Jayne Anne Phillips just won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel called Night Watch.
She’s written six books and founded the Rutgers-Netwark MFA Program and this episode is all about her approach to writing.
Some lessons below:
It's strange what you don't forget. Those things are a key to who you are and what really matters to you.
“When I’m writing, nothing is going through my head.”
Your job as a writer is to listen to the work itself because it'll tell you what to write next.
Every novel teaches its reader how to read it. It’s a unique world with its own rules, rhythm, relationships, and way of perceiving reality.
Writing is fundamentally about perception, and it's the author's job to show the reader how they perceive the world.
What's unique about children is the way they formulate their own conclusions by looking for truths that are truer than the ones they've been given.
We are creatures of narrative. We think in terms of words and in terms of images.
Small towns are webs of secrets beneath the surface: There's always a world underneath the world, and children hearing adult conversations know this better than anyone.
Jayne tells a story: “Someone said to me once: 'When I read your work, I don't feel as though I'm reading about something. I feel as though I'm inside it.' That is exactly what I want the reader to feel."
Find your writing allies. Some will be living writers, others will be dead ones, but no matter what, it’s worth reading all their work.
Language is like music. Every word is a different note, and the best way to find the flat notes is to read your writing out loud.
It's all intensely meaningful, no matter how terrible life can be.
[00:00] Introduction
Table of Contents
David:
I interviewed Jane Ann Phillips, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for a novel called Night Watch. We dug into passages from her writing that are going to show you how she thinks about voice, character, and also the poetry of great writing.
As you listen, I want you to notice something. I want you to notice how many times Jane describes writing as a full-bodied experience. She sees the creative process almost like an archaeologist would, feeling her way into the hidden and mysterious world of her own novel. So that sounds cool.
How do you do that? That's what this interview is all about.
David:
I think a good frame for the conversation is, you say, "I'm often asked if writing can be taught." One cannot teach talent, but I fully believe that committed literary writers who teach fiction writing and literature can encourage, inspire, mentor, and instruct a new generation of novelists, short story writers, and poets.
Why do you say that?
Jayne:
I always thought that "Can writing be taught?" was a silly question. There's a lot of competition inside academia and many English departments, in order to survive, created MFA programs because that brought in a whole new group of people who were interested in reading as writers and in writing. Some of them might not have known that they needed to read as writers, but hopefully, that's what they're taught in an MFA program.
I feel personally that you teach writing by teaching literature. I tell my students that being a writer now is almost like being a member of a medieval guild. There were those times when monks wrote these illuminated manuscripts and only monks could read them.
We live in a time in which people read newspapers, signage, and on their phones, but very few people read literature for meaning. I feel as though if you're writing, that's the way you read. You write many times inspired by your allies, that is writers whose books are really elemental for you.
It connects to us in such a deep interior way.
David:
You started off as a trained poet, and how does that show up both in the output of your writing and the inputs now?
Jayne:
I don't know that I was trained, because that was way before graduate school. But undergraduate, I did take part in these poetry workshops. I learned to write, I think, by writing one-page fictions.
I wanted to move past the prose poem form to a real sense of fiction that's very compressed, but written in a very dense, sometimes metaphoric language, sometimes an ironic language, and the entire story being compressed into one page so that the story has a kind of spiral construction that moves out of the center like an oil well bursting or a circle of energy.
The ending has to be very definite. The last line should be perfect. It should create a kind of white space around it. The titles are very... It's as though there's the title. You read the title, you read the piece, and by the time you finish the piece, the title is transformed for you in terms of its meaning.
David:
Can you read this section of "The Wedding Picture" for us?
Jayne:
Sure.
Jayne:
Yeah. And this piece first appeared in Sweethearts, which was a book of 24 one-page fictions, and on the cover was this wedding picture of my parents.
So the title, "Wedding Picture." My mother's ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water under the cloth. Her body, in its olive skin, unfolds the black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth. My mother's eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals. Her heart makes a sound that no one hears. The sound says, each fetus floats an island in the womb.
David:
So, as you write something like this, what do you see now from a process perspective of writing something like this?
Jayne:
I can't answer that question, really, because when I'm writing, nothing is going through my head. I'm just focused on following it, following into the next line. It's sort of like one line inspires the next, or one line is so connected to the next. When I'm writing a piece like this, I would probably write the whole thing and move just a few little things around.
It goes from this to something about the father. One of the lines is, "My father's heart pounds a bell in a wrestler's chest. He is nearly 40, and the lilies are trumpeting."
And in the photograph, there are these lilies coming up behind them. So it's very definitely a description of a photograph. But as you can see, the metaphoric language is limitless in a way.
I used to have an exercise for my students where I would say to them, "Okay, everyone bring in their parents' wedding picture, or if they weren't married, a picture of them together." One student brought in a picture of the orphanage where he grew up. They would write the piece and bring the piece and the picture in, and we would just have a great experience with them reading all of these pieces.
We'd make a book of them with Xerox copies of the photographs and the pieces for each of the students. It's a good thing to do to try to describe a photograph that you know very well, that is, you know, the history, the 20 years beyond that photograph, the 40 years beyond that photograph.
David:
Tell me about this: "It's strange what you don't forget."
Jayne:
That's the first line of Machine Dreams, my first novel. And that's being said in the voice of the character who is the mother, the character who would have been my mother. It is very strange what you don't forget.
David:
Well, it feels profound. Beyond just being the first sentence, it feels like there's a lot of depth in that as an idea.
Jayne:
Well, it's a whole. It's this reality of we experience so many things. Yet she's saying that in the context of a very early memory.
Why do you remember this one thing and this whole kind of primordial soup of images and things that went on? It's so interesting, and it's a special kind of key to who you are, what's happened to you, and what matters to you.
David:
Do you feel like that strangeness is something that you're kind of in pursuit of, almost trying to surprise yourself and using a kind of strangeness as a compass?
Jayne:
Yeah.
Jayne:
I feel as though I'm inside the work, following the sentences themselves deeper into the material. There's not myself thinking about the material.
I want to be inside the material. Someone said to me once, "When I read your work, I don't feel as though I'm reading about something. I feel as though I'm inside it." That is actually what I want the reader to feel. I want them to be inside the material itself.
I mean, when we read a line like, "across the street," in your mind's eye, I cross the street. You are that persona. If the writer can pull you in deeply enough, you are experiencing that voice and whatever happens in the world to that voice, almost as though it's happening to you. You're responding to it in your own way, in a kind of unconscious way maybe, that you're not even necessarily aware of, but it forms the connection.
[09:45] Immersive Reading and Embodied Experience
David:
So do you feel like even from the beginning of a novel with a sentence, where you don't forget, even at the beginning with the premise, that sort of initial seed, do you feel like you're being pulled there and kind of following that whisper, sort of surrendered to the work itself?
Jayne:
I sure hope to surrender to the work itself. If you can get there, that's good.
David:
What does that look and feel like?
Jayne:
You're not thinking about anything else. This can happen to anybody—a car mechanic, a painter, a cook—so involved in what they're inside that they lose track of time.
That's the kind of thing that happens to a writer if you're inside the material itself, and it happens to a reader. We've all had that experience of reading something that's so intense for us that we lose track of time.
David:
Tell me about intense and obsessive reading. That seems to be something that you really value, something you've done a lot of. When you do that, what is that process like? How do you think about what books to read? How do you think about the actual reading, the reflection? Then we'll end with how it kind of infuses and makes its way, seeps into your mind.
Jayne:
We pick up our allies, and they might be living writers and they might be dead writers, but we read all of their work, and we read certain works of theirs many, many times. That's what I encourage students to do. Find those writers, find that work, and really get inside that work.
That starts with reading the book for just intense pleasure and then reading it again to see how it works, and then maybe reading it again and plotting it out on paper, almost memorizing the book, like writing down what happens in each chapter.
I've read several books like that, and one of them is Fat City by Leonard Gardner, a book that was 800 pages that he cut until it was just like a diamond. It's about wrestlers in Stockton, California in the late 50s. Many, many writers worship at the altar of that book. There are other books like that. For me, The Sound and the Fury is one of those books. It was a book that I carried with me everywhere all the time when I was writing Larkin Termite.
David:
Can you walk me through how to read Faulkner, how to think about Faulkner?
Jayne:
Just beautiful, right? This is a very famous Faulkner quote.
David:
"Because no battle is ever won," he said. "They're not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
Jayne:
Was anything true or ever spoken? Oh, Faulkner is just everything. It's his language, the world that he creates, the way all the books are connected one to the other.
There was this fake lost cause that was sort of drummed up during Jim Crow, but he was really writing about lost causes. And they were so sorrowful and so true only because they were lost. Thank God they were lost.
But he wrote about people and perception. Writing is really always about perception. You know, in that last image of The Sound and the Fury, when Benji is roaring because they're trying to go the wrong way in the carriage around the monument in the center of the town, it's because his perceptions have been shifted.
The way that we write, the way that we read, we're trying to show the reader how to perceive this world that we're writing about. Every book teaches you how to read it, right?
David:
What do you mean? You say write, but that's not clear to me.
Jayne:
I think each book teaches the reader how to read it. You get inside the book and you begin to see, feel where you are in space.
It's like you sit down in a chair, the chair starts revolving, but you keep your seat because you're so intensely in place. I want my writing to do that. I want it to be about perception itself and awaking perceptions around all the details, the time period, the characters. It's the elements of what you're doing.
David:
So how do you bring that to life? When you're writing about something in the 19th century, that's literally a different time, and you're trying to make it real. I know you went to the asylum and you took photos and stuff like that. You go home to West Virginia. What else do you do in research first to make a place, a time, a people, a culture vivid to yourself, and then to translate that onto the page for your readers?
Jayne:
You just simply are kind of preparing yourself by doing the research. But you're not just thinking the research. It has to be sort of more embodied, more whole body, but again, it's about perception and the fact that fiction is a form of time travel. I don't consider myself a historical novelist at all. All of my books take place in different times, but it's because that was the time or the place for this story, this narrative.
So it was very daunting to try to write a book about the Civil War. But I felt I had to go there because I'd written about these two civil wars between north and south, you know, in Vietnam, in Korea. But we had this whole cataclysmic war between north and south, and we still live in its shadow today. And I had to find my way in, feel my way in.
And when I wrote the beginning of Night Watch, it's this scene where this 12 year old child who has sort of been the only adult in her family for the past couple of years, her mother is so traumatized that she's now mute and she's being hustled into this buckboard by the man she's been told to call Papa. And he says, we're taking her for her rest and cure.
And I wrote that first section and they were just there, their voices, the way they were talking to each other, the subtext, this very scary subtext between what they're saying to each other and what he's saying to her. The natural world felt as though it was real inside that piece. And at the end of that, I think it's 10 or 20 pages. Okay, now what? I had no idea. I mean, obviously they were going to the asylum, but I don't plan the book out.
David:
So there's a kind of surprise, a kind of mystery to what you're creating.
Jayne:
Well, the whole book is a mystery to me, but of course that's a little bit disingenuous because I've been thinking about this book for 10 years.
And in Night Watch, I did have periods of time where I stopped writing because I didn't know where I was going. And in those periods of time, I would sort of fall back into the research and do more and read more. I mean, I have shelves and shelves of books, books of photographs, diaries, letters, and scholarly books, you know, about the region and just sort of every aspect.
David:
So what do you do when you feel that sense of stuckness?
Jayne:
Is it.
David:
Some people panic, some people get really frustrated and mad at themselves. You feel remarkably at peace with it?
Jayne:
No, I don't know. There's always a lot of fear. I mean, writing is like walking a tightrope without a net. I used to tell my students that writing, if it's sort of like the spaceship movies where they're in outer space and somebody's on the outside of the ship in this silver suit and they're trying to fix something and they're attached by a little line, but then the line breaks and they just drift off for eternity.
That's kind of what writing is. That's a metaphor about writing. And another metaphor is writing is like you put on this asbestos suit and you walk straight into the flames, and the asbestos suit is writing itself.
[19:49] Writing as a Dangerous High-Wire Act
David:
So back to the question about stuck. You said, I feel a sense of fear. What happens when you get stuck?
Jayne:
Well, as I said, sometimes I just wait. Either life is demanding so much of me that I can't write, or I'm at a point where I don't know where I'm going next.
With this book, in particular with Night Watch, I went back inside the research. I also feel as though you finished the work for the day. And the next day, if you don't know where to go, you read that work again. You read that page again. And if you still don't know where to go, you go back 10 pages and you read those 10 pages.
If you still don't know where to go, you go back to the very beginning and you read through to where you are. That's how you know what to write next, because you have to be inside the material.
That's a certain way of looking at it and a certain way of writing. There are a million ways, but for me, for what I want to do, and I suppose for the way that I teach, I can only teach an approximation of my perception of writing. Where you need to go is inside the work itself.
David:
What does it mean to edit with your ears? In 2002, you wrote this teaching philosophy statement, and that's what you say in there: edit with your ears.
Jayne:
Because language is a music. If you read the work out loud—I can tell by reading it in my mind—if you read the work out loud, you can tell where it goes off. It's like a flat note on a piano. It should just work inside its own music.
When we're reading as editors, we're looking for that spot where it goes off. Hopefully there's something there to begin with. You've got to be at a certain point for this method to work. You're listening for the work itself to know where to move in the work.
David:
One puzzle that's emerging is you're talking about the importance of being inside the work of art itself, but for so much of your career, you had real demands of teaching and you weren't able to write all the time and weren't always a full time writer. How did you...? I'm surprised that that is such a uniquely important part of how you think about writing, given that particular set of constraints that you face.
Jayne:
Well, I am just doggedly persistent. I do not give up. That can be a thing people do not like about me personally, but especially because writing is so interior, that's something that I can work with in myself.
I've never thrown away a book, and I think I've only maybe thrown away one story. Once I start something, I feel this need to see it through because I feel it's there. I'm just not seeing it. So it's about trying to get there, get inside, and see what I'm doing.
David:
How have you cultivated peers to help you with writing in terms of who you're learning from? Just the people that you surround yourself with, because I know that you tell students that that's important.
Jayne:
Well, you don't cultivate them; you just run into them somewhere. One of the great things about MFA programs is that one can meet two or three people in that group who you will know all your life, who can be readers for you.
There's a particular person who's been my reader for years and years. I actually met her in a childbirth class.
Oh, wow.
I was having my first child, she was having her fourth, and we became friends. I realized that she had been involved in an MFA program, which she sort of didn't finish for many years because of all these children.
But she was a brilliant reader, and she is a brilliant reader. She has been an editor and a film editor. She really knows my work, so I always send her everything. I've had editors who have been very, very important, who've been with me through two or three books.
David:
What makes for good poetry?
Jayne:
What makes for good poetry?
David:
Yeah. As you're writing it, how do you kind of pull the yarn out to create good poetry?
Jayne:
Oh, I don't think that I'm creating poetry, but I'm a reader of poetry. I'm in awe of people who are poets, and I find it very important to read poetry. My son is a poet.
Oh, wow.
He published a book of poems about two years ago. So somehow, I managed to raise two kids who are in the arts.
I don't write poetry, but I suppose I use a kind of poet's composition process in the writing of fiction.
David:
In what way?
Jayne:
Just writing line to line and thinking about the internal rhyme, the sounds of the words, the way to the syllables, the way the line sits on the page. It's kind of part of it.
David:
Can you read this from Machine Dreams? I want to hear you talk about it, what you're going for.
Jayne:
"The fields surrounding the house were full of light. Scrub grass grew tall and the milkweed stalks were thick as wrists. Wild wheat was in the fields and the crows fed wheeling in circular formations. Milk syrup in the weeds was sticky and white. The pods were tight and wouldn't burst for weeks."
This is a description of the fields behind the house in Machine Dreams, which is based on the house I grew up in, which my father built. That is, he was the foreman of a work crew that built this house. It was his design. It was surrounded by acres of land. Our yard was an acre, and it had a fence. Then there were three fields and a creek, and then these tall hills beyond hills. This is a description of the fields in the summer.
There's a compression. Stalks were thick as wrists, so you really see that. And the milk syrup, which is sort of sweet, sticky, thick, viscous, sticky and white. The pods were tight. It wouldn't burst for weeks. It's very sexual. It's very natural. It's the power of the natural world there long before we were.
David:
When you were writing Night Watch, you went back and studied 19th century Appalachian speech patterns.
Jayne:
Yes.
David:
Tell me about that.
Jayne:
Well, I read books written at that time, and I think in the acknowledgments to Machine Dreams—I mean, acknowledgments to Night Watch—I mentioned some of these books. There was one four-volume set of books on the Civil War that took year one, year two, year three, year four of the war. And these books were composed of letters from generals, from infantry, from women in the South, women in the North, trying to live through the war. And the way they spoke just kind of—I wasn't sort of looking for things or writing things down. It was just sort of sinking in.
David:
It washed over you.
Jayne:
Just let it wash over you. Yeah. Films that we've seen that are convincing about that period of time, books of photographs. Photographs have always been very important for me.
David:
I can tell.
Jayne:
Yeah, family photographs. And I have so many beautiful books of Civil War photographs. That's why in Night Watch there are photographs and documents that I got from various archives that are inside the book.
I have a PowerPoint where you're able to see these images very big on a big screen. When I do readings and events, I often show those images because they just speak in a way that is beyond speech. You know, we're looking at something that was real.
If you think about the simultaneity of time, Bergson's theory, the simultaneity of time, that past, present, and future coexist, all existing at the same time. The fact that something is real means it's real forever, as long as we can apprehend it. So that's how I feel about photographs.
[30:46] Civil War Photos and Time's Simultaneity
David:
And why do you say that writers are like the conscience of a culture?
Jayne:
Because we think about what happens afterward.
Art is always about saving what might be lost, what will be lost. I feel that very much about my writing and about almost any writer I can think of.
Unless you write it down, it will be lost. That might start with the first novel, is often sort of the most autobiographical work. It starts with saving that world that's gone.
But anything you write, you're finding something, you're inventing something, you're listening to something, you're inside something. Unless you write it to the end, all of it would be lost because it's a particular vision, and we need all of that. We need all of those books.
David:
So do you feel like you were born with, like, a hyper sensitivity to language itself?
Jayne:
I was a very early reader, and I lived out on this rural road, and I read obsessively.
Little book clubs that my mother would join for me—the mailbox was out at the end of the driveway, and they would come to the mailbox and go out there and get them.
I've written an essay in which I describe my father. He had all these little paperback books that kids weren't supposed to read with naked women on the cover and guns. He kept them in this cupboard that was—you had to stand on the bathroom counter to open the door and reach into that cupboard, which I did, to look through his books.
I happened to find one day a copy of Rabbit Run, a mass market copy with a kind of naked woman on the cover. It was clearly the mass market edition of the book. My father probably bought it by mistake, who knows? He's like Mickey Spillane, that kind of thing.
I opened this book to the moment in the book that Janet, drunk, is bathing her infant in the bathtub. Because she's drunk, she loses her grip on the baby. It just completely blew my brains apart.
I remember looking out the window and seeing the lilac bushes, as though—but they didn't even look like lilac bushes. I was just so blown away by reading that, and I was about nine or 10.
David:
Do you feel like in that moment you were blown away because the scene was moving, or you were astonished that writing itself can move me like that, or was it like, I want to do that for my career?
Jayne:
I wasn't thinking anything. It was simply the power of reading that. My way of thinking about it was, my mother would never do that. My mother would never lose her baby in the bathtub.
But the power of making that real—I'm describing afterward what was happening, because at the time, I wasn't thinking about anything. I just was like, wow. And I didn't read the rest of the book; I had to put it back. Of course, I read it later.
David:
I think it's so funny that I keep asking you about thinking, and you're like, I don't think I have a felt experience.
Jayne:
I think constantly to my own detriment. I can't stop thinking. I have a rev, rev, rev brain that goes on and on and on. But in the act of writing, it's a different experience. I'm not thinking then.
David:
Why do you write so much from the perspective of children?
Jayne:
One of my early mentors and idols was James Agee. His book, A Death in the Family, is still one of the most important books for me. And I love the way that he wrote from a child's point of view. That book is the story of his life.
He was such an interesting being that he wrote exploratory works in so many different genres. He was the first movie reviewer. He wrote a book of poems. He was the first journalist. He did Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with Walker Evans, another absolutely deathless, necessary book.
He spends two pages writing about a handmade wooden chair in that book. And Faulkner also wrote about children from a child's point of view. I just feel as though children are the ultimate outlaws.
David:
Outlaws?
Jayne:
Yeah. They don't see anything in context; it's all new. It's sort of a beginner's mind, a Zen mind. So inside a child's point of view, if you can write it well, unbelievably, it does something no other voice can do.
David:
Children, they're the ultimate outlaws, and you said that as if that's a really important thing. I want to write about outlaws. What's going on with that writing?
Jayne:
Can't be afraid of anything. I used to tell my students your only responsibility is to write with compassion. The compassion has to come into it. You can't hate your characters.
Beyond that, you have to just tell the truth, no matter how it might hurt people who think you're writing about them, because of course you're not. The minute you start to write about someone, it's not that someone.
David:
What do you mean, the minute you start to write about somebody, it's not that somebody?
Jayne:
No, not if you're writing fiction.
David:
What does that mean?
Jayne:
It just means that if you're going to move into the world of character, you're not simply writing about somebody. You're inventing a new reality.
It might have been inspired by someone you knew, or something about someone you knew. I mean, certainly when I was writing my first novel, I was thinking about my father and my mother, and hopefully I approached the deeper reality of who they were, who they are.
You can't think about how people will react to your work. Because the minute you think about an audience, because some people say, think about your audience. The editors are saying books about this are doing well, or something like that. You can't think about your audience because that immediately cuts you off from what's really happening, which is the book that you're trying to write.
David:
On the point about children, you say children formulate their own rules. They look for a truth that is truer than what they've been given by their parents or society, which is often some screen to push down secrets.
Jayne:
Exactly, a screen to push down secrets. That's the culture I grew up in, and there are many permutations of that culture. My husband's Jewish, and he would certainly say many things weren't talked about.
But in that world, it was a small town. I think small towns are so interesting all across America. Small towns have certain things in common. I'm not talking about suburbs or really small towns that are out in the land somewhere that have these physical worlds that are very specific. It is a world in which people know each other's stories back generations.
Especially for a child who's sort of hearing adult conversations and being aware of gossip or whatever, there is this sense of a world underneath the world, a sort of web of secrets. Of course, that's true. That's true about the element of life itself.
You look at it at the molecular level. We're not aware of any of that, the way that the molecules of that table are moving. So it's kind of as above, so below, you know, that ancient proverb saying, as in our daily lives, so with eternity. As in our daily lives, so with death.
I used to tell my students too, that writing is practicing for death. It's practicing for death because you're trying to write about transformation, that there is a transformation involved from the thinking and the wanting to actually writing. You're involved in transformation in the act of writing.
[41:27] Small Towns and Hidden Histories
David:
You said it's practicing for death.
Jayne:
And we do need to practice. I mean, I want to be aware.
No one knows what the circumstances will be, but this is sort of the big transition. We don't remember birth, at least not consciously. I just find it very interesting.
David:
I pulled this quote, which I'd love for you to read. 12-year-old girl speaking to her mute mother. And I think this kind of brings together some of the themes that we've been talking about over the last little while. Children voice.
Jayne:
Well, this is the character Papa. She's been told to call this character Papa, and he has been occupying their home for almost three years. During that time, her mother has become so traumatized that she is mute.
One day, suddenly, they're in the buckboard on the way to the asylum. They're on the way, and he's saying this to Connolly: "Talk to her," he said. "Tell her she'll like it where she's going. A fine, great place, like a castle with a tower clock. Tell her, you'll like it, Mama," I said. "A fine place, like a castle built from stone."
Of course, she's never seen this place, and she doesn't know where they're going. At the end of this section, something happens that we won't reveal here.
I think all of my books were preparation for writing this book, in a sense. A friend of mine told me, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, we were somewhere together, and I mentioned this book or this idea about a mother and daughter who go to an asylum. I don't remember that at all. I must have been thinking about it for a long time.
I grew up; the small town I grew up in was about 20 minutes from this asylum. It was a real place in my mind, although at the time that I knew of it, it was a ruin. Part of the research with the book was going back to that place as it existed in the beginning, during, and after the Civil War, when it was a very, very different time, place, world.
David:
So how does an idea transition into a book? Do you make a decision: "I'm going to write a book about this?" Or do you just write every day?
Jayne:
No, I don't even write every day. I write in spurts, almost for weeks or months at a time when I have the space.
As I said, I worked on this book for about eight years, and there were times in which I would stop writing for months. I retired from my day job in January 2020, which was a convenient time, right before the pandemic.
David:
Yeah.
Jayne:
There was something about what was happening to everyone. There was no cure, things were deserted. This book almost became my refuge in the way that the asylum becomes a refuge, a surprising refuge for Eliza and Connolly.
The irony at the heart of the book is that the world was violent chaos, and inside this place, there was something else.
Everything was reversed. It did feel like a complete reversal of what life is, with what we thought life was. Somehow, in that period of time, I was able to finish the book.
David:
Tell me this: what's going on here? Why do you write by hand? I saw some stuff out.
Jayne:
I don't even know what that's from.
David:
Well, just more generally in terms of this is pretty standard for how you write.
Jayne:
I write in a notebook. I never really learned how to write cursive, so my writing is sort of printing that you can do very quickly.
I have written a few things about hair salons because there are places where, when I was a child, women gathered. As a child, I was an outlaw inside this gathering.
It's sort of like the physical, the sensory element of church: the red carpet, the pews, the huge organ pipes, the stained glass windows. That world is so impressive and never to be forgotten for a child.
This world, with the heat in the air and the running water and the suds, these women talking to each other in a way that they know no one can hear them, was a real look through a keyhole into the adult world, the world of women.
David:
It seems like you had a very vivid childhood that you've spent a long time really making sense of.
Jayne:
I don't know. I was always looking for something: the truth and also just the beauty of it. I wasn't thinking of it as beauty, just the way things were. I wanted to, and later on as a writer, I wanted to really make the work real. A lot of that had to do with sensory detail and physical descriptions being very clear.
There is this magical quality to it, a magical quality for me to language, to the way people use language, to the way certain writers who've become so important to me use language. It's just really a privilege to be involved in that attempt.
Writers do think a little differently, whether that's practicing for death or embodying transformation. In a way, it's a real statement of faith, not religious faith, not the faith that everything's going to turn out great, but the faith that life is meaningful, that it all has meaning. Because if it didn't, why would we be finding meaning?
That is, I think, one thing that we talked about: writers writing so that worlds aren't lost. If this life and all of these nameless, forgotten people—if you just think of it as a huge field of moving tall grass—it's all just anonymous. It's just moving.
Each person is a kind of historical genius in that each person is completely separate, and their experience, their traumas, their healing, if it happens, they're moving through their lives. It means so much.
That's what writing, and particularly writing, I think, because we are creatures of narrative. We think in terms of words, we think in terms of images, past, present, future, fantasies. It's all intensely meaningful, no matter how terrible life can be. I just think that's kind of miraculous.
[51:13] Writers, Language, and Meaning of Life
David:
It's good to meet you.
Jayne:
Good to meet you.
