PLU Open Mic interviews: John Sweet

John Sweet will feature at our open mic on Thursday 18 May 2023

Who are you and who do you write for?

I’m a queer, working-class, relatively uneducated Canadian anglo living in North America’s only francophone metropolis. I guess I mostly write for queer folk, for people who feel marginalized, people who have suffered trauma from bullying and being made to feel “other”. That probably covers a good number of people.

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I didn’t really start writing seriously until I was in my mid-thirties. I’ve always loved reading (and in fact my day job is as a copy editor for book publishers). What I have come to understand about my writing is that it is always destined to be delivered orally. I don’t seek to be published. I want to look people in the eye and deliver my words to them.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

I don’t really feel qualified to give advice to writers, especially as most writers seek publication and I don’t. But my advice to artists in general would be: Be true to yourself. You don’t need to fit into any mould. In fact, your responsibility as an artist is to think independently. (Queer folk have a bit of a built-in advantage in all these respects!) If you dislike capitalism and materialism and technological mania (i.e., if you don’t like the society we live in), find a way to do your work that breaks out of the parameters of business thinking. You don’t need to maximize your audience, you don’t need continuous growth, you don’t need to be “useful” in terms of helping to grow the GDP of your country, you don’t need a marketing plan. Just be yourself. Be an artist. Say what’s in your heart.

How do you react to criticism of your work?

I love to receive feedback. I think I’ve done enough by now that I feel confident about what I do. If someone has something negative to say about my work, I will first decide whether or not to take it on board. Frequently, it can be really helpful. But I try to never accept criticism from people who just basically don’t like what I do. Not everyone likes everything, and there are a lot of people who don’t like text-based one-man shows!

What do you miss most about the pre-pandemic world?

Maybe the rose-coloured glasses? I think we (in the prosperous West) were living in a dream world and we’ve had a wake-up call. It can be painful to wake up, and to grow up, but it’s where we are. I don’t want to go back to the noisy pre-pandemic world. We need to do things differently.

How has your work developed over the last 12 months?

As the pandemic went on and on, I came to have a profound sensation that we’re losing our humanity as we spend all our time looking into screens (a condition that was only exacerbated by the pandemic), and this has given me a really deep conviction that theatre and spoken word are more important than ever. We need to talk to each other, in each other’s physical presence. We live in a physical world, and we need to re-connect to it and take care of it. And of one another. And to do that, we need to speak to each other. In real time. In person.

What does the future look like to you? 

Oh boy. We must have hope, mustn’t we? Things are really messed up, let’s not kid ourselves. I’ll quote Shelley in a modern context: Capitalism, neocolonialism, disengagement from reality, exploitation of the natural world “are graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.” I think the world will look hugely different in five years, ten years, twenty years. We need to get back to basics: take care of one another. And we’ll need to do that more and more as things fall apart.

What importance has other people’s art had for you and your creative process?

I just quoted Shelley, who is a hero of mine for his iconoclasm and revolutionary spirit. I also think about classical music a lot when I think about the form of my work. I love that Chopin wrote in a way that was totally weird, throwing a mazurka into the middle of a heavy dramatic piece. Closer to what I myself do, I’d say perhaps THE seminal creative moment was seeing a performance of Wallace Shawn’s monologue The Fever at an international theatre festival in Toronto in 2000. It’s when I thought, “That’s what I want to do. It’s so simple. All you need is a person onstage and a text. That’s it.”

Have you looked at different ways of expressing yourself or taken on a new medium?

I’ve moved from being an actor speaking other people’s words onstage to other actors; to being an actor saying other people’s words directly to an audience in a monologue; to writing my own one-man theatre show; to being a clown; to doing more stripped-down, text-based work; to doing spoken word poetry. So I’ve shifted a fair bit, I think. I studied dance for a while, and think about movement a lot when I’m performing. But essentially, I think I’m doing now what I do best: writing my words and delivering them. There are slightly different ways of doing this—more or less theatrical, more or less poetic—but essentially, it’s the same idea. I don’t really feel drawn to a different medium at this point.

Tell us about someone’s work you admire.

Okay, well, I mentioned Shelley, Chopin, and Wallace Shawn above. Add Chekhov (his plays) and gay novelist Alan Hollinghurst. One of my biggest artistic heroes is my fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell. Over the course of her long career, she has consistently pushed the boundaries of what she does as a songwriter, musician and singer, and has remained true to herself. It’s a huge balancing act, and one that I admire immensely. There’s so much pressure to be like everyone else! To be yourself, and remain yourself, without ever becoming fixed and unchangeable—it's a life lesson. She seems to have managed that.

I’ve recently discovered the calm, meditative music of Max Richter, and I love it! Also the dreamy, heartfelt songs of fellow Montrealer Patrick Watson. 

Where can we find more of your work?

Come see me in Prague! My show is on from May 24 to 27. (If you’re reading this before my show in Paris, and want to take a chance on me, I’ll be at Brighton Fringe from May 5 to 14.) Otherwise, have a look at my website to see what I’m up to: www.johnarthursweet.online I mostly perform in Canada, but I’m conscious of the limitations there, so I am constantly drawn to perform in the UK and Europe—but I don’t want to destroy the climate by taking planes all the time. So I’m not sure where to perch.