Hi, I'm Jill

Val McDermid said that characters don’t tell stories, writers do. And, of course, this is true. The characters are a writer’s creation, after all. But, my impulse to bicker with this statement comes from a difference in writer brain. I’m going to divide writers neatly into two categories: those who write to plot/structure, and those whose work is character-driven. McDermid, a mystery writer of intricate, layered plots, is the first. I’m the second. Is there overlap? Of course. Mysteries don’t matter if you’re not interested in the character, and character-stories die without a good plot. I’m simplifying matters to get to my point.

My point: my characters surprise me. They’re mine, I invented them, they are a product of my imagination, but they surprise me. During the re-write, one of my characters relayed a memory that startled me. I just sat there, staring at the monitor, re-reading her confession. I typed it, and so it came from my brain, but still, I wasn’t conscious of it. I didn’t deliberately set out to relay this memory. I’ll be sweeping, or booking bank statements or walking the dogs when I hear a conversation between two of them. That’s how it feels, like eavesdropping, like they have lives beyond what I have created for them. And isn’t that art? Shouldn’t the creation exist beyond the scope of the creator? Even, perhaps, from its inception. 

A couple of years ago, I had an idea I was excited about, and a character with a fascinating back story, and tension, and conflict, etc. I sat down to write her and she just wanted to sit in her living room reading magazines and smoking. It took weeks before I gave up on her. She wouldn’t budge.  For me, writing is less like being god, and more like being mom. I hope the best for you, I nurture and love you. But, in the end, your choices are as important as mine are. Read More

At a lecture by the poet, Jack Gilbert, years ago, he said that an editor had once advised him that perhaps his poems had big endings too often. I’m intrigued by that criticism. “The Great Fires” is a masterful book of poetry. I carried it in my backpack for years, and read some of those poems thousands of times. They fold back on themselves, the endings transfiguring everything that has come before. The narratives are mundane, philosophical, informed with the marvel of dailiness. They are meditations on grief, and meditations on love, and strangely, those two experiences are interwoven so that you cannot see the difference between them, which has always felt right to me. 

I enjoy the anti-climax. Patrick O’Brian, I think, did this better than anyone. The big naval battle took place some 100 pages before the end of the book. The story of the men, the struggle to command, the terror and bliss that is seafaring, these were the stories of his books, and the wild fights and adventure happened along the way. He wrote in the anti-climax: all the life that is built around the pivotal orgasm—the necessary reveal—the climax. 

Are these two things connected? The big ending, and the anti-climax? Gilbert layers his poems, so that you feel like you are climbing upward as you read them—scrambling a scaffold. Gilbert and O’Brian both narrate in the anti-climax, the human struggle to build and thrive. It’s a scale, is all. Heroism, yes, myth and allegory. The epic rages around us as we carry on with the business of living.

 

 

Read More

More than a decade ago, my grandfather told me that no one was going to pay me to sit around and write poetry, and he hoped that I had a contingency plan. I didn’t actually believe him. Why couldn’t I make a living writing poetry? Why couldn’t I cross the country, eating diner apple pie, discussing the Black Mountain poets, exploring the revolution of imagist language? 



I still dream about living in a cabin in Maine, spending my days gathering firewood, and lyrics. Taking hikes through some forgotten forest—without fences, or “No Trespassers” signs. These days I’m more practical. Now I write fiction. 



Here’s a poem from grad school. Last night, I woke myself laughing, and this poem was at the forefront of my mind:



 

Nosebleed





Your head is a pitcher tipped and tumbling.


A jeweler’s scale, garnet-heavy,

spill-slanted. A teeter totter

 

on its unsteady descent. Hovered above your face


like a prop plane, she’s drowning


tissues, the woven blue



 

of your sweater, her sleeves. At the ceiling


the fan shudders. Shatter, you think, 


she’ll shatter. Her staccato breathing. The brown



 

of your hair confused in her fingers. Your jawline


inventoried–this silver-hooped earlobe, that bike wreck


scar above your eyebrow. She wants to keep



 

this: hold you together. She is all palm, draped


over you, a collapsing tent in a sand storm.


Without hinge or pivot, her nipple so near



 

nursing, she’s a cradle. A determined rocking


horse. Her stance strict as a construction crane,

she’s a joist: her wound is yours.

 

 

Read More

If you had to define your childhood by three things, what would they be? On my hike this morning with the dogs, I thought one would have to be my haircut. It has always informed my world in specific, and powerful ways. But, I just can’t play through on that one.

My red dirt bike, my black dog, and the woods.

The first two are, no doubt, self evident, but the third is the one with sweep. I think of childhood as tree forts, and hikes to the creek and the orange clay pools. I remember searching for turtles and frogs, dodging rattlesnakes, watching an owl pull a mouse apart. I remember the wildness of our adventures, a stone’s throw from the cul-de-sac of Gridley Loop. The trail that roped into the cottonwoods, the fishing holes, the echoes of our voices at the canyon. 



I remember the exhilaration of experience. The iron taste of blood in my lungs when we’d sprint through the leaves. Skinned knees as we scrambled up the rocks. The light somehow hallowed.

 

 

Read More

For me, voice comes first. I see an incident—a girl dangling from an airplane, laughing—and I wonder, what’s that about? What’s going on there? I have to know more about that. For this second novel, I opened the door to a woman covered in blood, and I heard the question: “What have you done?” And that’s how it is. A voice, and the story comes from the voice. The voice tells the story. I have to figure out what the story is as I go along.



Plenty of writers don’t work like this. They plot, they draft, they outline. Me, I have a notion about the anti-climax, and I have a voice. Tone comes late in the process. My characters get funnier in second and third drafts. The humor initially is stark and incidental.



I’ve been stalling about the re-write. Not because it’s difficult, exactly, but because I have to do something cruel to someone I love. I have to clarify my intentions toward my characters and their stories. Intentionality, like tone, comes late to the work for me. It’s there in my head, and one of the last things I make clear to the reader. I write in concise visuals. I don’t spend much time explicating anything. 



It makes sense, of course, that tone and intentionality, when they come, often come together. Attitude and intention inform one another in my process. 



So I’m going back through brightening scenes, because nothing breaks your heart like love.

 

 

Read More

I am freaking myself out. When I was in elementary school, I decided to be a teacher—to teach History. That was the plan all the way into college, when I discovered that English Literature was significantly more compelling. My junior year I took this fiction/poetry team-teaching class. We had a fiction writer for the first half—a rugged guy who loved Hemingway, and for the poetry half—an earnest guy who wrote long, lush narratives. Literature stood on its head. I remember that. I remember sitting in class thinking: I can do more than analyze; I can create. And everything else fell away. 



I’d written stories and poems and articles from the time I was a child, but something about that class legitimized what I’d been doing. Made it feel less a hobby, and more a profession. I still finished with a B.A. in English, but I took more writing courses, and decided to get an M.F.A. 



The goal, naturally, was still to teach, but now I’d teach English and Creative Writing courses. My first year of graduate school, I taught English to advanced-placement seniors at North Central High School, and Composition to inmates at Airway Heights Correctional Facility. It was amazing. I had a buzz from it. The thrill of interacting with students, of being on the other side of language, of getting to be excited about the possibilities of diction and images and vehicle and syntax with groups of people who were suspicious of words and hated writing.



But I realized something else too. I’d never have a life if I taught. I’d be consumed with the passion of it. I’d pour everything into it, and be empty myself. I knew I’d never write if I taught.



When I graduated, I took a job as a technical writer. Later, I worked in an independent bookstore—closer to the life of an artist—impoverished and meaningful. By this time, I had a child and a book, and understood that passion requires balance, and that balance can be learned. I didn’t have to burn out like a flare. And this desire to teach climbed through me again.



I’m supposed to be working on my Curriculum Vitae for a teaching position at one of the local colleges, but I can’t make myself do it. I have the requisite documentation and my resume, and my desire, but I cannot get my confidence to cooperate. Why is this? Because I want it so badly, and the wanting has been sustaining me? Maybe. I don’t think there’s one clear answer here. But I do think that I’m pregnant with possibility, and there is power in pregnancy. Labor is inevitable, but can be forestalled, for a time.

Read More