Book Interview: John James on Blues in the Suburbs
JOHN JAMES (alias F.J. Page), is a Warwickshire-born musician, poet, playwright and author. He has always had a vast interest in literature, vintage aesthetics, jazz music and many other bizarre and eccentric things. While he may spend his time teaching and music making, he also finds many moments to sit down and put pen to paper. As well as writing poetry, he has also written radio drama scripts, and novellas of different genres; but mainly focusing on crime thrillers or espionage fuelled plots, as well as the odd journal entry on various topics. He is very excited to have a collection of his work published by such a wonderful company.
Can you tell us a bit about the book you just published with Sunday Mornings at the River?
Blues in the Suburbs is a collection of poems that reflect the blues of life while being city bound. The poems often talk about the sadness connected with losing love - funnily enough, the topic of most decent blues songs. The title comes from the word Blue (often a colour associated with sadness) and the Suburbs reflects that I write in the city.
Sean Felix, author of Did You Even Know I Was Here? adds the following: “Blues in the Suburbs is John James at the crossroads. While I don’t think he sold his soul to the devil like Robert Johnson, he definitely knows the devil in the nooks and crannies of suburban life in our technological age. In the second poem of the volume ‘Alabaster Child (The Alabastard)’ he sets the tone with a lament for the earth that has been covered over by suburban sprawl, and the darkness that grows within its walls, “On tiled floors of three bedroom housed kitchens/where rich men bully their trophy wives/into submission/where their children are carted off by blue-blooded nannies/who hide dark sultry secrets.” The Lynchian conjuration of our secret lives is laid bare.
But while James is a deft observationalist of our suburban nightmare, he is also a wanderer haunted by the memories of a dead revolution. The cycle of poems that make up a central portion of Blues in the Suburbs evokes the freedoms that we need and those that were lost when the revolution and the revolutionaries died. He stakes his raison d’etre, his claim to the artist’s life in his prose poem, ‘Vivre en la Bohême’. “Society makes us the outcasts and as a result us bohemians face a different kind of rhapsody. We paint, write, compose and fight through our struggle to perhaps one day arrive at the glorious highway of acceptance…” But there is the acknowledgement that even though he, and by extension all those who call ourselves artists, those of us that feel, can live this life that sadly “My dear friends, we live in a time when the world is, sadly, no longer in rhyme, and we must pay the price for having fun and being gay.” James vows to fight, as must we all, against this darkness, but it is here that the crossroads rears again.
Poems like ‘2020 Needs Gonzoism’, ‘A Cup of Revolution’, ‘The Writerman’s Bugpowder Binge’, and ‘A Poem to Plath’ among some other poems find us standing at the crossroads with a question to ask ourselves. As we remember the forces of nature that Hunter S. Thompson, Che Guevara, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath were, there is the ready threat that our nostalgia for them will stunt our own growth as artists and revolutionaries in our own right. John James doesn’t come right out and say it, but their evocation mixed with the questions of identity and lost love in beautiful internal rhyme lines like, “Sitting here looking at faded photographs from long ago, wondering where did the time go, wondering whether we really did know what we had was perhaps the best thing in our lives,” from ‘I Wrote a Poem at Three O’Clock in the Morning’ make a person wonder whether it’s better to live in the past rather than make a new present. James leaves it for the reader to ponder which road they will take. Will they turn toward the ease of nostalgia or toward the difficulty of birthing a new present? He answers the question for himself in the Poesque closer ‘That Colloquial Dreamer’, but how will you?”
What inspired you to write this book?
I wrote this book as a way to help people make connections between love loss, music and some other emotions that may help others.
Who are some of your literary or artistic crushes, and did they influence you at all while writing this book?
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney and Dorothy Parker - all of these fantastic, bizarre, broken and beautiful people helped me find my feet and my voice. There are poems in this collection that they directly inspired, and others that use techniques.
What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your books?
I found that I was a miserable sod when it came to talking about love - unsurprising as most of my love experiences haven’t been overly positive.
What is the first book that made you cry?
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Its tag line reads: ‘Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us.’ It is the story of nine-year-old Bruno, who knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.” — Wikipedia and Bol.com
Do you take poetry classes or read books on poetry?
No, but I wish I had done so - my style is rather unusual and magpie-ish in its approach. I am a great believer in the old adage “every great creative mind borrows” and have done so frequently, of course not directly taking words, but adapting them to suit my own purposes.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Don’t stress about sub-context when it comes to writing - think more about what you want to get out of what you write. People may not always enjoy what you write about, but they’ll enjoy your enthusiasm and hopefully support your creativity.
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
Two leather-bound notebooks, a beautiful fountain pen with replaceable cartridges - there is something so lovely about writing with a fountain pen.
What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?
Joan Didion - her work was at first to me very much like reading a history lesson from the writer’s perspective. Since re-reading The White Album, I’ve been most intrigued at how Joan Didion’s approach is actually quite novel. I had much more enjoyment on the second read.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
Several! I have written five novellas (four of which are unpublished in paper), as well as several started drafts for other stories.
BLUES IN THE SUBURBS is out now and available worldwide on Amazon. You can find John on Soundcloud, Facebook and Instagram