A survival story.
Not the tidy kind.
Joe Butler writes about what survives when a life is taken apart — and what we build with what remains.
His memoir, Dismantled, began five words at a time on a hospital clipboard.
Dismantled
What Survives, and What You Build Instead
MEMOIR
At twenty-seven, Joe Butler was diagnosed with stage IVa mouth cancer.
Sixteen hours of surgery rebuilt part of his tongue using tissue from his forearm. Treatment saved his life.
It did not put that life back where it had been.
Dismantled is about what came afterwards — survival, identity, family, grief, rebuilding and the ordinary life on the other side of the emergency.
How is the other driver?
Speaking from lived experience
SPEAKING & MEDIA
Joe is an ambassador for the Oral Health Foundation and speaks about mouth cancer, early detection, patient experience and life after treatment.
His talks draw on diagnosis, treatment and the less visible work of rebuilding afterwards — identity, communication, family and what survival actually asks of a person.
FICTION
Fiction by Isaac J Burns
Joe publishes fantasy and speculative fiction under the name Isaac J Burns.
The first public series is The Dusklight Keepers, beginning with The Light That Went Thin — a family fantasy adventure for ages 7–11.
Other Isaac J Burns stories will move into darker speculative fiction for adult readers.
LATEST WRITING
Before Any of the Rest of It, There Was a Café
Before the books. Before the hospitals. Before most of what came later, there was Butler’s Dining Rooms on Brook Hill in Sheffield.
A piece about family, memory, the café, the people who shaped me, and some of the things that get built into us before we realise they are there.
MEMORY · FAMILY · 15-MINUTE READ
New writing, book news and the work behind it.
Occasional emails from Joe Butler about new essays, Dismantled, speaking and what is being built next.