Member Spotlight: Jo Hunter

June is a bumper month of Member Spotlights to celebrate Pride, and we're so excited to share our latest interview.

Jo Hunter is a poet, playwright and spoken word artist based in Edinburgh. In the short time since completing their MLitt Playwriting and Screenwriting degree from St Andrew’s University, they have certainly made an impression on the creative scene. Whether it's their explosive play ‘Kneecaps’ or their new poetry collection, Jo’s work examines queerness in engaging, experimental and always entertaining ways. We caught up with them to find out more about their work and motivations.

First things first: you’re about to launch your debut poetry pamphlet, ‘Flustercuck’. Can you tell us about that?

With pleasure! Since before I started writing and performing my own poetry, I was always a massive fan of reading poetry and would always collect independent artist’s work when I could and knew that I wanted my own one day. While so much of working in the industry is applying for opportunities and essentially waiting for people to give you the resources you need, I wanted this project to feel entirely my own, so I collaborated with my good friend and incredibly talented illustrator, Leigh Simpson and we are self-publishing (with help from the incredible people at Out of the Blueprint) my debut collection, ‘Flustercuck’ on June 6th. It’s a collection of a lot of my work that’s been a few years in the making now and really has something for everyone, a lot about queerness and gender anarchy, but also about platonic love, familial connection, identity and learning to make peace with the things that we can’t control. We’re doing a launch event at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the 6th of June which will feature performances from myself and two other phenomenal queer poets, Odhran Thomson and Kate Wilson and I couldn’t be more excited to share the stage and celebrate with them.

How did you get started as a creative? Is this something you always wanted to do?

I grew up in youth theatre so performing has always been a passion of mine, but I also loved creating my own stories and entertaining people with my own work. As I studied acting & performance, I started realising I was more drawn to writing and devising my own work, so did my postgraduate degree in Playwriting & Screenwriting and worked with a few companies including Framework Theatre, Scottish Youth Theatre and Wonderfools and then started doing more spoken-word performance over the past few years. It does feel like quite a full-circle moment as I spent a lot of time as a child writing wee stories and poems and performing them for my friends and my family, and now almost twenty years later, I’m still doing exactly that but for a larger audience and that’s really special and something I’m incredibly thankful for.

You’re experienced as a poet, playwright and spoken word artist. How do you decide which form to take when starting a new project?

That’s a really good question. A lot of the time when an idea comes to me, it already comes in the form that it’s going to be in, if that makes sense. Whenever I’m conceptualising an idea or writing something new, it helps for me to picture the finished product, and that involves picturing it as a piece of theatre, film or me performing it. There have been times where a project has started in one form and then I’ve realised it would actually benefit from being in another form, pieces that have started off as plays have become pieces of spoken-word gig theatre, like Words On World’s Ending, a piece that I ended up performing myself about the parallels between queerphobia and climate denial. A lot of the time, the decision process comes down to what I want to work on and how involved I want to be in the piece after it’s written, and I really enjoy and value that creative freedom.

I had the pleasure of seeing your play Kneecaps last year, which still haunts me (in a good way). Are you drawn to dark and twisty themes?

I’m so glad that you enjoyed it, thank you! I do love me some dark and twisted art! I think what was important to me when working on Kneecaps was discussing these very real and difficult themes, but also putting them against this backdrop of just utter absurdity and chaos, partly as to not completely overwhelm the audience in the morbidity of the real-life situation, but also because it’s FUN. I have such a deep appreciation for horror writing and artists that can display such vile and gruesome imagery and still have the audience thinking ‘I am having a blast’, and that is what I wanted to do with Kneecaps, I wanted it to almost feel like a camp B-movie, while also handling these themes with care.

Queer identity is an integral theme in your work. How would you like to see representations of queer stories evolve in arts and culture?

Unfortunately I think that queer representation is not where it needs to be in the art scene and I’ve noticed this specifically in Scotland over the past couple of years. I, for one, am getting tired of seeing the same diluted queer characters and the same story that is clearly constructed for straight, cis audiences. Queerness can be celebrated and enjoyed by everyone, but the more the industry refuses to platform and celebrate specific parts of the community to cater to specific audiences, the more that the ignorance towards the community grows, and from that ignorance breeds rejection and resentment. I believe that art is the best way to educate people, especially on topics that we find hard to understand, it’s a way for us to be addressed directly, but not talked down to and a way to hear someone’s authentic truth in a safe facilitated space, a space that is becoming more and more scarce everyday, specifically for trans people in Scotland. So, I’d like to see arts organisations take the plunge and really invest in authentic, diverse and necessary queer stories. Because not only will they attract exciting, new audiences to the industry, it might also create real positive conversation and change within existing audiences.

What’s next for you? Any exciting projects you can tease?

I’m going on a little mini-tour in June to promote my poetry pamphlet, which I’m absolutely buzzing for, including competing in the finals of the Roundhouse Poetry Slam in London on June 1st, where I’ll be representing Scotland (I do plan on wearing the most stunning tartan dress you’ve ever seen). I’m working on a lot of exciting projects at the moment, I can’t disclose any specific details, but hopefully over the next year you’ll be seeing some queer-ass comedy, some body-horror poetry and maybe even some music in time for sad girl fall!

Interview and photography by Rachel O'Regan.