A Conversation with Shaun Levin
Jameson Currier
As an admirer of Shaun Levin’s fiction, I am always pleased when I find his writing online or in an anthology. Shaun lives in London where he also runs the independent press Treehouse Press. His newest endeavor, Writing Maps, is an innovative writing tool which has been enthusiastically embraced by students, teachers, and writers. I recently had the opportunity to reach out to Shaun to ask him more about his new projects.
Jameson Currier: Writing Maps is a big success. How did the idea come about?
Shaun Levin: They kind of evolved organically out of my own writing practice, my creative writing teaching and various fascinations I have, particularly with artists’ maps and creative forms of mapping. After many years of teaching creative writing and running a lot of workshops in public spaces around the city, I felt I wanted to gather everything together into a creative writing book, but the world doesn’t need another creative writing manual, so I started to think of ways to collate all these hundreds of creative writing prompts and activities I’d used over the years and one thing led to another and Writing Maps were born!
Currier: How are the maps produced? Who are the artists and where do you find them?
Levin: It’s pretty much a collaborative process. I send the writing prompts to the illustrator--and each Writing Map has a different illustrator--then they come up with an initial design, and from then onwards we work on it together. Sometimes a map can take a few weeks to create and other times several months. I’ve found all the illustrators on PeoplePerHour, which has let me tap into a huge resource of amazing artistic talent.
Currier: How are the maps used in the writing process?
Levin: Each Writing Map is a collection of creative writing prompts that can be used to write fiction or non-fiction. Most prompts will give you ideas for complete stories, or they can be used to help expand a bigger work, or just for daily writing practice. They can be used in a group setting or alone at your desk, and because they’re easy to carry around, people use them in cafes or on their commute, or wherever they go to write, for a boost of inspiration.
Currier: How are the maps used by writers? By others who are not writers? Can they be used outside of London?
Levin: You really don’t have to be a writer to use the maps. The prompts are great for oral storytelling, too. I know a therapist who encourages her clients to use the maps to explore their own personal stories. Writing Maps are very much for everyone everywhere and aren’t linked to London in particular. Having said that, some of the Writing Maps have been inspired by London--a city I’ve lived in for almost twenty years and which is a constant source of stories and new places to write in.
Currier: Tell me about Treehouse Press. When did you start it and why?
Levin: Andra Simons and I started Treehouse Press in 2009, along with the designer Raffaele Teo, whom I’d worked with while editing Chroma. Andra and I had books we wanted to publish and which we knew might take a while to find a publisher, so we figured: Let’s do it ourselves. We started with our own books, The Joshua Tales and Snapshots of The Boy, and then we went on to publish other writers. Check out Lou Dellaguzzo’s The Hex Artist; he’s one of the most exciting queer writers around today. His work is astounding.
Currier: Any new books coming from Treehouse?
Levin: There’s an essay anthology of queer writers writing about queer bookshops that’s been in the making for quite a while now. I hope it’ll come together before too long! I’ve got about 15 pieces so far--I just need the time and space to focus on the collection a bit more.
Currier: You juggle a lot of work: teaching, writing, publishing. How do you find the time to do everything?
Levin: I’m not sure I do find the time! Things get done eventually, though some things take longer than others. I go through phases of focus. The biggest challenge is to keep writing at the center of attention. I finished a novel last year, so I’m taking a breather before immersing myself in the next big project, which will be based around the life of the British painter David Bomberg. At the moment I’m working on short stories that have been unfinished for way too long, and also a couple of essays. I’m trying to do less teaching this year, but I need to pay the rent, and I really enjoy teaching.
Currier: What do you like best about teaching?
Levin: I love the calm of the workshop space. One of my students said this week that he really liked having a quiet two hours in his week where writing was all that mattered. The bonus of working freelance is not having to grade people’s work or follow a syllabus or have to answer to anyone. Writing is the focus of my teaching. I try to bring people to a regular writing practice and introduce them to different ways of putting words together, different perspectives to write from – basically, to get them to see the vast range of choices you have when you put words on a page.
Currier: Where did you grow up? When did you move to London and why?
Levin: I grew up in South Africa until I was about fifteen and then my family moved to Israel, where I spent the next fifteen years. When I was in my early 30s I moved to London and have been here for close to twenty years. My reasons for moving were a combination of running away from and running to. I wanted to get away from Israeli politics and the general hopelessness I was feeling about the chances for peace and co-existence in that part of the world. I also wanted to live in English again, to be surrounded by the language I was writing in, and because I’d just started to publish (in The Evergreen Chronicles and Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly) I somehow felt London was the place to be. America felt too far away, although that’s where many of the writers I love come from!
Currier: What writers influenced you?
Levin: In the beginning, the writers who made me want to write were John Preston, Andrew Holleran, Zora Neale Hurston, and the brilliant Christopher Coe, whose book, Such Times, I’ve read at least a dozen times. They were writers bringing us news from what it was like to be them, and by doing that, to also tell the story of a... I don’t want to use the word community... the story of the people around them, the people who sustained and shaped them. That’s what I wanted to do in my own work, to bring news from the kraal and the battlefield.
Currier: What books are you currently reading?
Levin: I’ve always got about four books on the go. I’ve just re-read Kafka’s Metamorphosis--and it really was like discovering it for the first time. I’m at various stages of progress through Sergei Dovlatov’s The Suitcase, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec. I read a lot of the kind of writing I want to emulate!
Currier: What UK gay writers would you recommend?
Levin: I love La JohnJoseph’s work. We published a brilliant story of his in Chroma almost ten years ago, so I’ve been waiting a long time for his first novel, Everything Must Go. Sina Sparrow is a comic artist whose work I like very much. And there’s Eric Karl Anderson who’s an American based in London; he’s always doing interesting stuff.
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Shaun Levin is a South African writer based in London. He is the author of Seven Sweet Things, Snapshots of The Boy and three other books. He is the founding editor of the literary journal Chroma, and the director of the independent publishing house Treehouse Press. He teaches creative writing, and has recently launched the innovative writing tools, Writing Maps. His short stories appear in Between Men, Boyfriends from Hell, Modern South African Stories, Love, Christopher Street, and With: New Gay Fiction, amongst other anthologies. See more at www.shaunlevin.com and www.writingmaps.com.
Jameson Currier is the author of nine works of fiction and is the publisher and editor of Chelsea Station magazine.
To learn more about Writing Maps, watch the video.
