✎ᝰ⋆˚Interview » Joanna Walsh˚. ݁₊✍︎⋆

on amateurs, failure, and embracing clunkiness

I can’t help but roll my eyes whenever another “infinite scroll” or “phones are bad” article comes across my feed. In a time of overwhelming techno-pessismism, much of which is impossible not to agree with, it was exciting to read Joanna Walsh’s Amateurs! Walsh, a prolific author who I first came to know through her book Girl Online, has taken on the difficult task of historicizing the people who shaped the social web: meme accounts, aesthetic wiki moderators, aspiring artists, bloggers, cursed image curators. Amateurs! pays tribute to the creative work, often uncredited and unpaid, that has been dismissed as merely “content.”

How often have you seen a piece of online content that felt more compelling than a piece of contemporary art? Walsh acknowledges this tension, while weaving in theory and art criticism to create a singular reading experience. Her experimental, often non-linear approach is not unlike opening multiple tabs in a browser, hopping between sites, and leaving a trail of links to revisit at a later date. I spoke with Walsh about writing Amateurs!, her own relationship to amateurism, and why she doesn’t take photos.

You just put out your book Amateurs!

Yeah, I just put it out, which means I’m at the maximum stage of hating it [laughs].

Oh no!

Not entirely, but I feel quite distanced from it. I can’t remember it in some ways. Sometimes I wish I’d written it differently, but when I go back to it, I couldn’t have written it any other way.

Everything I do has a clunkiness to it, and here that clunkiness is the site of some kind of trying to bring two kinds of writing together, or two kinds of saying something together, and it gets me quite a lot of friction. My average Amazon book score is something like 3.8, because people like some bits, and then they hate other bits. They like the theory, and they hate the popular stuff, or the other way around.

I came to know your writing through Girl Online. I went into that book wanting it to be something else, but I realized the way to read your work is to let myself follow you wherever you want to take me.

It’s interesting to have someone tell me what it’s like reading one of my books, because I’m not sure anyone has ever told me before. I’m aware that I have this kind of strange way of proceeding, but, if you said you have to follow me, I just have to follow what seems to come together in my mind. I like to experiment with horizontality and nonlinearity, not only in terms of narrative. In fiction that’s something that a lot of people have played around with but in theoretical or critical works: why not apply it there?

You described your way of thinking as “hyperlinked” in an interview I was listening to. That’s something I love about your writing as well, there are so many threads for people to follow on their own, little rabbit holes.

How could I not include a pileup of stuff, because collaging and collecting and sorting is everything that’s happening online.

In the book, you say you’re paying tribute to the people who shaped the internet. It was refreshing to read this in a time when everyone’s relationship to the internet and technology feels especially fraught.

A lot of this stuff hasn’t been historicized as significant art practice, and I think that it should be, because it’s so influential. It has as much influence as film or literature or art on how we see the world, how we deal with the world. A lot of it’s trivialized because online creators are often amateur and often female.

Can you discuss how failure is central to the amateur?

Amateurism is a failure, not always to be less competent than professional, but a failure to be able to inhabit the same space. You can be just as competent, but you don’t have the professional framework. I’m very aware of that, because I spent the last few years in academia, and I have massive imposter syndrome–even my imposter syndrome has imposter syndrome: it’s like, who am I to think I have imposter syndrome? But I’ve got to preserve the little place where I am, because I don’t think I want to fully integrate. Working within a space of discomfort is important to my writing. Perhaps no one fully integrates into any profession, but I want to maintain a slightly slapstick, critical distance.

I think a lot about Sianne Ngai’s work. She writes frequently about I Love Lucy, the old TV show about a female amateur trying on different professions, and the things that happen when she doesn’t make it often define the points at which those professions are recognized as professional. So her amateurism is a good critical position, but it does involve never quite hitting the mark.

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at amateur modeling photoshoots, and there’s always something slightly, tonally off. You can’t always put your finger on what it is. This bleeds into your AI essay as well, you make this really great point that most of the images being fed to image models are amateur and what ultimately gets shot out emulates amateur aesthetics.

Amateur aesthetics are often over-accurate when trying to imitate professional practice. AI art makes me think about Sheila Heti’s 2012 book, How Should a Person Be? Her friend Margaux the artist has a competition to paint the ugliest painting, and somebody paints the most beautiful landscape possible. It’s got a sunset, it’s got green hills, it’s got beautiful trees–everything that’s traditionally considered ‘beautiful’–but it’s so over the top, it becomes ugly.

Totally.

The name for that is vulgarity. Trying too hard, being too perfect, and therefore showing itself as an imitation, not the real thing. I’m completely fascinated by that line between what’s considered natural and good, and what’s considered artificial and bad.

Is it important for you to participate in the amateur communities you discuss?

I wouldn’t be a writer if it hadn’t been for the internet, and particularly social media. I was an illustrator and was blogging from about 2005. My blog did quite well. I got some awards for it. It was mostly drawings, but I started increasing the amount of writing. I took it down about 2012, just because I’d switched to writing, and I wanted to refocus. Around that time, I joined Twitter. Twitter was a very different place. I was anonymous. A lot of people were anonymous. There was not this pressure to link your personal life with your online presence, so it gave people a lot of freedom to be what they wanted to be, or to leave behind some of the pressures of “real life.” Yet, there were also identifiable people on there who were creative practitioners, who were ‘professional’ writers. You could talk to them, and I was very surprised that the majority of them would answer you back. Kindly as well. They were just like, “What do you want to know? Can I help you?” I got a lot of reading lists. I got an insight into other people’s writing lives. I also connected with a lot of other emerging writers. It was like a support group.

When I was growing up, writing degrees just didn’t exist where I lived. It was something that you kind of taught yourself. There was an inbuilt idea that writing was always amateur.

In 2012 I was an editor at several online literary mags, including 3AM Magazine, which I think is the oldest entirely amateur-run online literary magazine still running. I was talking to an editor of another mag recently who said his publication was running into trouble because the writing communities of Twitter have collapsed. Neither of these magazines pay writers or the editors who run them. Though I’m a strong campaigner for writers’ pay, these alternative online spaces are vital for experimentation and community building.

Twitter was a crucial platform.

I also started doing online activism. I ran an account called @read_women from 2014 to 2018, which was surprisingly successful. It was started because of some tweets that I did that went viral, which was completely unexpected. So I started a Twitter account to focus on writing by women, especially writing that wasn’t getting through, areas where women were having a hard time getting their work seen or heard, and also writers from the past who get called ‘recovered voices’.

Although internet time is horizontal, and always seems to be about what’s happening ‘now’, people still live with offline linear (vertical) time, so, if you’re older, there’ll be times in your life when the situation for women was very different. I was at University doing my undergraduate course, just before the Women’s Prize was founded in the UK after a survey that found that women writers made up 10% of prize lists. As most prize shortlists are only 5-6 writers, that meant there was one woman on maybe 50% of most literary prize lists. The situation is very different now but @read_women was founded at a time when broadsheet newspapers were still rating women writers on their appearance. I stopped the account when I started a PhD, because I just didn’t have time anymore.

Like everyone else, I’m stepping away from the internet. It might be partly because I’ve written this book about it, and once you know how the sausage is made, you don’t necessarily want to be there anymore. A lot of it was because Twitter was my platform. I like words. I’m on Instagram, but I’m only using it for professional stuff. I kind of feel sad, because I’m not getting that kind of connection. I can’t just go online and say something that I think is funny that a few of my friends will get. That space has gone.

I feel that way too.

What’s going to replace it? We need online safe spaces where people can interact without having to know each other first. They’re like being at a party. You’re talking to someone, you don’t really know them, but you know that they’re probably there with good intentions.

I’m becoming more private. It’s not as fluid anymore for me to hop onto the next platform.

I’m mostly on Instagram now because a lot of my friends are visual artists. I haven’t moved on from Twitter and Instagram to TikTok. TikTok just seems to require a lot of work, even more work than any platform before, because you’re filming stuff, you’re editing it. Even if you’re photographing on Instagram, your photos don’t have to be that great. On Twitter, you could drop in there very occasionally. Amateurism has become even more like a job.

You’re also looking at what an algorithm thinks you should be looking at versus people that you actually follow.

Social media platforms have recently become more like traditional media. The thing I always hated about radio and television is they just give you stuff they think you want or think you should like, and you can’t respond within that medium. The internet facilitated a huge critical response by users, which became a creative act. By using social media platforms, users were saying, this is how we want to talk to each other, this is how we want to get our news.

Joanna Walsh Photo: Nick West

Are you often working on multiple writing projects simultaneously? I noticed that a version of your Dead Sites essay shows up at the end of the Selfie essay in Amateurs!

I do usually work on different projects at the same time and a few parts of Amateurs! and Girl Online had been published as standalone essays and were adapted (if you look at other writers’ non-fiction work you’ll find this is pretty much standard practice). There was one essay I couldn’t get into Amateurs! I wanted to, but the style was too much of a departure from the rest of the text. It’s about Jennicam (the first livecammer) and Joyce Burditt, who was a screenwriter, and how they were brought together by a 90s detective series called Diagnosis Murder. Burditt wrote the episode and Jennifer Ringley (Jennicam) starred as a TV version of her online self, a live cammer murdered live on screen. She was killed in the first five minutes. So she had this tiny role, which seemed quite exploitative. Then I looked into the stuff that Joyce Burditt had written and she had a parallel history of exploitation trying to make it as a woman screenwriter. This struggle hidden in every aspect of the show was fascinating. I had to write about it.

I allow my obsessions to guide me. Writers should go with what interests them, rather than trying to respond to something topical or to something that people seem to want. Find out what you need to write about (this is more difficult than you’d think) and you’ll find it means something to a lot of readers too.

One aspect of the amateur that you often touch on is the curation and saving of images. Grouping and sorting content is built into nearly every platform. We all become aspiring creative directors, or as you’ve put it, “Artist as shopper.”

I’m very interested in aesthetic mood boards: cottagecore, dark academia, the things on Wiki aesthetics. You can collect things, but you don’t need to own them. You can be a curator, but you don’t have to be a billionaire. You’re somehow associated with them by having their image. People used to collect postcards and have always hoarded magazines as long as they’ve been around. The pleasure of looking at images is very interesting but I can’t quite work out why. I just had my kitchen redone and I’ve got a load of Pinterest boards on kitchens. And of course, you just have to make the decision in the end, but I’ve still got the boards. I haven’t deleted them. I sometimes go and look at them and I can see where my ideas came from. They’re just still there, like a work that I can go back to. Or like evidence of something…

You discuss anonymity when it comes to the moodboard, how images are pulled into them and their sources are decontextualized. Anonymity is imposed by the curator. This is where you evoke the mother, you seem to point to her throughout the book as a sort of symbol. How does she exist online?

I noticed the amount of internet material, some of it commercially produced, that implies that your mother is the person you don’t want to be online with you. Because she might see something about you or she might be technologically incompetent. ‘Your dad’ isn’t often evoked in the same way. I’m a mother, and that’s one of the things Girl Online is about. When I started making things online in the mid-2000s I wanted an online life that was somehow different from my offline pressures. Not the pressures of parental labor, but the attached cultural pressures to be a certain way in the offline world–to have a certain persona, certain values, certain ways of behaving, and that kind of limitation on mothers seems to me very much to do with making sure they carry on doing the free labour required of them without complaining. The internet seemed to offer wider options. A lot of work has been done so mothers aren’t perceived in such a narrow way now but the period I wrote about in Girl Online was 15 years ago: writing and publishing have the slowest timeline of all.

I wrote Break.up from about 2012 and it was eventually published in 2018. I was writing truthfully about my life but I gave absolutely no information about my family situation. At the time, there seemed still to be an understanding that ‘good’ literature could not be about motherhood and children. It was the first book I started writing (though it was not my first published book) and I felt that the kind of writing that I wanted to do had seldom been done by mothers, or by women who would admit to an interest in motherhood in their writing. Things have changed very rapidly. I’ve been part of that change. I’ve written about it since and talked about it and run campaigns about it but things are so different now that I feel my decision in Break.Up may be something a younger generation find difficult to understand.

Amateurs strive to emulate professionalism, but on the flipside, influencers professionalize performing a form of amateurism.

There’s this idea that the camera’s not there in influencing, and of course, the joke is the camera always is. I saw someone in Marseille who is a relatively well-known fashion influencer. She’s written about not wanting someone else to take her photo. I saw her, just by chance, on the street with this little stick with a camera, setting it up and then walking towards it casually, as if the camera wasn’t there at all, as if it was street style. People on Instagram see her as the subject but she’s also the photographer.

You say you don’t take photos. Is that true?

That is true. I mean, I take photos of objects for Instagram and I take photos if I want to send someone a picture of a funny thing. But personal photos, hardly ever. There are a few reasons for this. I have an autism diagnosis and autism is different for everyone but I think I’m missing something of the emotional connection that happens for other people via photos. There’s nothing I hate more than when you’re at an event and everyone wants to have a group selfie. I don’t know where to put my face.

The first time I liked photos of myself was when I was able to take selfies–I occasionally take them on my own and keep them to myself. I never liked an image of myself before, because I only saw myself in situations where I was asked to stand a certain way and always to smile. There weren’t many casual photos taken in my childhood. The French fashion writer Sophie Fontanel said the same thing. She’s in her 60s, and she said the first time she liked an image of herself was when she started taking pictures of herself. She’s a huge Instagram star now, and what she does looks like a hell of a lot of work. She must have a whole team. People talk about the pressures on women to produce internet images of themselves, which, of course, is true, but a lot of good things have come out of this self-gaze. Obviously, you still have to negotiate with established cultural gazes when you photograph yourself, but there’s something different. You can almost always tell when someone’s taken a photo of themselves. Even the best photo by someone else has not got the same feel to it. I appreciate the people who put images of themselves online that push boundaries in some way, that push against cultural stereotypes in a very personal way. I like to look at them. They give me a kind of strength.

What role does nostalgia play in Amateurs!?

In one essay, I talk about Dubravka Ugrešić, the Croatian writer who died only a few years ago. She was not really an online person, but she was very interested in material images. She wrote a book called The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, about being a Croatian exile after the war in the 90s. She said there were two kinds of refugees, those who had photographs and those who didn’t. She thought that the nostalgia attached to these images was radical, and I agree with her there. There’s a potential to remake narratives via nostalgia, even if they often pass through sentimental retellings. I’m interested in sentiment as well. Like nostalgia it has a bad rep. I’m always interested in anything cultural the moment someone says it’s bad, especially when people in a position of cultural power say, this is not an echt way of creating or an echt way of thinking, and especially when the practice they question is associated with women. I’m interested in the radical potential of nostalgia and especially in its artificiality. It’s selective and it’s creative. You can’t stop people being creative. You can’t define creativity as morally good or bad. People need creativity in their lives. It’s something that people do regardless and they’ll use whatever resources are available to them. They’re going to make things and put it out there, even if no one is paying them, even if they know they’re giving their labour away for free to platforms that are going to exploit them and take their work and use it. It’s a form of communication. It’s a form of cultural memory. It’s a form of personal expression. You can’t limit artificiality. Artificiality is so natural.

To see more of Joanna Walsh’s work visit her website. Order a copy of Amateurs! through Verso.