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Between,
Georgia
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Between,
Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson
Author
Q&A
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What
writers have influenced you?
I read constantly and eclectically. Of course I am a rabid fan of
great southern fiction: Flannery O'Conner and
William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Lee Smith. But I can't read
them when I am working---a truly great Southern book like To Kill a
Mockingbird can put me on the floor, foaming and
biting at the carpet, yelling “WHY, LORD, WHY! WHY DO I EVEN
TRY TO WRITE WHEN HARPER LEE ALREADY SAID EVERYTHING WORTH SAYING
PERFECTLY!” So when I am working—especially when I am drafting new
material---I will read anything BUT Southern fiction.
My favorite contemporary writers are Haven Kimmel and Michael
Chabon. They can slay me with a single phrase. I like reading debut
novels in any genre, sci-fi, cosies, literary fiction, the kind of smart
horror Stephen King often writes. In gods in
Alabama
, my main character’s boyfriend is hooked on legal thrillers, and
that's actually a tick of mine. I also like cops and private detectives
when they are exceptionally well written---I’ll read anything by
Dennis LeHane or Lee Child. I think you can see the influence of that
kind of reading in gods, which borrows the same sort of engine that’s
used to drive murder mysteries.
As a kid I read weird stuff. I had an older brother who claimed
he’d glued all the pages of
Charlotte
’s Web together and he wouldn’t replace it until I agreed to read
one of his books. Then he handed me Conan the Conqueror. He got
me hooked on classic pulp at about 8 years old. I read everything Robert
E. Howard ever wrote before I was 10, also Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P.
Lovecraft, and Heinlein’s early space opera stuff. By the time I was
twelve I was reading back and forth between my dad’s J.R.R. Tolkien
and my mother’s Jane Austen, my brother’s Michael Moorcock and the
neighbor lady’s complete collection of Harlequin Romances (but she’d
only loan me the ones that were written before 1972, before the
guidelines changed and all of a sudden the characters went running way
past second base).
Have
you always wanted to be a writer?
Pretty much. My mother says that as young as first grade,
people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say,
“I’m going to write The Great American Novel.” And in the attic
she has quite a few “books” I wrote and published myself using the
“crayola and stapler” method.
Reading
was always my favorite escape---it still is. When I am reading something
good, people can enter the room, talk to me, put up wallpaper, commit
murder... I am not likely to
notice. Now I have son who walks into walls and tumbles down the stairs
because he has his nose buried so deeply in Lemony Snicket he can’t be
bothered by pesky old reality. I love that. Whenever I see faults in him
that I know he got directly from me---we both constantly lose things,
break things, we worry, we are frothingly impatient--- I say to myself,
“At least I was able to pass on my reading obsession! He got SOMETHING
good out of my half of his genetic legacy!”
I did spend some time working in theatre, mostly acting, but even
then my primary interest was playwriting. Except for the part about
being the greatest genius the western world has ever birthed, I’m a
lot like Samuel Beckett. Or, actually, a reversed Beckett. He wanted so
badly to be a novelist, but... He never caught Joyce, not by half. And
yet he is the best playwright to ever grace this planet, bar none. I
wanted to write plays, but I’d get twenty pages in, and 90% of what I
had written would be in italics or parenthesis, stage directions and
scene/character descriptions with very few actual lines. I’d realize I
was once again trying to stuff a natural born novel into a play.
Are
any of the characters based on people you know?
It doesn’t really work that way for me---there are no
absolute or even easy parallels. There are parts of me in all the
characters, and there are things in all of them that are absolutely
foreign to my nature, but I know how they work because I have seen
pieces of them in other people. Burr from gods in
Alabama
is probably closer to my husband than any other character is to a real
person in my life. I wrote a child as a central character for the first
time in Between,
Georgia
, and I can see elements of my son, my daughter and most all my niece in
her.
Sometimes odd little facts and memories and objects that have
personal meaning show up in my fiction, tucked into odd corners. For
example, I really do have an Aunt Niner, now deceased, and I stuck her
old rocking chair in Mama’s room in gods in
Alabama
. I don’t remember anything about Niner’s personality, her likes or
dislikes, and I can’t hear her voice or remember a single thing she
said. She died when I was a child. But I can see her big-knuckled hands
and her bony wrists and the hard lines of her angular face perfectly.
Aunt Florence looks like her, so much so that my father recognized Niner
from the descriptions of
Florence
.
In Between, there’s a little girl named Fisher who wants
desperately to be Jewish. This is actually a pretty common desire for
kids raised up in Southern fundamentalist churches. I wanted to be
Jewish so badly when I was little. So did my son when he was six. My
neice went through the same phase at five. It’s that
phrase…”God’s chosen people.” I remember the intensity of
wanting to be special to God like that, to be chosen, and here is this
abandoned little girl who feels anything BUT chosen, so the real
experience I had as a child snuck into the novel.
What’s
next?
I
am in the middle of writing book set in Pensacola, Florida, a town where
I spent a great deal of my childhood. It’s called The Girl who Stopped
Swimming, and it’s about this little frumpy stay-at-home-mom type.
She’s actually an art quilter, but she is too diffident to identify
herself as an artist. If
you saw her in the grocery store, you wouldn’t even blink, but we meet
her from the inside out. Inside her head is a whole different world from
the ones most folks see. LeeAnne has a nice average middle class life,
but she has an extremely high level of understanding and empathy for
others. She sees right to the bottom of people.
I love her voice because she was raised way out in Redneck country
and she never really got an education, so her vocabulary is limited and
her idioms are colorful. I have to use this limited, specific language
to try to describe beautiful and terrible things that she understands
intuitively. It’s challenging and exciting and as a bonus, she cracks
me up.
I tend toward an odd blend of humor and violence, and this book
begins when a young girl drowns in LeeAnne’s backyard pool.
In the fall out from that event, LeeAnne gets sucked into a
twenty year old nest of secrets that no one, not her husband, her
parents, or her friends, really want brought to light. LeeAnne, fearing
her own child is in jeopardy, calls in her hell-on-wheels blacksheep
sister Thalia for help, and the two of them go to war against the
willful blindness that southerners oftentimes practice and call good
manners. It’s an ambitious book, and I hope to God I can pull it off!
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