The first tattoo Joelle Taylor ever got was of an angel. It was 1994 and she had just written her first play (no stranger to theatre, she had already directed Angela Carter’s Vampirella, but Naming was her ‘first professional thing’). Unlike today, getting a tattoo was not the done thing, certainly not for women, and Taylor remembers feeling scared. Yet, with that first inking, she entered her body into a secret language. ‘It was a cultural currency amongst queers and criminals,’ she says, ‘both of which I did very successfully.'

Tattoos have long enabled discrete signals between queer women, helping them identify each other wherever their desires were taboo: nautical stars for butch lesbians, violets for the femmes, or a pink triangle (a subversion of the Nazi demarcation for gay men). Taylor’s Cupid, she explains, was a popular stamp in the 1990s. ‘It’s about carving out not just a safe space, but an erotic space,’ she says. ‘That’s where my fascination with tattoos and stories started: how we own these bits of our bodies and what they symbolise, what stories they tell, but also what stories they cover up.’

In The Night Alphabet, tattoos signify other people’s stories, which the protagonist Jones involuntarily inhabits. Each illustration recalls a life Jones has seen through another’s eyes, giving the novel its immense scope (a post-Brexit wasteland, synthetic wombs, sex trafficking and coal mines all feature). Taylor is similarly expansive when we speak, her mind sparking in all directions. Warm and loquacious, she is in holiday mode, one daiquiri down as she joins our call from Thailand, where she has retreated for a month-long break.

This is Taylor’s first foray into prose, following 2021’s TS Eliot Prize-winning poetry collection C+nto. It’s a satisfying trajectory for a writer who, in another interview, characterised her younger self as a member of the ‘illiterati’, the slam poetry camp once considered inferior to ‘real’ page poets. How different things look today for the SLAMbassadors championship founder and, now, novelist. ‘It absolutely feels terrifying,’ she says. ‘All I’ve wanted my entire life is to write. I got into performance because, for people like myself, there’s no opportunity to break into this heavily guarded cultural castle. It’s hard to get access unless you build the stage yourself.’ Actually, Taylor says, she writes prose just as much, if not more, than poetry; only now, with C+nto’s success, her ‘queer futurist’ novel can take flight. 

Fairytale and dystopia saturate the book, which Taylor attributes to her early experiences reading speculative fiction. ‘I learned to write through Stephen King,’ she says. ‘Though where story really comes from, for me, is the English ghost story.’ That ability to weave tales is also a maternal legacy (a prominent theme in The Night Alphabet: Jones learns to embrace her so-called ‘rememberings’ with her mother and grandmother’s help). ‘My mother was a glorious storyteller,’ says Taylor. ‘She could make going to the post office and sending a second-class letter absolutely epic.’ Her grandmother too, a dockworker’s daughter, broke ranks and travelled to France in the 1980s, inspiring a love of learning in her granddaughter. ‘She self-educated and passed that on to me. She’s probably the reason I am a writer.’

Yet, as a visibly butch woman, mothers provoke complicated feelings for Taylor. ‘There’s quite a bit of pain when I think of mothers, because I know I let them down terribly.’ Taylor left her Lancashire home at 15 and hitchhiked south, where she found new maternal figures in the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and London’s squats. ‘We became mothers to one another,’ she recalls. ‘Obviously, it’s not this utopian world. We aren’t mincing around with flowers in our mouths being beautiful. There were a lot of fist fights too, but we understood that we’d all come from trauma.’

Mothering, in these alternative homes, became a communal act. ‘This very morning, I went to an elephant sanctuary. The guide told me that herds of elephants are all female. There will be one actual mother who is pregnant for two years. When the calf is born, it will stay with the mother for a year. Then she gets bored, so they share the nannying of this calf. That’s like the squats in the 80s.’

Central to The Night Alphabet are the multiple perspectives Jones gains, which give her a unique empathy, even for troubling characters. One harrowing episode enters the embittered world of incels. ‘Researching that is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever gone through,’ says Taylor, who peppered the chapter with snippets of misogynistic speech lifted from real tweets. ‘You never think people really think like that, but they do. I think the responsibility with writing is to go into dark rooms to find something we lost.’

It also reads as an invitation to heal rifts, particularly within the atomised left. ‘The right wing has always known that the best way to defeat the left is to leave us alone as we have this incredible ability to destroy one another,’ says Taylor, citing the divide between Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer supporters that splits the Labour Party. ‘What terrifies me is not the different perspectives; the rage of each perspective, that’s the thing. But what do we do? Surely at the heart of liberal thinking is allowing constant debate. If we get rid of that, we’re just a bunch of fascists.’

Part of the trouble, says Taylor, is the deterioration of physical space. ‘We lost the mining families and all those women who would support one another,’ she says. ‘We replaced them with the youth centres, but then we closed the meeting spaces, the lesbian and gay spaces, the women-only spaces. So what are we left with?’ The Maryhill Bar (which first appeared in C+nto, and gets its own chapter in the novel) represents one such relic; a lesbian bar where queer women could commune, of which only one remains in London today. ‘We see a lot of fights within the bar, but when it comes to it, you stand as one.’ 

The tonic, Taylor argues, lies in restoring these spaces. ‘It won’t be in a sci-fi way with our heads in a pod. It’s going to be with bricks and mortar. It’s been the same message, whether it’s slam poetry, fiction, playwriting: come together. It’s the biggest antidote to cultural fascism.’

The Night Alphabet is published by Quercus on Thursday 15 February; Joelle Taylor reads at events across the country from Sunday 4 February–Friday 26 July.