Exploring Two Perspectives on Life's Most Challenging Narratives
My Story
I'm Joe - writer, Dad, cancer survivor, mouth cancer awareness advocate, and someone who has learned, the hard way, that life rarely arrives in the shape you planned for.
I was born in Barnsley and now live in Southampton with my partner Vicki, and our children. Family sits at the centre of most things I do; the choices I make, the stories I tell, and the reasons I keep going when life is hard.
At 27, I was diagnosed with stage IVa mouth cancer despite having no known risk factors. That diagnosis changed everything. Surgery, treatment, recovery, scars, fear, humour, grief, stubbornness, and fatherhood have all shaped the person I am now.
My Writing
I write because I want to make sense of what happened, but also because I want to leave something useful behind. Not polished advice from a distance, but the most honest version; what hurt, what helped, what broke, what stayed, and what turned out to matter more than I expected.
My memoir, Dismanted, grew out of that need to tell the truth properly. It is the story of surviving mouth cancer and rebuilding a life afterwards, but it is also a book about family, ordinary moments, love, fear, finding my identity again, and the strange humour that carries people through impossible moments.
My World
I am an ambassador for the Oral Health Foundation and speak about mouth cancer awareness, early detection, patient experience, and life after the treatment ends.
I also write fiction under the pen name Isaac J Burns, exploring broken worlds, survival, myth, memory, identity, and the difficult business of hope.
Whether I am writing memoir or fiction, I keep coming back to the same question; what do we do with the pieces when everything falls apart?
