A Poet Between Tongues: Shane Johnstone on Myth, Masculinity, and Multilingualism
A conversation wtih Shane Johnstone
Govanhill is a place of many languages, voices, and histories. Seán’s latest poetry collection, Govanhill Mythologies, captures the layered experiences of the area—its sounds, its myths, and its contradictions. Writing in English, French, Gaelic, and the Glasgow dialect, he offers an immersive experience that reflects the complexity of identity, class, and belonging. In this interview, we discuss the impact of multilingualism on poetry, the myths that shape Glasgow, and what it means to write from a place that is constantly shifting.
G: In your collection, there are 4 languages: French, Gaelic, English, and the Glasgow dialect. Why did you decide to write this collection in multiple languages?
S: I'm interested in sound. I used to be a musician and I have synesthesia. Languages influence it as much as music - they each have their own texture. I wanted to explore how language works in an area, filled with mostly different diasporas, but none of them speaking the standard language. I wanted to see if I could, with some of the translation, find a register, or a way of softening some of the Gaelic sounds .
If you're walking through an area, you're not going to understand everything and I suppose that's part of the consciousness of Glasgow - there's always going to be more to it that you can know.
I’m also drawn to Beckett. I like his poetry as well as the plays. He used to say he wrote in French because too much was happening when he wrote in English—French helped him distill things.
G: The way you use different languages adds to that immersive experience of Govanhill - a recreation of the soundscape itself. Do you have a process with the languages?
S: Sometimes, an idea comes in a particular language, which is the more romantic notion. Often, which language to use is a conscious decision - certain subjects feel like they belong in certain languages. And sometimes, translating a poem is what unlocks it and turns the poem into something new.
G: So the whole process varies. For example, Dixon Avenue is in French, the subsequent poem is written in English on a similar theme. That was when I realised that the Gaelic and English poems weren’t always direct translations. They seem to have a more imbalanced relationship. Would you say that’s true?
S: It is a hundred percent true. You have to be able to offer some value in that language that you aren’t offering in another. Each language has its own untranslated poem. The reason Dixon Avenue is in French is partly because of a Glaswegian tradition - working-class people who, self-consciously or otherwise, get into French as a way to mentally escape the grimness of industrial Glasgow. Glasgow's not necessarily like that now, but books like Dear Green Place, capture that.
So each language has its own poem and I tried not to just translate.
G: As a reader, it is always thought provoking to be locked out because of a lack of language, which is largely inevitable considering you use four. Was that intentional? Was your use of multiple languages a tool to narrow your audience or broaden it?
S: That's an amazing question. I think it's probably both to include and exclude. You’re one of the first people to pick up on that.
There are presumptions made by all sorts of linguistic groups, both minority and majority ones, about who's entitled to understand what and has access to what? It's intended to be thought provoking. It's a statement on how the consciousness of an area can work. In Govanhill, there are some pretty big linguistic barriers. There are people, who consider themselves natives, who feel frustrated about that. They feel an entitlement to the area or to knowledge. I wanted to examine that.
With English, especially, it can be overwhelming to decide what to focus on because the readership is limitless. Restrictions are helpful to writers. At the same time, using multiple languages might narrow the audience in one sense, but it also exposes readers to languages they might not have encountered otherwise.
G: If English is your first language, life is easy, reading is easy and it’s thought-provoking to read something and go ‘Okay, this is a barrier.’ What can I understand or what can I appreciate about something I’m locked out of? How does it feel to be locked out of language, for once? Would you say that there is a language that belongs to GovanHill or Glasgow?
S: No, and I suppose this is part of it as well. Someone asked me ‘Do you feel like it’s natural to write in these other languages?’ As if there’s a natural choice. I think what they meant is that the official or state language is the natural language.
Language happens in all sorts of situations. I learned most of the French I know in GovanHill. I haven’t been to Western Isles but Gaelic is probably the language I use most now.
Glasgow has always been shaped by different cultures. They come and go as people are forced to integrate. But maybe there’s an assumption that poetry belongs to the “official” language. I don’t think any one language belongs to a place. That idea is inherently exclusive
G: Did you grow up speaking Gaelic then, is that your mother tongue?
S: No, though there was some Irish Gaelic around when I was younger. Maybe people’s grannies still spoke it. But for most, it was a couple of generations lost.
I got into it about ten years ago through traditional music. Linguists still debate whether Irish and Scottish Gaelic should be classified as separate languages when writing. I don’t think about it too much—I take the Tom Leonard approach. He saw language as a sound system rather than an orthography.
G: That makes sense for you—as a musician, poet, and linguist, it seems like sound is your primary concern.
S: Definitely, when I started writing it was prose but I felt frustrated with the lack of sound. I was trying to get to poetry, get back to sound. It’s still one of the driving forces of what I do.
Although I'm also the son of two painters. I used to paint and fell away from it but I’m trying to get it back, through poetry as well. Poetry is an amalgamation of all of them. So I'm quite into Rilke and other poets who are also trying to get to image as cleanly as possible through poetry.
G: Moving on from language—let’s talk about your use of myth and your title, Govanhill Mythologies.
S: It’s a general meditation on mythology. There’s so much that has changed about the area. It’s an area that’s been quite controversial. It’s a place that has had a myth created for it which it now perpetuates. When I was growing up, there was all the gang violence and crime. The Daily Record called it the most demonised area. But now it’s quite woke, there’s a lot of progressive activity happening. There’s this contradictory idea that it’s radial and woke, but also exclusive. Everyone’s drinking oat milk lattes all the time but there’s a lot of grinding homelessness. Poverty is rife.
The people who move here see the old days filled with violence and deprivation. But it was also a mythologised time, where there was a sort of perfect Irish diaspora, where everyone was getting on, singing and playing whistle and fiddle - everything was great. Now that’s been compromised to an extent.
So two different myths of Glasgow’s past have emerged. By using the word mythology, it’s an attempt to make a compendium of all those different narratives, perspectives and stories. It’s the way language is passed down and changes, the way people digest the tales they're told. Some of the stories in my collection are things I’ve seen and experienced, some are things people have told me, and some of them - who knows?
Also, it's partially referring to Roland Barthes - the mythologies of progress, social change and social mobility. It’s an attempt to encompass off those different forms of myth.
G: You separate the myths into two sections: what’s the difference between them?
S: Mythologies 1-8 are myths of Irishness in Glasgow including Catholicism and of gang violence. It’s partly a challenge to the romanticisation that happens with that violence. ‘Oh the kids are so soft now, when I was young we were all kicking lumps out of each other. We weren’t so pampered as they are now.’
So, 1-8 are different scenarios that may have happened or may already be myth. Glasgow's relationship with gang violence is literally a mythology. Nowadays it's a predictable thing for working class male authors to write about in Glasgow. It’s become an industry relying on itself to perpetuate. It’s a form of literature that always manages to be more popular.
I'm happy to be indulged with this stuff, because usually people want to know about were you really involved in the gangs.
All the poems in 9-12 are different types of mess. There's a dialectical merging of myths happening, and then for Myth 13, there's the end result which is the pure, sound form of the dialect.
There’s one poem called ‘Skipper’ which is in dialect about an evolving idea of masculinity. I don’t know if there is a mythologised Glaswegian male archetype. But there is the very male Baudelaire and his interpretation of man being outside of nature and the poet separate from society. I really like Baudelaire’s poetry but I have to admit I’ve done a bit of an irreverent take on his myth of a poet as a superior entity by using more everyday language and translating ‘Albatross’ into English and dialect.
When I talk about Baudelaire, I think of a certain type of guy you meet in pubs in Glasgow—often self-taught intellectuals. I wouldn't call myself an intellectual, but I am mostly self-taught. There’s a particular ego that can come with that, almost a kind of snobbery toward formal education or university learning. My parents, being artists, have encountered that attitude quite a bit.
All of those archetypes and forms of masculinity are being explored and thrown into the melting pot. What emerges as Myth 13 is an attempt to distill all these ideas into pure sound and dialect.
I'm trying to uncover the one main myth—unpacking the macho, male Irish flâneur poet as a natural product of the community. And honestly, there's a bit of superiority in that attitude, and I have to admit, I sometimes see it in myself, too.
G: Interesting, so you’ve drawn inspiration from a few male poets with said egos - are you stepping away from this or leaning into it?
S: I suppose the detached tone in my work is my attempt to step outside that narrative. There’s quite a lot of the self-taught, gritty, working-class voice in Glasgow and among poets. It’s a part of my work, but I also position myself as a bit of a mystical character within it.
If you’ve read Annie Ernaux, she was accused of being cold in her writing style. But I think that’s unfair. Her work feels angular. When you’re looking at memories and their reliability, if everything’s just gushing forth, you lose control of it. You have to step back.
G: You wanted to retain control whilst not putting yourself too much in the centre.
S: Exactly. I’m trying to make sense of a place through different people’s perceptions, including stories I’ve heard. I’m also making sense of myself, coming from that place. But if my writing was too personal and confessional, I would feel too much like that flâneur character — the archetype you see a lot in Glaswegian literature.
Shuggie Bain, for example, which won the Booker Prize, is a stereotypical example of the confessional narrative. I’m writing about quite grim things at times, but that confessional style — “Look how hard things were for me!” — is something I’m trying to step back from.
G: Your tone is detached but it also varies. You adopt so many different aspects and registers. In some poems, it reads as a satirical tour guide. At the next point it's a teenage boy talking about his morning before school with his friends, and it's very casual. And then there are these more sentimental moments involving Peter and a father on the Tour de France. There are so many different styles to varying effects that I couldn’t choose or reduce the narrative voice down to one word.
S: I agree. I agree with you. After having heard that that was quite convincing.
G: I particularly like the poem about Peter/Pierre, who seems like an Uncle figure. The persona is taught to raise shoulders when there’s alcoholic behaviour about. Two poems later, the character downs a beer in front of the dad, and the dad hunches his shoulders. It was powerful and sentimental how your poems interlinked.
S: Thank you so much. Being a nursery teacher, you learn about transmission of language through behaviour and ideas. It’s one of the more central themes. So it's always really nice to hear that validated that someone's understood that
G: There’s a lot of fluctuation between first and second person. Is there a centralised person or idea?
S: No and yes. Literally, it’s an attempt to see the place from a few different perceptions, including different people, in hindsight and retrospect, across generations and whichever way that manifests. It is also an attempt to work out what’s happened in order to produce myself and everything that’s influenced me in my life.
There were some real tensions I needed to resolve. The contradictions that were driving me insane. The increasing affluence, the predictability of poverty, the availability of art, intellectual conversation and opportunity that came to the area where I lived. I grew up in a family of poor artists who weren’t necessarily valued. The different voices are various perspectives and persons but all work to make sense of it all to me.
Grace Dewar: I think that makes sense for a mythology. You’ve incorporated multiple sounds, voices and stories that make GovanHill. You built an image and history without you as the obvious centre. Equally, the personal moments, and intertwining narratives add to the variety and range.
G: Is this a love letter to Govanhill?
S: Hmm again, it's a yes and no. I love living here, love the diversity of language, experience and culture. But it’s hard to separate that from poverty which is devastating. A lot’s been done but only so far under the current system.
I’ve made my best friends in Govanhill who have opened doors for me in the literary world. Govanhill has quite a lot of social capital now and I feel guilty about that. A lot of the people that I grew up with didn't have any of these opportunities.
There's a lot to be loved about it but I don't love how smug it can be about itself now about how progressive, apparently progressive it's become.
A love letter doesn't need to be all positive? You have to accept that part of it's going to be part of something that you love is going to be negative.
G: Did writing this collection help you appreciate the area more?
S: Yeah, I think you learn to accept contradiction as an inevitable part of life. If you refuse to love anything that’s contradictory, then you’re not going to like anything much, are you? When I moved back 7 years ago, I was excited by the place, but I had to work through the contradictions.
G: Well, that’s another bonus. How was your publishing journey with Arkbound?
S: It’s great. Getting the credibility of being traditionally published. What that does for you is massive, and I do think that when they're doing an amazing thing. It's a journey. It alters you actually, being traditionally published. Yeah, I think it's made me pretty defensive of traditional publishing.
G: That’s amazing to hear. Thank you so much for your time. Govanhill Mythologies is truly an enjoyable, insightful, and thought-provoking read.
If you’re interested in Shane’s work, you can buy his work Govanhill Mythology here via Arkbound.
Arkbound is a charity publisher, which means 100% of profits (excluding author royalties, of course) go back to the charity to support underrepresented writers. While we aim to make our books widely accessible, we encourage readers to purchase from one of the wonderful local bookshops that stock our books on their shelves or directly from the Arkbound.
