Interview with Joshilyn Jackson

Create a Connection Interview
with Joshilyn Jackson, best-selling novelist
by Deb Richardson

Joshilyn Jackson (the "h" is silent) was born in the Deep South and raised by a tribe of wild fundamentalists who taught her to be virtuous and upright. Unfortunately, it didn't take, and Ms. Jackson dropped out of college to pursue a career as an actor. She worked in regional repertoire, but after a few years she realized that she preferred writing plays to acting in them.

After deciding both virtue and an education were worth the work, Joshilyn went back to college to study English literature, graduating with honors from Georgia State. She moved to Chicago and managed to recover from a near-terminal case of culture shock just in time to earn her MA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. Jackson taught English at UIC, where, in her first year of teaching, she won the Student's Choice Award for Best English Instructor.

After graduate school, she returned to her hometown and married the boy next door. She currently lives just outside of Atlanta with her husband, their two children, a basset/beagle puppy named Bagel, and a twenty-three-pound, one-eyed Maine Coon cat named Franz Schubert.

Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her first novel, gods in Alabama, was a bestseller and a number one BookSense pick. Her second novel, Between, Georgia, was also a bestseller and a #1 BookSense pick and garnered starred reviews in both Kirkus and Booklist, while the audio version (narrated by Ms. Jackson herself) has been featured on several "Best of 2006" lists.

You can read Joshilyn's near-daily musings on her blog, Faster Than Kudzu.

When did you know you wanted to pursue writing as a career instead of as a personal passion or hobby?

I don't know. I don't think that happened. It still hasn't. I've always sent stuff out---short stories and agent queries---because I wanted to be read, but I knew how competitive the industry was and I was mostly...playing. An actual career didn't feel like something that could really happen. It still doesn't. It always felt the same way buying lottery tickets feels -- I do buy them when the jackpot tops 100 million. Not because I think I'll win. I do it because the fantasy of winning is a pleasure.

When I first queried my agent, wanting him to represent my novels, I hadn't WRITTEN any novels or even a PIECE of a novel, just short stories and plays. Querying with no actual WORK is absolutely forbidden and ridiculous and a dumb idea and extremely unprofessional. But I repeat, I was PLAYING. I sent him a magazine that had just published a short story of mine, and I was SHOCKED when he said he would love to see my novel. I backpedalled, HARD, and said, "OH! UM! I just realized it needs a FEW MORE REVISIONS! HEHE! Can I send it to you in six months?" He agreed and then he said the dreadful words...

"WHAT IS IT ABOUT?"

I had no idea. I started babbling about snakes and a one-eyed grandfather and three sisters and a nativity play, taking FRANTIC notes so I could make sure the elements I mentioned actually ended up in the book I had to write. In six months. Then I sat down and wrote the book. Still PLAYING, you understand, and I about fell out of my chair when I sent him this cobbled together SNAKE BITES GRAMPA'S EYE OUT AND BLACK HILARITY ENSUES book and he actually took me on as a client. Even though THAT book did not sell (go figure!) under his mentorship I eventually wrote gods in Alabama, which did.

Has your background in theater influenced your writing career in any way?

Oh yes -- hugely. Writing feels a lot like acting. Character creation is the same internal experience. I always read aloud -- especially dialog. I also physically act out scenes and see what my body wants to do and what facial expression I make as I pretend to be my people. Sometimes I forget myself and do it in the car, and I will suddenly realize that I am shrieking and contorting myself at a red light while the guy in the next lane watches me like he thinks I must be off my meds.

On a practical level, it helped when I wanted to read the audio version of Between, Georgia myself. I had to send in an audition tape, and I knew how to audition --- I read some straight narrative, a humorous scene, and an action scene with multiple characters so they could see my range, stuff a non theatre person might not have known to do. Also I was comfortable in a studio from doing voice work. I'm grossly proud of that audio book. It's disgusting. Truly. Publisher's weekly just gave it one of their LISTEN-UP awards for the Best Audio Books of 2006, and I have been purely repulsive about it, dancing around and making my husband look at the issue every fifteen minutes.

I know you've said several times that location plays a huge part in the stories you tell, to the point of the location almost being a character in itself. Have you ever imagined what sort of stories you might have written if you had stayed in Chicago after graduate school?

Well, I did. I stayed in Chicago after grad school for quite some time, and in fact I wrote the snake-eyeball-bite book and another novel that did not sell while living there. I wrote the first little piece of gods there, too, but I moved home before I wrote the bulk of it. gods in Alabama is in a lot of ways about that culture shock---of being exiled in a foreign country like Chicago and then coming home years later to find the South has become the foreign country, so I think the move home triggered something that made the book better than my other books.

If a character from one of your books was to magically step out of the pages of that book and become a living, breathing person for one day, which one of those characters would you most like to meet and spend time with? Which one would you avoid?

Oh Lordy! From Between, I can tell you for double dern sure don't want to meet any of those trashy, violent criminal Crabtrees! Except Henry. I wouldn't mind meeting Henry, preferably someplace dimly lit and secret. I had a little crush. I HAVE met the little girl in the book, Fisher. She is VERY MUCH based on my amazing, brilliant, off-beat niece, Erin Virginia.

From gods in Alabama, I would want to meet the narrator, Arlene, both to smack her upside the head and also because I bet she's enormous fun to hang out with. And her willful, strong, unbreakable and unbending Aunt Florence. I do know several Florences in real life already --- almost all southerners who read the book recognize a Florence or two in their family.

What's the most interesting new thing you've learned in the course of doing research for your books?

For Between, Georgia I spent a LOT of time researching ASL (American Sign Language) and Usher's Syndrome (a genetic condition that causes a person to be born deaf and then go completely blind as an adult). My narrator is a Sign Language Interpreter, and her mother is an artist with Usher's Syndrome. I got all kinds of help from The Helen Keller National Center and the Georgia Deaf-Blind association to learn to write about a deaf-blind character with respect and accuracy.

Stacia Frett, the artist, started becoming more and more integral to the plot as I wrote the book, and I worried that I was making her TOO independent, TOO capable, and having her do things she would not actually be physically able to do. BOY, WAS I WRONG! As I spent time in the deaf-blind community, I realized I was SERIOUSLY limiting my deaf-blind character. My imagination hobbled my character much more than Usher's hobbles the people who live with it. People are amazing. We can adapt and survive almost anything---not just survive, but find ways to live richly and well and love and be loved.

Many of the people who will read this interview are writers. Is there anything you'd like to tell them that you wish someone had told you before you chose writing as a career?

Don't choose it. Just play. Write to entertain yourself and to understand the world you live in better. Write for the sheer raging pleasure of it and for that stretching feeling, that hard soreness it gives you in your brain. Of course you query, of course you try to place your work, but don't take that part seriously. Do that part like it was Lotto, because it is. Let all your energy go into the actual writing. The industry is a business, a job, and while you meet incredible people working in it, the job itself will never speak to you or love you back, any more than a job as an accountant would. The writing will.

When will your next book be hitting the bookstore shelves, and can you tell everyone a little about it?

It's called THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING, and it is set for March of 2008.  Between will be out in trade paperback this coming summer, and next Christmas, gods in Alabama will hit your local grocery store in the form of a mass market paperback with a teaser chapter of THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING in the back.

Even though it's more than a year off, I am almost done writing THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING and can tell you what its about as my editor and I JUST finished the catalog copy yesterday!

Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty, whether helping her mother make sure the literal family skeleton stays in the closet or turning scraps of fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts. Her estranged sister Thalia, an impoverished Actress with a capital A, is her polar opposite, priding herself on exposing the lurid truth lurking behind middle class niceties.While Laurel's life seems neatly on track -- a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna -- everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of her 13-year old neighbor Molly Dufresne. The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. Molly's death is inexplicable -- an unseemly mystery Laurel knows no one in her whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving. Only her wayward, unpredictable sister is right for the task, but calling in a favor from Thalia is like walking straight into a frying pan protected only by Crisco. Enlisting Thalia's help, Laurel sets out on a life-altering journey that triggers startling revelations about her family's guarded past, the true state of her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.

Speaking of characters you would -- or would not -- want to meet in real life....WHEW! I would love to meet Thalia. For about ten minutes. Then I would run like a rabbit!

You can find Deb talking about art, books, and life from her own unique perspective at her blog, Red Shoe Ramblings.

Comments

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[Delia]

AMAZING interview! Thank you both for taking the time to do it--so enlightening. I thought gods in Alabama was a fantastic book, so I am excited for the next one...
Love,
D.

[Laume]

How fun to get a tease about TGWSS. I have been carrying around a "mood" about it every since I found out the title, and it's not at all what I expected. Hmmm, intriguing....

And the "just play" comment. I'd forgotten about the doing it for the sheer pleasure of it part of writing - thanks.

[nyjlm]

that was awesome! What a fun interview- Joshilyn had me laughing, I could barely read it fast enough.

I'm definitely going to check out her books!

Thanks Deb!

[kristen]

this was just wonderful! and ooooooh! TGWSS sounds AMAZING - oh joshilyn, pretty pretty joshilyn, do we REALLLLLLY have to wait THIRTEEN MONTHS????? oh dear oh dear oh dear.

deb, you did a fantastic interview. it was very fun to read it all. of course, was i surprised? of course not! knowing both of you, i knew it would be FAAAAAAAAAAABULOUS!