TRAMBLINGS. . .

Following in the tradition I started last week, JOSHILYN JACKSON, author of GODS IN ALABAMA and the forthcoming BETWEEN, GEORGIA, is with us today.

A round of applause. . . and now. . . JOSHILYN JACKSON.


1)When you wrote GODS IN ALABAMA what did you know for sure going into the book?

I had a really good sense of Arlene as a character. I could hear her voice pretty easily. Arlene first appeared in a short story I wrote and sold to TRIQUARTERLY maybe ten years before I started writing this novel, and I'd thought about her on and off for years. I always felt that she had a secret, and that if I learned her secret, I'd probably write a much longer piece about her. The first thing I wrote ended up being chapter two in the finished book --- Arlene at fifteen, heading up to the top of LipSmack Hill to beat Jim Beverly to death with a bottle. I figured then I was writing about redemption. That's a natural progression for me. The character compels me to tell a story, the story as I tell it informs me what it is I am actually writing about. I am not the universe's most self-aware person. I don't think I could say, "Well, today I think I'll write a novel about how a person comes to gain an understanding of what unconditional love is, and maybe they can take two baby steps toward grace. Hmm, I'm going to need some crucifixion imagery..."

It's more organic than that. As the story unfolds for me, I do begin to see why my brain is producing it and how the thematic elements relate to my own experience. The story is often a processing or response to experience or my understanding of how the world works, but it bears no resemblance to my life and the main character is generally not terribly like me. As I work, I learn more about what's driving me to write this tale, and that's where craft comes in as I begin to make more deliberate choices to shape the novel.


2) Is there a single book that has influenced you more than others?

No, but there is a single writer who has. FLANNERY O'CONNOR. She's it. She's the stuff, the real deal.

3) Did becoming a published author turn you into a different kind of reader? How so?

Not really. I've always been a passionate reader and always wanted to be a writer. I began reading "like a writer" at a young age. I read once for pleasure, for plot and language and because the people interest me. Then on the next reading, I look for the how and the why. I try to get a sense of the craft and pinpoint the little man behind that curtain. Then I reread again just for the flow of it, to try and get an intuitive feel for how a good book is layered and paced. I don't understand all the people who freely admit that they do not read and then in the same breath tell you that they are writing a novel. I don't think you can learn to write if you don't read. I don't even see why you would want to write if you aren't passionate about books.

4) What about research? How does that figure into your writing?

I hate reading for research. I would much rather read novels. So I do about 90% of my research via interviews. I sit around having snacks and asking people all about their area of expertise. I'm a good listener, and people love to talk about the things they are passionate about.

Doing it this way, I have met some fascinating people I might not know otherwise. My novel that will be released in July, BETWEEN, GEORGIA, has a deaf blind character in it, and to write her convincingly, I started hanging out with Atlanta's deaf blind community. The main character is her daughter, so I began interviewing CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) as well, asking a broad spectrum of CODA adults to read chapters and scenes and drafts and tell me what was not ringing true. I was worried I would make my deaf-blind character too independent and have her do things that would not be physically possible. To my surprise, as I became immersed in this community, I realized I was limiting her way too much! My good friend Alice Taylor is deaf blind, and she lives with her husband and cooks and she takes care of her grandkids and is very involved in her church. Although she is nothing like my character in personality or looks or spirit, she showed me the mechanics of living richly as a deaf blind woman.

I've also found that learning through people instead of books makes me more empathetic. I get a fuller emotional understanding of how a scene should work. Right now, I'm talking regularly with a homicide cop. It's disconcerting. I kill off people all the time, you know? But it is pretend. Two people are killed in the book I am writing now, so I'll call him to ask a bunch of questions about who would come to the scene first and what would happen then etc etc. I remember at the end of one rather long talk, I asked him, "What would a human body feel like four hours after death, if the person was outside in a body of water in late summer." Then...he told me. I experienced hideous vertigo as I realized down in my bones that he could answer that question because he had seen and touched multiple bodies in those circumstances. Talking with him, as opposed to reading, has really changed the opening of the book. It's making me more respectful of the process, more respectful of the circumstances.

Eventually, I have to hit google and do some auxiliary reading, but I get as much as I can from human sources who have lived what I want to write about.

5) Are you ever surprised by your books? Your characters?

All the freaking time.


6) Have you ever considered a writing project a complete failure? How do you avoid that sort of thinking?

Well, sure. 75% of the short stories I've attempted are flat bad. I don't think in that kind of story arc. I guess I try to NOT avoid recognizing the hopelessness of a particular project. If it's bad, then it's bad. I need to be able to see that. I need time and distance to see my work rationally. I'm not a lukewarm person...with any work in progress I flip back and forth between wanting to set everything I ever touched on fire to cleanse the earth of my taint and making out with my amazing self for producing it. When the pendulum swings toward smug, I am FOUL. I prance around ululating in repulsive self-adoration. The next day I realize it's all tripe, and I consider a home lobotomy to make my brain stop telling stories because clearly I have no business calling myself a writer. I should be a newt farmer. Neither of those reactions comes from a real response to the work. It's just part of the process for me, this insane seesawing as I work a rough and tumble draft into a book I can be proud of. But later, when I have some distance from my work, I can be a pretty good judge of what's complete crap and what has promise. If it's a failure, if I genuinely don’t have anything to say, I think it's best to abandon it early and work on a story that will drive you harder.

With novels and plays, I've learned that things I abandon are often shades of a novel or play I then wrote more successfully in a few years. The initial attempt failed because I could not yet understand what the story is actually about. There may be something there, but I am not yet ready to write about it. My short stories are often permanently abandoned because I do not read enough short fiction. I barely read non-fiction, so I don't write that either. I have a love affair with the novel, and while I may flirt with the odd Quinn Dalton collection, I am for the most part faithful.


7) Have you ever been "given" a story by another writer? Have you ever given one away?

Yes -- I am BEGGING my friend Lily James right now for a story from her childhood about a crazy aunt, a pair of new jeans, and a dog. I hope a version of it will be in the book I am writing now. It's perfect. She owes me, because I let her have my "The Pretty Lunatic Theory" and the story that caused me to have a pretty lunatic theory in the first place. She sold the short story that grew out of her response to my story and theory. I have an odd and unrecognizable version of her husband in my current book, and she has a version of me in her current WIP (Work-in-Progress). Writer's lives overlap and we do tend to tell each other's stories. By the time I am done though, it's mine. Same with her. I don't think my own mother would recognize the "me" in Lily's book because I've been filtered so completely through her.


8) Are there stories that you, or your family, have deemed off-limits?

No. I don't think a family story would be recognizable by the time I was finished with it. There are very few things that make it intact from the world into a novel. Usually the true things are too odd to be believable in a work of fiction. There are very few things that were lifted from true stories in gods. I can only think of two: Phoebe the chicken was based on a real chicken. I had to really tone the Phoebe story DOWN to make it work in the book, and it's still one of the most over the top Southern Gothic elements. There's a story of how a boy died in gods, and it is loosely based on a friend of a friend type story I was told. This child's death haunted me. I kept dreaming about the randomness of it, how close his mother was, and she never knew he was even in danger until it was too late. Putting a version of it into gods was my way of laying it to rest. After I put the scene in, the dreams stopped.

I have an aunt who is convinced that I based gods in Alabama on her life because two years before gods was released, she began a serious relationship with a black guy (she eventually married him) and she sprung him on a branch of my older (and exceedingly racist) relatives at a party. She came to the launch and told people, "I'm Arlene!" But she doesn't understand the publishing industry---gods sold over a year and a half before it came out, and I had finished writing the draft and was revising it for almost a year before that. By the time I knew she was dating the guy, my agent already had the finished draft.


9) Have you read anything lately, specifically fiction, that just knocked your socks off? Share with us and give us the name of a writer whom you think has been ignored.

Yes, quite a bit this happens. I think MINDY FRIDDLE is astonishingly good. What a sense of place! Her debut, THE GARDEN ANGEL, blew me out of the water with its surety of language and its lovely heart. I still recommend that book to just about every book club I visit as a "What to read next." The last author you interviewed, Tayari Jones -- I thought her LEAVING ATLANTA should have been #1 on the NYT and stayed there. Talk about a perfect book... I think HAVEN KIMMEL'S first novel, THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY, deserved more attention. That book ought to be knighted, if not sainted.


10) Name a character in your writing that is closest to you? How?

It's frightening, but one character who I think is close to me is Arlene's Aunt Florence. I call her my steel magnolia with no magnolia. She's just a steel lump of steel molded into the shape of a dried up, bitter, borderline-sociopath racist. But in a strange way she is also me---She's everything I fear most in myself---my absolutism, me tendency to see Right and Wrong and ignore shades of gray. She's the person I never want to be.

It's not her worldview. I don't share that. Her racism, in the book, is a function of her generation. I was asking, "How do New South non-racists like Arlene and Clarice deal with the fact that the people they love, their parents and grandparents, are so deeply flawed in this unchangeable and fundamental way?" More personally, I was asking, "How do you love them?" How can you love a racist, when you know ideologically at the core of you how wrong it is. And how can you not, when they raised you and loved you unconditionally and kissed your hurt knees and soothed your broken heart so personally? It's something I've had to deal with, not THANK JESUS with my parents, who, much like Clarice CHOSE to find a way out of the worldview they were raised within, but it's been a big issue with my grandparents and with some other older relatives as well. It's very real to me, and very personal, and I tried to write about it with honestly and humor and not to flinch, and not to SOLVE it either -- it's not solvable. The storyline in the book ends in an uneasy but love-based truce, a little morally ambiguous. I hoped that readers would then think about the compromises they have made between love and justice, a balance I personally renegotiate almost daily.

So it's not Flo's cultural indoctrination that scares me and binds me to her. It's more internal than that. We share personality traits, and we are both mothers. Flo lost her son, and the world changed for her in terrible ways. I too am held hostage to the world in the form of my children. They make me absolutely vulnerable as they toddle cheerfully into traffic, convinced they are immortal. She is my there-but-by-the-grace-of-God self. I hope being aware of how alike we are will save me from ever becoming her, but I see a lot of her in me on my darkest days.

My husband tells me the main character of BETWEEN, GEORGIA is much closer to how he sees me than Florence. Thank God. I hope he keeps on seeing me that way. I like that woman.

Here are a few more links if you want to read more about Joshilyn Jackson.

Joshilyn talks BACKSTORY about GODS IN ALABAMA.

BOOK SLUT on GODS IN ALABAMA.

An INTERVIEW at SOUTHERN REVIEW.

MOMWRITES, a Joshilyn hangout.

An EXCERPT.

Until next time. . .