Craft Interview with Leslie Jamison ~ MENNA DELVA

Craft Interview with Leslie Jamison

MENNA DELVA

INTERVIEWER: What was the first book that made you cry?

LESLIE JAMISON: I think it was probably The Phantom Tollbooth. It was either that or The Red Pony, and I wish I could give you a more definitive answer. The Phantom Tollbooth was certainly the first book that I remember completely just falling utterly in love with and being utterly moved by. Have you ever read The Phantom Tollbooth?

No, I have never. INTERVIEWER:

LESLIE JAMISON: So The Phantom Tollbooth is about this little boy named Milo who is like totally, completely bored by his own life and one day he gets this tollbooth in the mail and he pulls it out of the box, and it comes with a little car, and when he goes to the tollbooth, it takes him to this kind of like enchanted land where there’s like a kingdom of numbers and a kingdom of words. I just remember feeling like, I mean feeling I think among other things even though I wouldn’t have said to myself this way at the time, that it was like a metaphor for reading itself: that you could sort of be lifted out of the tedium of everyday experience and delivered somewhere else. I think it struck some chord in me around being a child who felt like life was happening somewhere else... a kind of feeling of FOMO at a very young age, exclusion or outsider-hood. And then to feel like there might be ways that you could enter into experience... something as simple as the tollbooth you get in the mail. I think that’s the emotional chord it struck in me. So it was either that or the pony dying in The Red Pony.

And were these children books? INTERVIEWER:

LESLIE JAMISON: The Phantom Tollbooth is a chapter book for kids that I probably read when I was seven or something like that. And yes, The Red Pony is an adult book by John Steinback, but in my school, they had a sort of philosophy about having kids read adult books very early on. At the time, I think my parents were like, “Why are you reading The Red Pony?” But I actually think it wasn’t bad to be in this space where you offer yourself up to a book, and you aren’t exactly sure what it is going to do to you, and you can’t quite control what it is going to do to you. I think there is something useful and powerful about that.

So as a girl, what were your passions? INTERVIEWER:

LESLIE JAMISON: My passions were getting my older brothers to love me, for sure. I had two older brothers, and they were these kind of mysterious, godly figures to me. They were nine years and ten years older than me, and I really worshipped them when I was young. And because they were both quite reserved, I think I would often become passionate about the things that they were passionate about as a way of finding them because they didn’t make themselves readily available in other ways. And so I remember there was a season, and they were big fans of the Washington Redskins, and I remember there were a couple of seasons in the early ‘90s when I was like maybe 8, 9, 10 years old where I was a devoted football fan with them. It was a way of getting close with them. I was a big Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen fan when I was young, again, because I loved loving what they loved. I was a big Star Wars fan when I was young too. But I also had a lot of pets, and I really wanted to be a veterinarian for a couple of years when I was little. I also really wanted to be a fashion designer. I loved imagining all types of things. I would invent little imaginary outfits that I would also sort of make. Sometimes I would sew clothes or sleeping bags or things for my dolls, or I would also write almost like fan fiction. I was really into Nancy Drew, and I would write these sort of fake Nancy Drew stories with special cliffhangers.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe a typical writing day for you? Do you have an ideal place to write or a favorite time? What does that look like?

LESLIE JAMISON: Yes. So these days, I have a three-year-old, and I am a single mom, so these days writing is very contingent on when I have child care. So an ideal writing day is a day when I have a babysitter, and that’s the most honest way to put it. But I do think it’s important to put it that way sometimes because I think when I was younger, writing felt very contingent on inspiration, like this question of when and how would I feel inspired or when and how would the muse strike. Now it’s much more like when and how will I have an hour when I’m not taking care of my daughter and not working my day job as a teacher. So that said, I do feel really, really incredibly lucky and grateful that I am able to make those hours happen sometimes. And in the pandemic, you know...I live in a quite small apartment in Brooklyn and so just really anywhere else is usually a useful place to write. In a non-pandemic time, maybe there would be a little more range. I think having pressurized and limited time has changed my writing practice in a couple of different ways, and one of them is just being less precious about needing to feel inspired in order to write and more just like, okay, I have an hour. I am going to sit down and see what happens, and just come to writing with both a ferocious desire and a sense of gratitude and not in a like good-girl-I-should-feel-this-way-so-I-do kinda way, but just like, “I am really fucking lucky to have this time to write, so I want to show up for it pretty fully.”

INTERVIEWER: Right, and I understand that completely. It’s been a really weird and very busy year.

LESLIE JAMISON: And there’s both a lot of limits and also so much sameness. I feel like we’ve been lacking some of those like externalities like seeing strangers or being in lots of different places and spaces even within the same city.

INTERVIEWER: My next question for you is, in your opinion, what is the most beautiful word?

LESLIE JAMISON: Great question. I love that question. There are probably a thousand I could say, but the one that keeps coming to me is the word “ambushed.” And I think part of it is the word itself enacts a feeling of a turn or a surprise. I feel like “am” feels like a sound that is moving in one direction, and then “bushed” is a sound that comes in from another direction. But I also think I love it because, I mean obviously, there are forms of ambush that are violent and terrible, but I think some of the forms of ambush that I have been really interested in in my creative and honestly personal life in the past decade have been just these forms of direction or inspiration that come as a surprise. Like the project that didn’t work out because I was actively planning it or actively seeking it, but the kind of thing that surprised me from another direction entirely, which is like how I started working on essays in the middle of trying and failing to write a novel and, you know, I just love that way you can think a piece is going or is about something, and it surprises you by being about something else. I think ambush works for me on those levels as well.

INTERVIEWER: I think I have so many words. I kinda like plethora. I like the way that sounds. Or luminescent.

LESLIE JAMISON: Yes. “Loom” is a fun sound. When I was a kid, I used to feel really strong about the word “marshmallow.” In part, because I liked marshmallows, but I also think there’s something about the “shh” to “mmm” sound that is really kind of a fun turn too.

INTERVIEWER: I noticed from your first novel, The Gin Closet, your writing has changed from writing fiction to writing predominantly nonfiction. What caused this shift?

LESLIE JAMISON: Yes. So I always thought that I wanted to write fiction. And it was what I wrote when I was young. And, you know, these brothers that I worshipped when I was a kid, I would even before I could read and write myself, force them to transcribe my stories for me. So I think I really liked making things up, and my first book was a novel. But I think part of how I came to the essay was that I was working on a second novel about the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. It was a historical novel, and I had done all this research. I had this big timeline on my office wall that had all these photographs and dates, but I just couldn’t feel the pulse or heart of it. I felt so dutiful in relation to it, but I wasn’t truly passionate about it, and I started to feel instead like I had this deep passion about these essays I would let myself write or imagine writing, and some of them were personal, and some were more reported. Like I went to Tennessee to write about this crazy ultra marathon, 80

this one hundred-and-twenty-five mile race my brother was running, and I loved this idea that I didn’t need to invent everything because the world already had so much in it that was mysterious and fascinating and infinite and if I could show up and respond to what was already all around me either in my own life or in the lives of other people... that responding to that– what was already in the world– could be as illuminating as inventing things. It just felt less … it felt like engagement, rather than just being trapped inside the confines of my own head, and that felt really, really liberating.

INTERVIEWER: That’s beautiful. And you like to write about actual people in your life, correct? Do you ask for their permission when you do so? And how do they tend to react to that?

LESLIE JAMISON: Yes, that’s a great question. I don’t ask for their permission before I do it, but I do have a practice around my process where if I have written something that includes another person from my life, after it’s drafted but well before it’s published, I reach out to them and ask if they want to read a draft of the manuscript and have a conservation about it. A conversation about anything that troubles them or anything they feel like they want another layer of complexity added or something they see differently than me. And yes, basically reach out and say if you want to read it, I would love for you to read it, so we can have a conversation about it. So that’s my process around it. And I don’t kind of grant veto power--like that’s not really the way I frame it--but I do want them to have a voice. And often--not to be too rosy about it because sometimes it does create friction or sometimes we do remember something differently--but a lot of the times it actually makes the work better, because their perspective or the difference in their perspective adds another layer of nuance or complexity.

INTERVIEWER: Do you get writer’s block? What does writer’s block look or feel like for you?

LESLIE JAMISON: Yes! I absolutely get writer’s block. Often, on the micro-level, it feels like frustration and the desire to have a snack. I mean that literally--when I’m wrestling with something tricky, staring at my computer screen, I’ll literally start thinking about the snacks in my kitchen at that moment and often stand up to get one. These days, I’m trying to turn this into awareness, and even respect for bewilderment and frustration as part of the process, almost like talking to myself: Your desire to eat ten thousand cookies is a sign of wrestling with something difficult, and that’s okay! It means you’re beyond your comfort zone, trying to figure something out. It’s almost like the mantras I would tell my baby while I was trying to help her soothe herself to sleep. What do I do? I tell myself, just write something. It’s okay if it’s not any good. Or I set a timer and make myself write for 20 minutes and tell myself at the end of those 20 minutes, I can have a cookie. Or two. Or ten, or whatever. Honestly, also writer’s block is partially helped these days by having so little time--and I’m paying for all of it because whenever I’m writing, I’m paying for childcare, so I sort of have to throw myself off the cliff of writing even if I’m not feeling particularly inspired.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think about writing even when you aren’t writing?

LESLIE JAMISON: There’s a lot of time that I’m not writing– whenever I’m teaching, taking care of my daughter, watching documentaries about NXIVM late at night when I should be asleep– but I truly believe that all this time, in addition to being devoted to other worthwhile tasks– not the NXIVM so much, maybe, but certainly keeping my daughter alive!– is a fruitful part of the writing process too. Things are shuffling around in my brain, getting reorganized and re-ignited. Sometimes not being able to work all the time means that things bloom in the darkness or dimness of peripheral vision. A writer-and-mother friend of mine talks about something called “the mom simmer,” by which she means the ways her ideas and projects are simmering inside her when she’s doing all the other daily stuff– and I love that, like rocks getting shaken around in the rock-tumbler of daily life, and when you come back to them, there’s something different.

INTERVIEWER: What does your editing process look like?

LESLIE JAMISON: My revision process involves many, many drafts– four, five, six, nine– usually over many years, especially with personal narrative and with books. It involves taking time away from drafts so that I can edit them rigorously and ruthlessly but also with more love and excitement– often, I get saturated with a project, but if I give myself some time away, I can come back with more enthusiasm. Also, other readers! I have friend-readers who I’ve been reading and read by for years, sometimes decades, and their eyes and voices help me see projects in fresh ways when they’ve gone stale, or I feel dispirited– and help me stumble when I prematurely think I’ve nailed it!

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a book you believe every high schooler should read?

LESLIE JAMISON: I don’t teach high schoolers, but one of the books I do teach, that is, again, just the book that is coming to mind is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Part of what I love about it is not just the context of thinking about the relationship between racism and love in really urgent, beautiful ways, but also the craft and form of that essay. It’s more like in fiction. My friend, Heather, talks about the nonfiction novella. It’s kinda like a novella. But I love the way it has three pretty distinct portions, and one feels like personal narrative, and one feels more like reportage, and one feels more like a kind of criticism or thinking that rises out of both. But I love the idea that it could start with these personal memories of being a young street creature and kind of move from that into these, you know, extremely mature, complex ways of thinking. I love that he kind of gives this access to the child self that some of his thinking is coming from, and in a way, it’s like another way of thinking about forms of ambush or forms of surprise…the way a single essay might not go the way you are expecting and instead take these turns you can’t see coming, but they all build on each other and in the end, and you can see how. 82