Interview with Jessica Mookherjee

Sep 21, 20235 min read

Updated: Jan 14

Photo of Jessica Mookherjee — Jessica Mookherjee

When did you write the book, and what was the inspiration behind it?

I wrote the book in 2019 and 2020 and it was inspired by the story of an artist who was painting the sea from inside the sea. This struck me as exciting as I wondered how scale and dimensions would seem so different from a position of immersion. I was thinking of my relationship to London and how it had shaped and created me in the 27 years I had lived there. I also thought how strange it was that i had lived and worked all over the city, north, south, east , west in a kind of meandering path. This also made me think of animal paths and how underneath London was soil and roots. I also wanted explore subversive language and how we are also created from that.

How would you summarise this book in 100 words or fewer?

A psychogeographic love letter to London and a meandering animal child's progress through a landscape of words through time and space.

How would you characterise the style of your book? For example, would you see it as lyrical, prose or experimental? (to name but a few!) Can you provide some commentary around why you feel it falls into these categories?

It is probably something between poetic prose or prose poetry, a kind of rap through time and space and a little hotchpotch use of underground languages such as cant, Polari, rhyming slang. The lines between prose poetry/ poetic prose and poetry are not as demarcated as we might think and occasionally i break any convention in order to lineate. Much of this is to hold rhythm and beat but also to distract the eye and change tone but also to create tension in the reader.

Blind Alleys There, there nipper, steels the key from her old lady’s kipper. No fungus on his face, good clobber keeps her looking, offers her molly, knows she could do better. There was all that bad business down the railway lines, she remembers, those tricks, but it serves her to stitch it together, some good tunes in her record collection, some tall tales to keep him keen, drugs and cards. She gets coke and chips and he orders beer. She says it smells of disinfectant in here and he holds her hand. Thanks her for that night where she put up with him, says he still owes her speed and acid and a bottle of gin. He tells her, in the burger bar on Holloway Road, the Soloman Grundy, the Queen’s Head, the Nags Head, he tells her because there is nothing else to tell. There he is with a two bob job, blown like a bottle with his zhushed up hair. His tells are queer, how his fam disappeared down blind alleys and dead ends. It’s best not to know how the story ends, best to keep the secrets but he keeps on, spills his drink all over her dress. — 'Blind Alleys' from Desire Lines

During the writing of this book, did you learn anything new? either about yourself as an author or about the crafting of the work itself?

I learned that London changed me. I learned that places fuse with us but their stories keep moving. I learned the power of subversive and underground language.

Can you list some of your main influences? Feel free to include writers, literary movements, but also any influences outside of the literary sphere that have had an impact?

Some of the influences in this book were nature writers - Robert McFarlane’s Holloway and Hollow Places, also Ian Sinclair's work as well as Dickens and other flaneur poetry and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf too. I also love Sean O'Brien’s work so was a little inspired by him too.

Please can you list some stylistic or technical elements contained within your work, and why you feel that these are important?

I was interested in rap and hip hop and spoken word and how this moved rhythm on relentlessly so stole elements of this but in no way is this rap. I was also interested in how Lou Reed wrote about cities. However I did want it to sound breathy and full and packed like London but also expansive and with unexpected twists where nature bursts through - like the under ground rivers and wells. I wanted a very anglo saxon and brythonic cadance to lead but then infuse with elements from a host of cultures so in places i break style, interject and “switchback”.

Hollow Ways She takes her cards out, one by one, takes after her poor old duck, who lies in bed all day with a bad back, dosed up on tamoxifen, a looker in her day. The old man turns cards around, here’s the burn-card, all the way round, card-sharp. She’s here now, in the sunken roads, somewhere to go, somewhere to be found. She sees it in there as the chips are down, That back of the cab job, will it come out that she’s sunken and dipped. Was it that old man playing knick knack? She knows the answer but can’t tell. Slight of hand girl, nymph of the discard tray, gives it the patter. Says it doesn’t matter, gets into cars with strangers, beards and taxi drivers. Turned out again. Pitter-patter down the Holloway, in ruby slippers for the pocket-trick. Keeps you looking at the kiss-me-quick while the mark misses the trick. She goes box-jumping down Finsbury Park all the while the true odds stay down. She can’t stay schtum, chitter chatter, don’t give the game away. Zigzag girl bends her back down the Hollow Ways. — 'Hollow Ways' from Desire Lines

Can you give some commentary around the book’s central themes and why these are so important to you?

The central theme of this work is change and becoming and how we create and are created by the environment. This is important to me because like raindrops on a windscreen much of life happens to us in a vast backdrop and we may think we have agency but nature and place are bigger then us. However the other theme is the flaneur, the urchin and hidden “pickpocket” inside us, this is important as we can grow up to be adult and responsible but we still carry our broken parts and those parts are also the ones that kept us alive.

For someone who enjoys your work, which other authors do you think would also be appealing to them?

Elizabeth Sennit Clough is a writer I admire, also Julia Webb, Jemma Borg and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. I would also recommend Claire Trévien’s work and an amazing book by Mary J Oliver called “Jim Neat” published by Seren. There are so many good contemporary poets that I am unable to name them all and many are good friends I am lucky to say. Check out Matt Haigh, Martin Hayes, Joelle Taylor and Helen Ivory and Sarah Corbett- all different but all inspirations. I always return to Ann Carson. In terms of London - Caleb Femi’s Poor and Emily Berry are also excellent choices.

Is there a personal story or inspiration relating to this book? If you feel comfortable, please feel free to share!

I was a green girl - brought up in leafy Mumbles in South Wales and turned goth and arrived on blustery day dressed in a hat and carrying a carpet bag and I thought, like Dick Whittington - i would make my fortune. i was ready to become a journalist - starting a course linked to the BBC in central London aged 18 and very quickly realised i was just a little girl lost. Luckily i also found some poetry in London. One of the tales in this book relates to my ex partner and my ex cat - one of whom brought in a huge London pigeon into our living room which was opposite the Olympics, and one of them killed it - much to my horror and yet relief.

Trench Dora always get’s her man. Don’t give me that Jolene crap, she says and slaps and drags. Give me back. While you were filching down Finsbury Park, while you were out with the follow-me-lads, while you were out the cat’s about. It’s war-painted and tainted now. Where do you go all day, chitter? We watch you out of the windows, where do you go to see him? Zeus-Pitterpatter, or someone better? Where do you get the dosh, wind-sucker? Either way, here’s curses hurled at you. You’ll be a fag ash girl for the honey-polony, with your manky mincing and mollying – you’ll never call this home, you’ll be the never-be-loved. Dora’s lost her rag, unpretty rage and racket, must be the fairest in this this trench of land that passes through the woods and droves. She thinks she’s been such a good girl to get that rough trade home. — 'Trench' from Desire Lines

Is there a particular audience you had in mind when writing this book? How did this impact the writing process?

I don’t think i had a particular audience in mind - however many who have read Desire Lines have fed back to me that it sounds like London in the 80s and 90s. I just attempted to be honest to my feelings and perceptions to bring one type of London to life.

Did the book change your relationship to London?

Yes it did - it made me realise how much I loved it, how much it is about money and survival as well as hopes and dreams and how it catches hold of you and hopes to keep you intwined in its history but ultimately it keeps going without you.

Buy Desire Lines here

Jessica Mookherjee is a poet of Bengali heritage. She was brought up in Wales and London and now lives in Kent. Widely published, She was twice highly commended in Forward Prizes. Her poetry collection Tigress (Nine Arches press) was shortlisted for best second collection in the Ledbury Munthe Prize in 2021. Her latest books are Notes from a Shipwreck (Nine Arches Press) and Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books).