Salena Godden: Books, Boys and Boogie Woogie

Salena Godden  is a shamanistic tour de force, a charismatic, funny and poignant performer, an evocative and emotive writer [would you believe, editing this interview moved me to tears?] and someone who aligns themselves with the best literary talent in the country, providing them a stage to perform and a free space for audiences to engage with them at Monday night's Soho dive bar Book Club Boutique

Salena is currently working on her first book, a memoir called Springfield Road. She has been featured in Punk Fiction, as well as other mainstream and art house literary magazines and anthologies. She occupies a space somewhere between the dreamworld and reality, a sense of realism dipped in mystique, often humourous and always relevant. She has taken Book Club Boutique from a drunken idea in a pub to the most relevant literary night in London, and she is always busy. Which is why this interview is only a small insight into her myriad brain and her process as a writer. Read on, then seek her out.

> Why do you read?

I found books a great way to escape as a kid. If my family caught me staring into clouds they would ask me what was wrong, nothing was wrong I just like dreaming, making shapes... with a book in front of my face I could dream and be as quiet and solitudal [sic] as I wanted.

> What do you read?

Mostly anything by: Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Charles Bukowski, Carson McCullers, Hubert Selby Jnr, John Fante, F Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Brautigan, Henry Miller, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Knut Hamson, Dorothy Parker,  Henry Miller, Anton Chekhov, Laurie Lee, Julian McClaren Ross, Truman Capote, Frank O'Connor... and from contemporaries I really like reading:  A M Holmes, Ali Smith, Stella Duffy, Joe Dunthorne, Tim Clare, Hisham Mater, James Robert Baker, Tim Wells, Oli Spleen, Nicholas Hogg, Patrick Neate, Courttia Newland... the list goes on and on... I don't own a television or any pets or husbands; reading is what I like to do most.

> What was the first book you read?

Probably Dr Seuss and the Sesame Street album covers....and everything by Enid Blyton, especially Mr Pink Whistle.

> Have you read consistently?

YES YES AND YES

> What are you reading now and what do you like about it?

George Orwell Keep The Aspidistra Flying: I like books about desperate poverty, starvation and the life of earnest broken writers.

Carson McCullers The Mortgaged Heart: I love her writing, she always talks about lilac eyes and describes the sky being a shade of green which I find bewildering. Poetic.

Dwang anthology, which we just launched at BCB with wicked poetry from Billy Childish and A D Winans.

James Lever's Me, Cheeta: I just started the life story by the monkey from Tarzan films and it looks very funny!

> Who is your favourite author?

Female: McCullers

Male: Hemingway or Bukowski

> Being a musician, poet, author and performance artist, what is your process? Do you decide ‘today I will write a poem, today I will write a song’?

A typical Goddamn day for Godden usually starts at 4am or 5am. I try to not worry too much but most days I am up at those ghastly dark hours in sheer fear. I try not to go anywhere near a phone or internet until after lunch and for my dreamy waking hours to be used to read and write. However if I have done a gig the night before the chances are I will wake up at any hour and anywhere... scratch my a*s and go straight to the Facebook / Twitter cr*p to look at ghastly photos from the night before. I do my best writing when I have just woken up though, I am a morning writer, it’s best sober and in silence. It’s like I have two wives in my head: the performer Salena is a brazen blonde grabbing at my attention and making cocktails; and the writer Salena is a moody brooding brunette taking hours to make fresh soups and keeping the curtains closed. It’s easy to make the blonde chill out into the brunette wife- but really hard work and sometimes painful going the other way, from sober bookish to bold and brassy. The world is loud and incessant when you've been locked in alone living in the words. I love my band mates:  and so writing music days, studio days and band rehearsals are always the very lively happy days!

> You’re working on your first book, a memoir, how are you going about putting it together?

I have completed my first memoir; it is titled Springfield Road... It’s a childhood memoir, digging into my parents’ lives and union and then me up to the age of 12...tender and funny, poetic and dark in places too. It was a very awesome journey to write, it and took about 4 years to complete... I found things out about myself and my family I didn't know. I found a sister. I started by telling all the stories we all tell down the pub, the stories that come out over Christmas dinner. but then I got deeper and started examining photographs and letters and piecing them together... the things we were told as kids are often exaggerated depending on who is telling it right - like ‘the fish was this big!’ Music was evocative, I started playing vinyl my mother played and cooking food she cooked so my home would smell like our home. I spent a lot of time at home in Hastings too in my childhood bedroom in the attic and did a lot of the work there too. The hardest part was finding things I had always found fascinating in my memory didn't translate on the page. Meanwhile things that I thought I had buried were glaring. Also the hard part was letting go, that it was after all a book and although I may have come first once in a running race it didn't need a whole chapter right!? It’s amazing what we choose to remember, choose to forget, but actually really remember and wish we hadn't or wish we could. Memory is deceptive.

> What do you love about performance poetry and how did you get into it?

There is only so long you can bore your friends at parties or do poems to your bedroom wall until you find an outlet surely. I was led by the poet Jock Scot and called him my mentor for years back. When I was 19 and 20 I would go to his gigs and he got me up on stage and I started getting booked after that.

> Do you read written poetry? Who are your favourites?

Charles Bukowski, Dannie Abse, Aoife Mannix, Ivor Cutler, Alan Spence- all kinds of stuff...I quite like haiku at the moment...

>What do you get out of writing?

Everything. I even believe that a day will come when something I wrote yesterday could not be written better tomorrow.