Introducing… Jo Baker
Today’s new author is Jo Baker.
Jo Baker (she/her) is a psychotherapeutic counsellor and writer whose work has been listed for awards including Searchlight (twice), Guppy Books, and PFD’s Queer Prize. She has previously studied with the Golden Egg Academy, and recently achieved an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.
She lives in Lewes, East Sussex with her partner and son who both accommodate Jo’s fascination with all things strange and deadly with kindness – and no little sense of bemusement.
Jo is represented by Silvia Molteni at Peters Fraser and Dunlop. Contact: smolteni@pfd.co.uk
What is your writing routine?
I like to write early in the morning when the world is quiet and I can properly sink my teeth into my story. Sometimes I’ll get up to write in the night if I can’t sleep. I just need hot tea and a blanket!
Who is your favourite author and how have they inspired you?
I absolutely love Carmen Maria Machado. Her horror is queer and feminist and furious. One of my favourite short stories of hers is about a woman who has bariatric surgery and is haunted by her sighing, mournful fat. Her writing is both unsettling and beautiful — I find the combination of these two things incredibly satisfying, and I think her language is so skillful and poetic that it allows her a lot of room to explore the darkness.
What was the inspiration for your manuscript?
This manuscript was inspired by a short folk horror story I wrote on the MA. Set in a remote cottage deep in a snowbound forest, my main character’s mother arrives home late one night… but it soon becomes apparent that it is not her mother at all. Her mother’s skin has been stolen by something monstrous and spidery and deeply malevolent. And her sister is next…
I loved writing the short story so much that I couldn’t let the ideas go — it’s grown into the bones of my current WIP. There was something about that isolation, the sinister quiet of snow, the way the trees seemed to watch. But what really snared me was the subtle and growing wrongness of someone you love being hollowed out and replaced by someone — or something — else. For me, that’s the real stuff of nightmares.
And spiders, of course. Always spiders.
Who is your favourite character in your book?
I really love my main character's love interest, Lissa. She is fierce and honest and loyal, and she loves her mother and sisters so much she’s willing to sacrifice herself to save them. Her father is dangerous, and she has come out of a difficult childhood with a deep goodness that I find really inspiring. She’s also much more practical than me, so that’s fun to write! Her emotional task is to understand that she can have what she wants too. I think that’s really brave in a different way.
What inspires you first: character or plot?
I’m not sure it’s always the same. For Something Dead, I wanted to write about three sort-of-sisters who had been raised by queer couple, Bear and Ira, deep in the woods. When Ira dies, the sisters and Bear are left to deal with their grief. The story really came alive when the image arrived of a wolf-spider with one unsettling yellow eye in its abdomen, crawling up from Ira’s grave beneath a strange and yellow moon…
Describe your perfect day.
I love hanging out with my partner and son, and also writing, so for me a perfect day would be a frosty walk in the hills, home to do a little writing, and then retreating indoors with the pair of them to watch a film. We’re really enjoying scary spidery movies at the moment, which I’m calling research but is really just fun! We just watched Super 8, and Eight Legged Freaks, and perhaps Arachnaphobia next…