. And during the getting out of the baby, I like to call it the great disemboweling of 2010. There was a terrible – not a mistake. The C section went wrong. I was hemorrhaging, I needed to have a blood transfusion. And general anesthesia wore off while I was been operated on, and I had anaphylaxis as a result of the blood transfusion. So it was a shit show. And what happened as a result of that was all this armour that I had put on, being okay, being successful, being good at stuff, it just broke, it just broke. And there are various words and diagnoses that other people gave me for that time. But I was, I was in distress, I will say, I was in great, deep distress, it affected my relationships, and it affected my work. It affected my sense of who I was in the world. And the stories I was able to tell about myself, what I felt was real, what I felt wasn’t real. There was not one bit of my life that was not damaged by my distress, and how I acted because I was distressed. And it was, it was such a shock, because I thought I was okay. And I was doing well. And, and since then talking to other people, what I have, what I’ve come to know is that that’s quite a common story, that people can spend so much effort in outrunning difficulty that by the time they get to their safe place, a little tap on the armour can explode them. And that is what happened.
Elizabeth
Having read your memoir, I went and did a Google Ngram on the word trauma. Because what you’re doing so beautifully is wrestling with the difficulty of writing about trauma. And I kind of want to come back to trauma in the public conversation and how we’re doing with it. But I’d love you to speak just a bit more personally about the questions that memoir’s asking, which is, what is wrong with me, but also, the fact that that experience made it very difficult for you to write fiction, and you start asking what is wrong with a novel? Why can’t this hold it? Unpack that kind of journey for you as just almost professionally, what was affecting that?
Jenn
Yeah, you have identified the two questions that powered ‘Notes made while falling’. And one was, yeah, what’s wrong with me, and I had been told in various ways what was wrong with me my entire life. And I had decided that none of those words or labels suited me. And yet, there was something wrong. And I was still in distress, I was still suffering, what was wrong with me. And the way that I had learned as a fairly competent adult to meet the world and to sit with my questions was through writing. And so I tried to address the question of what was wrong with me through fiction, most of my novels, you know, they’re certainly not autobiographical, but they have an impulse that comes from my experience. I have experienced loneliness. And from that, I wrote ‘A kind of intimacy’, even though there’s nothing autobiographical about that book. I’ve experienced what it is to try and function in a family in a tight religious community. And so I wrote ‘The Friday gospels’, even though that book is not autobiographical. And I thought, you know, what’s wrong with me? What’s happened to me? What’s wrong with me after I’ve had a baby? The baby’s okay. I’m okay. I’m physically okay. Why am I not okay? And I thought I would answer that through fiction. And I started trying to write a novel about a woman who was a university lecturer, and she was going mad, and she was getting mixed up between lecturing, and writing fiction and praying. That was the plan. I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea for a novel, but I just couldn’t do it. And so my next question was, what is wrong with the novel, and there was something that the novel or the novel as I understood it at that time, that it seemed to require a certainty of the way that time worked, and cause and effect and plot, and the way that people would respond to each other into events. And that people would learn something, and there would be change across time, and there would be some kind of resolution. And I don’t mean to critique these kinds of novels. I love those kinds of novels. And I really wanted to write one, but I couldn’t. And part of the question was, okay, there’s definitely something wrong with me. But is there also something wrong with a novel that I cannot address this question in fiction, and so that led to ‘Notes made while falling’, which is partly a memoir, and it partly is a book that retains some of the relics of that original novel, which was a woman lecturing and writing fiction and praying, it seems to be haunted by those modes of speaking to a reader or to someone else. I don’t think I came up with a good answer, though. Maybe this is the point in the podcast where I’m supposed to dispense it. I just didn’t, I didn’t come up with my answer to what was wrong with me or the novel.
Elizabeth
I don’t require that.
Jenn
I guess that’s what I learned through writing those essays that what I wanted was to find the answer to those questions. And I didn’t. And I was, not only did the birth experience completely knock me away from a plan for my life, that that this is how I was going to live my life, and then I couldn’t. I had a plan for the book. And I just couldn’t, couldn’t do it. But what actually happened in my life and in the book and in the writing that I didn’t plan was really so much more interesting.
Elizabeth
Yeah. Back to my Google Ngram, which I hope is relevant. Trauma. So yeah, woundedness. So it’s not – it doesn’t really show up in books until the 1940s. And then it does so steady, and then huge spike in the 80s, which I am curious about, and I will go work out what’s going on there. And then sort of steadily going up, although it only goes up to 2019. And my instinct would be it would be like almost vertical for the last two or three years. It feels certainly like five years ago, I associated the word with soldiers. And we mainly thought about trauma in a warfare context. And possibly in, well definitely, but not in the public evaluation, kind of situations of abuse. Abusive childhoods, But our concept of it has broadened, this understanding that traumatic events in lives away from the battlefield can have these far reaching impacts. I’d love to just hear your thoughts about that. How useful it is, how do we navigate that ongoing conversation really well in ways that is as kind of helpful and healing across our divides as possible?
Jenn
I think people are more willing to talk about their woundedness, their suffering, and they are, there’s also a discomfort. When we talk about checking our privilege, I think sometimes what people mean is, am I allowed to be suffering the way that I really am? There’s a book, an essay, by Zadie Smith called ‘Suffering like Mel Gibson’ and she talks about her kind of privilege and lockdown. And, and, you know, this tendency we had during lockdown to almost emphasise, ‘okay, I’m not working on the front line, you know, my parents haven’t died from COVID, I still got my job, dot, dot, dot.’ All of that is true. And it is right that we – I hate the phrase ‘check our privileges’, right that we be grateful, it is right that we understand where we’ve been lucky through no effort or design of our own. But none of that cures you of suffering. It just doesn’t and Zadie Smith’s essay, she has this phrase called ‘the suffering is precisely designed’. And it kind of doesn’t matter if you’re rich, or live in, you know, this kind of gilded existence, we’re not all going to have the same kinds of suffering. This this woundedness. This is where the word trauma comes from – woundedness. I’m not sure it’s helpful to think about it is something that happens to you. And that if you have certain kinds of privileges, you’re protected from that thing happening to you. Not all of us are going to be raped, not all of us are going to be subject to racist abuse, not all of us are going to have exactly the same kinds of wounding. But I do think – there’s a Buddhist word Dukkha I think is really, really helpful here. It’s quite blandly translated as unsatisfactoriness. I would say like that the Jenn translation of that would be like the crushing soul, deep, relentless agony of the world, and other people and we ourselves not being the way that we want it. And it does not matter what your privilege is, that is in my view absolutely inescapably true. I don’t have – trauma, suffering, Dukkha, agony is the word for it…
Elizabeth
My sort of shorthand to myself sometimes is ‘existential queasiness’. Like being alive is hard today. As well as writing somehow and parenting you also teach at a university. And we often characterise universities, and I think for some good reason, as almost like ground zero of the culture wars, or this sense of like, something is quaking in how we see each other, deal with each other, name ourselves, name other people, understand the world. What’s been your experience of that?
Jenn
What I have noticed, working in universities, working in our university for the last 10 years, is a real awareness of the power of speech and conversation. And so we’ve got two things happening in universities at the moment. And one is the idea of no platform and that the Students Union or the university itself will deprive a group or an individual or an organisation the right to speak formally or informally at the university, and whether this is censorship or not. And this is an idea that has been addressed in various kind of corners of our media, and certainly the right wing press and the government are characterising this as an attack on freedom of speech. And something else that’s happening, you know, and this is kind of the big picture life on campus, the bigger conversations on campus. What I experience also, daily in the classroom, in the creative writing workshop, is the idea of the content note, or the trigger warning, a way of containing or excluding or managing conversations in the workshop. And I think the first thing that I would say is that what I know is that in universities, there’s an absolute epidemic of we might call it mental ill health, we might call it distress amongst young people, that is systemic, it is overwhelming to staff and to the NHS, and that the students who are in distress and who are ill, and who are unsupported, that is so much more of a threat to their ability to speak freely, to speak boldly, to do good work, to discover what needs to be discovered than a content note on a text. And I would also say in terms of the structure of academia, the precarity for early career researchers, the difficulty of getting a job, the way that PhD students are exploited by the system for years before they can get those kind of full time academic jobs, that economic precarity is so much more of a threat to academic freedom and free speech than no platforming. And, you know, that is a little bit of a rant. But I think that it’s really important that that’s not forgotten in this conversation. But in terms of how to do those conversations, it seems to me that the students who call for controversial speakers to be no–platformed and the students who are asking for content notes on controversial material in the workshop, what they are asking for is safety. And it seems to me that that it is our duty, my duty as someone who is in that community and has accrued relative privilege, to listen to that. You asked me in preparation for our conversation what I thought we might do differently or speak to each other differently across difference. And I thought about these situations and I thought about being a teacher and as someone who has responsibility, as someone who can talk at length like I’m doing now and have people pay attention, that what my job is, is to listen. And I thought a bit more about how teachers and how academics often listen. And that there’s sometimes listening with an agenda, there’s a kind of Socratic questioning going on, some ironic questioning where I will prove to you by the mode of my listening where you are wrong, or where you need to think a bit better. And I’m actually wondering if I could achieve an agenda–less listening that makes room, makes space for someone else, and gets out of the way. You listen to someone, you’re going to give them shelter. Which is not to say that I can listen to everybody, and the students who are calling for certain voices to be no platformed, or certain materials to be handled very carefully in the classroom, I think what they’re saying is, we can’t listen to that right now. And I know that when I reach, when I come into contact with something that I cannot listen to, my next job is to go inside and listen to me, listen to myself, to have some kind of inner hospitality. What is it that’s going on in me that I can’t hear? And, and there’s something to do with this that I think, you know, it’s so delicate. And it’s so difficult, that kind of big sound bitey rules about no platforming and no content notes, and the way that that’s conveyed in the press, it will never capture that kind of gentle intimacy of what it is to be in a classroom with students and try and get out of the way and make some space for them and to try and listen to them and to try and create the kind of conditions that I had when I was listened to. And I have been listened to very well in lots of different places. But especially in classrooms over the years. I don’t know if that gets anywhere near it, but there’s something about conversation where we think it’s about talking. And I don’t know if we’re good at talking, I’ve just said a lot, but I think listening makes us so vulnerable. And it requires such a lot of care and love and attention. And also requires us to search out the quiet speaker. The one who’s not in the news, the one who’s not loud, the one who’s not fashionable, who’s not attractive. And to listen, listen to that person. It’s a searching out.
Elizabeth
Yeah, yeah, the more I do this podcast, the more I realise how much fear is driving these divisions, how much actually, one group is scared of the other group and feel delegitimized and dishonoured or disempowered and not safe. I wish I’d screenshotted it, there was a little thing on Twitter earlier, which was a kind of older woman saying, you know, ‘these younger feminists don’t understand that a woman with children in her 40s and 50s could be politically active and they don’t know any of us. They don’t care about any of us’ and then a younger feminists saying ‘these older feminists, they keep trying to de–woman us by saying that if we don’t have children, then our feminist voices…’ and it was just this painful little microcosm of two groups. Just ‘What about me? What about me, like, see me, see me, take me seriously.’ But the only way to express that being to attack the other group
Jenn
And it matters and you know, when people use phrases like, you know, check your privilege, it can often get people’s backs up, it gets my back up, but I try and inwardly translate it, and when I am being asked to check my privilege, I try and kind of run that through the Jenn Google Translate. And so what I hear is, attend to where you have been listened to. Where and in which conversations and in which settings. My words matter, they carry weight, they cause change. We don’t all have the same answer to that question. Some of us don’t have an answer to that question. We don’t have that experience, but I certainly do. And because I have had that experience, I have the bandwidth to make space and to listen to other people. And not always – there are some types of discourse, to use an ugly word, that I can’t listen to because it injures me. And my priority in that moment is to listen to the part of me that is injured, and to care for that part. And to protect that part, and that is more important. But where I can listen, I want to. And that, to me, is such a tiny thing that I have to offer there. But that is it really, to search.
Elizabeth
We started talking about your childhood Mormonism. And the end of your memoir is a kind of extended meditation on prayer. I can see reading lots of my favourite theologically inclined women. If it’s not too private, where do you sit on religion, spirituality, God, these ineffable things now?
Jenn 1:12:53
I bury…Maybe it brings us back to this question, that those words that I brought in at the beginning. I have a very, very precious and cherished doubt. And so I would not call myself an atheist but I certainly do not belong to any kind of church or religious group. And I am attracted to thinkers who have quite troubled relationships with religious groups. So I’ve been reading a lot of Iris Murdoch, who was kind of fascinated by Christianity, couldn’t write about God, called it good. And really quite liked Christianity apart from miracles, and the action of the divine in the world. She’s a very contradictory person. Reading Kierkegaard, who, yeah, a kind of great religious thinker who I think really, really pissed off, deliberately kind of spent his life trying to piss off the institutional church where he lived. Simone Weil, a Jewish woman who kind of refused to convert to Catholicism, even though I think she was probably a very good Catholic in lots of ways. And so I’m interested in these very troubled relationships with institutions. I don’t know if my upbringing means that I will always be allergic to churches and to religious ritual, I think it would be a shame if it was always like that, but that is how it is now. And I feel still quite spiritually injured in that way. And in terms of prayer, so I used to think that prayer was like, sort of like writing a letter to Santa Claus, or maybe learning precisely how to operate a fruit machine so the money had come out of the bottom. I wish it was like that, and where I am with that now, I do have kind of various spiritual practices and one of them is meditating. And what I do when I meditate is that I sit really quiet. And I listen as well as possible. And often what I hear is the like, endless, miserable churn of my own ego, and sometimes that is quiet. When I am in that quiet place, it’s such a relief not to be the centre of the world. And such a delight. I would like more experiences like that. It is such a kind of tiny childlike, what do they call it in the Bible, mustard seed. But that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. And, you know, yeah, I’m alive and functioning fairly well.
Elizabeth
Jenn Ashworth thank you so much.
Jenn
It’s been – just thank you. No, thank you for the invitation. It’s been so much fun and how rare it is to be able to have conversations about such tender and important subjects and it not be like Twitter beef, or having a row with someone mad on Facebook or trying to convert someone or, you know. I felt my vulnerability in this conversation, but yours too, and that’s been really lovely.
Elizabeth
Well, I knew I was gonna find Jenn extremely interesting to talk to and I did. Her sacred values I thought were very powerful. One day, I’d love to get someone to illustrate all the different things that people have said are sacred, maybe I’ll have a chat with Emily Downe, who’s the Theos Illustrator and amazing at these things. Jenn said curiosity, doubt and gratitude. And they are all wonderful, it was actually gratitude that she really helped me understand at a deeper level, because we talk a lot about gratitude and gratitude journals and all those kinds of things. But she talked about gratitude in relation to vulnerability, that you actually can’t be grateful unless you acknowledge your interdependence, unless you acknowledge that you need something that you couldn’t do for yourself, or you receive something that you couldn’t get for yourself. Or maybe that you could get for yourself, but you didn’t have to. And I think a lot about the sort of idea of gift in theology, it’s a really deep sort of theological anthropology, that understanding that life is a gift and that we are most ourselves when we give of ourselves, not in transactional, individualistic ways, but in more of a dance, of giving and receiving. And that connected into gratitude and vulnerability in a new way for me.
Mormonism, what an interesting and different story Jenn has because of that, I would really recommend reading her memoir. It is very powerful. And there just aren’t that many Mormons in the UK. I think she’s the first one I’ve met. And certainly, I can’t think of Mormons in public life. Practising Mormons, at least, in the UK. Maybe I should speak to one, maybe if there’s someone who’s still very much part of that movement and finds it life giving, I’d love to interview them too. Yeah, the strength of the kind of written tradition with Mormonism and how actually that’s a powerfully fertile formation for a writer came through really clearly, as did, of course, a lot of the pain and the control that Jenn experienced.
I really liked what she said about class and Cambridge that she can hold two things in her mind at once, which is maybe kind of entry level for a writer, that it was both incredibly inhospitable because of the fact she was Northern and working class, but also, the first place she felt safe, and they gave her a library ticket and left her alone, which is what she never wanted. I only have several people in my life who that is true of. And I loved it.
She spoke so beautifully about trauma and privilege and suffering, it reminded me of Kate Bowler’s book ‘No cure for being human’, that our – there’s such a childlikeness to our suffering, right? We want it to be acknowledged that we find life hard. And, actually, we can’t cope with that much information about how other people find life hard. Often, it takes a lot of character and a lot of moral muscle to pay attention to how other people find life hard. And to acknowledge both where trauma exists in others and I guess, in ourselves, I’m always reminded of the Stephen Sondheim song from Company the musical just called ‘Being alive’. And it’s about a man or in one of the modern productions, a woman talking about longing to find a romantic partner. One of the lines is to help me survive being alive. The bittersweet, exquisite, painful, wonderful experience of being a human being and the way writing and religion and listening will help us I think. Jenn was so powerful on listening. And I love what she said about checking your privilege, going through her Jenn Google Translate and ending up at attend to where you have been listened to. Attend to where you have been listened to. And acknowledge where people might not have been listened to. And again, just the power of listening to someone. Simone Weil’s thing about attention being the kindest and rarest or most powerful and rarest – I can’t remember that exact quote – but attention being the most rarest and most powerful form of generosity that we can give to people. I’m very stirred. Those are my reflections for today. Thanks for listening.
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