Janina Matthewson is chasing her artistic dreams in London
From the Edinburgh Fringe to creating fictional universes for BBC Sounds, Janina Matthewson has found ways to chase her artistic dreams in London.
WHILE THE WORD ‘PODCAST’ MAY FIRST CONJURE thoughts of true crime tales like Serial and Black Hands, or perhaps interview shows hosted by the likes of Joe Rogan and Brené Brown, there are many other expressions of the format. ‘Fiction podcasting is an area that’s starting to gain more traction now, but it’s been around for as long as podcasts have been around,’ says Janina Matthewson, who moved to London in 2011 to chase her artistic dreams.
Twenty-five years ago, Janina was an adolescent entranced by acting at Riccarton High School. Now she’s a freelance creative who earns a living by crafting audio dramas and a range of other writing work from her home that’s a short walk from the River Thames. It’s a project-based life that mixes joy and struggle, freedom and frustration, often on a daily basis.
‘I really love the process of creating stuff, and it’s one of those things that kinda sucks because I have to remind myself of that all the time because I really hate starting,’ says Janina with a laugh. ‘Every day the process of starting to do the work is just the worst thing in the world, it takes me a long time to get past that, and then I’m like “Oh this is really fun”.’
Since 2016, one of Janina’s projects has been co-writing Within the Wires, a genre-blending podcast set in an alternate universe where countries have been abolished and families scattered. Each season (five so far) focuses on different characters and is told through ‘found audio’. Relaxation tapes may have a hidden message for an inmate at a mysterious institute; a series of museum audio tours unravels the disappearance of an artist; dictation notes between a bureaucrat and his secretary chronicle a political thriller set in 1950s Chicago.
‘I write that with Jeffrey Cranor, who co-writes Welcome to Night Vale, which was like the first really big, successful fiction podcast,’ says Janina. Within the Wires is a diverse, multinational production: its narrators have included British, American, Norwegian and Māori actors, and the main characters range across ethnicities and sexualities. A British composer provides the music, Janina writes out of London, her co-writer out of New York.
‘Jeffrey had already been working on Welcome to Night
Vale for a few years when we met and we started working on Within the Wires together,’ says Janina. ‘Since then, I’ve started writing more audio drama. I’ve written a couple for the BBC, and for Radiotopia.’
In January last year, one of Janina’s projects launched on BBC Sounds. Murmurs was a ‘magical realism’ podcast drama where everyday people were caught up in extraordinary circumstances after our world was connected to another. Janina had pitched to write an episode, then ended up as the head writer helping craft the entire universe of the story.
Talking to Janina after London came out of its second lockdown, she says her working life hadn’t changed all that much during the pandemic. Beforehand she’d occasionally do things like heading to Cardiff for a day to give suggestions during the recording of Murmurs. Other than that though, ‘I’m mostly writing and I’m mostly at home on my laptop,’ she says.
The reality of a creative life in London may not be as
glamorous, exciting or lucrative as many imagine, but Janina loves what she does. Getting to tell stories, professionally. ‘My family was always pretty creative in general,’ she says, looking back on how she discovered her passion for storytelling as a kid in Christchurch. ‘There was a lot of music in my household, everyone is musical to some extent. We went to church and did lots of skits and sketches when we were children, and I think as I got to high school age, I always knew I wanted to do something with stories, to do with language, because I just found it fascinating.’
Taking drama at Riccarton High was formative for
Janina, who says she’d gone from being a gregarious kid to an adolescent battling ‘terrible self-esteem’ while at the same time deciding she wanted to be an actor. ‘Which I couldn’t do at all because I was so embarrassed and worried about being judged,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘But then I kept at it because I wanted it so much. I studied it, took drama at high school, and I just think doing it more and more was good for me as a person. I had to get over myself in order to do it … I was very invested.’
She has fond memories of a then-new drama wing at Riccarton High, classes with Sue Jowsey, and being the lead in a school production (‘a post-apocalyptic teen drama before that was cool’) where she learned the impact small adjustments could have on telling a story.
‘Helen Moran, an incredible actress in her own right, came in to run our school production that year,’ says Janina. ‘It was at some point when we were in full-run stage rehearsals she brought in Martin Howells, who is an incredible director, and I remember him making these really small changes, but then the next run-through everything was different, because he’d picked at these tiny threads. That was really mindblowing for little 17-year-old me.’
Those lessons have stuck with Janina as she took on various arts and creative roles in Christchurch then London over the next couple of decades, from working at The Court Theatre to acting in short films, doing front-of-house at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to penning her own novel Of
Things Gone Astray (HarperCollins, 2014), then audio dramas.
‘I really enjoy that back-and-forth where you’re getting notes and you’re trying to make something work,’ she says. ‘I remember my first book when I got a note from my publisher I totally disagreed with. The way I’d written it I was very attached to, the way he wanted me to write it I hated, and I couldn’t see any way to make it work. Then I just did – I figured out a way to satisfy what I already had while bringing in what he wanted in a way that was completely different to how either of us had imagined it. That’s just so satisfying, and there’s nothing like that – that pushback and feedback that gets you there.’
The reality of a creative life in London may not be as glamorous, exciting or lucrative as many imagine, but Janina loves what she does.