Joshilyn Jackson

Rochelle Krich: Joshilyn Jackson, welcome to ReadersRoom.com. We're delighted to have you here.

Joshilyn Jackson: Thanks, I'm so pleased to be invited.

Rochelle Krich: You've written numerous short stories and essays. gods in Alabama is your first novel. Can you tell us about the transition from short fiction to novel?

Joshilyn Jackson: It was a very easy transition for me actually, but I don't really care for short stories. I very seldom read them, unless they are like Alice Hoffman's Local Girls, you know, connected and looping and creating something larger and whole. I wrote them because it's a great way to learn craft and to work within limits, but novels are what I read...novels are my drug of choice. They make my little red boat bob up and down all happy in the water in way other forms can't. So when I said, "Okay, I can do this, I can write a Novel," and tried, I found it much easier and much more...pleasurable than short story writing.

Rochelle Krich: Can you tell our readers something about your novel?

Joshilyn Jackson: Sure --It's the story of Arlene Fleet, a young woman who makes a deal with God when she leaves her small Alabama town to go to college. She promises she'll never tell another lie, she'll stop fornicating with every boy who crosses her path, and she'll never set foot back in Alabama. All God has to do is keep the body of the man she killed hidden. The novel opens ten years later, when that deal begins to fall apart.

Rochelle Krich: Arlene is a fascinating character. She made her first appearance in a short story, where she didn't play a central role. How did she evolve into the protagonist of gods in Alabama?

Joshilyn Jackson: She wouldn't leave me alone. She's such a TINY part of that story. A few sentences. But every time I would go back to work on that story, she would kinda glitter at me -- like a teeny piece of broken glass in a bif field, and the light is catching just right. I KNEW she had a secret, and I knew she was something big, a novel waiting to happen. If only I had known what her secret was...*grin*

Rochelle Krich: Tell us--really, tell me: what's a "bif field"?

Joshilyn Jackson: BIG hehe---I wish I would stop reversing my N's and my G's---I type very fast and very inaccurately with about 4 fingers and one thumb. My copy editor LOVES me. I give her SUCH job security.

Rochelle Krich: That's priceless. I can just see future literary critics analyzing Joshilyn Jackson's new term. What came first in gods in Alabama? Arlene and her colorful family, or the dead body?

Joshilyn Jackson: Arlene. I'll tell you how I figured out what her secret was... I at first thougit had something to do with her boyfriend---that was already a complicated situation because I knew she REALLY loved him in a "this is the man I want to have 1 million babies with" way and he is black, and her family, that she also loves (in spite of their MANY flaws) is racist. But that wasn't it -- she had something else going on. So I put her away for a few YEARS. And one day my best friend was over weeping on my porch. She LOOKS like Arlene, this little tiny, intense brunette and she had just placed second place in a novel contest. Which, normally, that would be a celebration, right? BUT, this contest...first place was a rather nice publishing contract and second place was a HEARTY CONGRATS! ...ouch! She was wrecked over it.. SO CLOSE! And she sat out on my porch and she said, 'LORD WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO???? KILL SOMEBODY?" and her little hands were fisted and her mouth curled up and I went...lightbulb! And I said, "Honey...you need to go home. Here, take this bottle of Jack, take these Godiva chocolates and go GET IN A BATH!" Awful friend, right? But she did, she went home (I owe her so big) and I went right upstairs and wrote what I thought would be the beginning of the novel: Arlene Fleet, creeping up Lipsmack Hill to beat Jim Beverly to death with a tequila bottle... Of course that ended up in chapter two, but I knew at that moment I had a line on Arlene and could write this book.

Rochelle Krich: Arlene is worried about her family's reactions to her black fiancé. Do you think racism is still alive and well in the South?

Joshilyn Jackson: It's alive and well all over this country! It's just that in the South we specialize in black-white tension. But racism is still a factor all over. I do believe it's getting better -- we as a country are getting better, every generation.

Rochelle Krich: Do you worry about the reactions of Southern readers to that aspect of gods in Alabama?

Joshilyn Jackson: No. Not at all. I think Arlene is pretty plain that her worry is HER family, not the entire state. And Arlene and Clarice, young southern women, it's not nearly the issue for them that is for their parents.

Rochelle Krich: You call Arlene's hometown, Possett, Alabama, "the fourth rack of hell." Does Possett exist? If not, what town did you base it on?

Joshilyn Jackson: Nope. Possett is my own invention -- I have a couple of novels and many short stories and a play set there. It's loosely based on a tiny town called Leighton which is near Sheffield which is near...some kudzu.

Rochelle Krich: Speaking of kudzu... That's in the name of your blog, and it's an element of gods in Alabama. Can you describe it for our readers?

Joshilyn Jackson: Oh Lord---you have to SEE it to believe it. It's an amazing, spooky, leafy, virulent, deep green unstoppable mighty vine. It climbs everything it touches and coats it and takes on its shape. You can see, in rural Alabama, these huge car shaped heaps of kudzu where someone abandoned a clunker and the vine got it. In the winter it goes to bones---just a lacey network of sticks and you can see the skeletons of whatever is shaping it underneath...creeeeeeeeeepy. Gives me the wig.

Rochelle Krich: A regional "Little Shop of Horrors?"

Joshilyn Jackson: Oh yeah. And so fast that you feel like every time you look away it's snaked out 15 more fingers.

Rochelle Krich: You mentioned your friend who placed second. What was your road to publication? Warner Books has made gods in Alabama their lead title....

Joshilyn Jackson: I truly wish I had not been making out with Jimmy Mack all the time in High School. I COMPLETELY failed typing. Oh Lord that's a long story. The short version is ... there almost never is a short version. If you want a career as a novelist, be prepared to become congenitally unable to hear the word no, and just keep working. You have to find the right agent and then he has to find the right editor on the right day when the market is doing the right thing for your book and your style. It was ...I said it was and then had to way to sum it up....It was...worth doing, seems like the best way to end that sentence.

Rochelle Krich: What about your friend? Did she get published?

Joshilyn Jackson: Sure did. Lily James. That's the other thing -- if you are writing good books (and yes, that's plural *grin*) if you are writing good books and you have a good understanding of craft and engaging characters and something to say, I really believe it is only a matter of time and not hearing the word the word no. You can NEVER surrender or say die, but if the books are good and you are unceasing, the stars will eventually align for you and the right editor and right day WILL come.

Rochelle Krich: I recently started my own blog, so I know how much effort it takes. Tell us why you began your own blog, and what you hope it will do for you.

Joshilyn Jackson: Well I started it because I am an avid, hooked, junky-level reader. And when I find a new writer I like, I often go seek out their website. But most of them were SO STATIC. The book info would be up, a bio, once every year or two NEW book info would come... there was no reason to bookmark and go back. I wanted my site to be bookmarkable, to have constant fresh content. Blogging seemed like a no -brainer. But something cool happened...I discovered I FREAKING LOVE IT. I limit the amount of time I can spend on it, and it jump starts my brain. By the time I close the blog and open my actual files, that place in my brain, that crazed soft spot that generates novels, is already all flexy and limber and wanting go. So it's been hugely beneficial. ON TOP OF THAT-- I get to connect with readers. That's awesome. Readers are --in a way -- why I do this. I say in a way because readers are not why I WRITE. I'd be writing even if I had never gotten a deal with Warner. I always have before. I always will. But readers ARE why I pursued publication for so many years---I have story--I'm a storyteller, I have things I want to say, you want ears for that. So. And the blog let's readers talk back to me immediately, so it's not this diffused theoretical relationship. It's amazing. And I've met SUCH cool people via Faster Than Kudzu.

Rochelle Krich: I love the blog name. How can readers find it?

Joshilyn Jackson: The other problem with not touch typing is I get intent on saying something and don't look up to see how badly I have butchered it until SEND is hit and it is ALL over....

Rochelle Krich: Like kudzu...

Joshilyn Jackson: Well the blog linked to the site in the main menu, and if you Google my name or other related things it pops up, and it's linked from MANY other blogs.

Rochelle Krich: Can you give us a URL?

Joshilyn Jackson: http://joshilynjackson.com/mt

Rochelle Krich: Great. gods in Alabama is a very Southern book. I was reminded of the wonderful novels of Eudora Welty. What Southern writers have influenced you?

Joshilyn Jackson: OH EUDORA OF COURSE! And Flannery O'Connor, I think that ones pretty obvious, right? She was the original MISTRESS of humor interspersed with great heaping scoops of black violence. I love her, LOVE her. And of course you have to read Faulkner and I love right now Cassandra King, Lee Smith, folks like that. I cannot read southern fiction at all when I am working though - it messes with my voice. So I save it for when I am lying fallow and then get STINKING drunk on it. When I am working I read hard boiled urbany stuff...Dennis Lehane and Heminway, manly man prose with guns and such.

Rochelle Krich: What do you think distinguishes a Southern novel from other novels?

Joshilyn Jackson: For me? Voice. It can be set in the south and not be southern.

Rochelle Krich: Let's get back to gods in Alabama. What do you like most about Arlene?

Joshilyn Jackson: Her desire for goodness. She's a flawed character but I think it's very telling that she falls in love with Burr. She's almost a flim flam artist, so agile is she with NOT LYING and yet never telling the truth. And she picks BURR? Burr sees through her every time, and he CALLS HER ON IT, and she loves him for that -- because he sees her clearly and still loves her. She wants to be called on it. She wants to be a good person. She fails a lot of times. Heck, so do I. But she WANTS it and she tries. That's why I love her.

Rochelle Krich: She's a compelling character. You make the reader worry about her.

Joshilyn Jackson: I worried about her too. I had no idea how it would all come out.

Rochelle Krich: She worries a great deal about keeping that bargain she made, and you also have other "stories" going on. Arlene and Burr have a game, "What do you have in your pocketses." Tell us about that.

Joshilyn Jackson: Ah that's one of my favorite parts of this book, the gaming. Arlene is a game player from way back, and I love how that is echoed in the literal games she plays with Burr---card games and poker --they always have a game going. Pocketses is an important one --- I love the moment in the book where the game moves out of the theoretical and becomes something the reader can play too. I can't explain it any better than that -- but reading the book is an invitation to play in a lot of ways.

Rochelle Krich: I'm particularly impressed by your fresh metaphors. Do they come to you naturally, or is writing hard work?

Joshilyn Jackson: It's play. It's absolute pleasure. When it is going well. *grin* But no, it's not work. Other than my family, it is the single most pleasurable thing in my life.

Rochelle Krich: Clarice seems different in gods in Alabama than she was in Little Dead Uglies. How did that happen? In that story she doesn't seem to like Arlene much, but in gods she's devoted to her.

Joshilyn Jackson: Oh yeah, she is not the same person at all. I knew that from the beginning. But I liked the name. It was really just the name that came from the story, as far as Clarice goes. I mean to clarify -- Clarice never GREW out of the short story Clarice.

Rochelle Krich: Interesting. You were an actor before you began writing. Did acting have any influence on your narrative style?

Joshilyn Jackson: It's the same thing. Really. Even in third person (and I have written more in third than first, although my first two novels published will be in first) the writing comes out of the same soft spot in the brain where acting came from. Character creation. I learned how to invent people from an AMAZING director named Yolanda Reed. She now runs The Loblolly - a professional theatre in Pensacola, FL. And I was an okay actor -- decent, but it really I think was a novelist stretching in another form, not acting. I can't light up a stage like a truly gifted actor can....but I could take the words on a play and make that person real in my head, and that's how I write now, I make a person in my head, and be them and see what happens to them.

Rochelle Krich: Which brings me to another character in gods -- Aunt Florence. Did you base her on anyone? Bits of anyone? She's tough, because she has to be, but the reader can sense her love for Arlene.

Joshilyn Jackson: She's me. She's me if I was broken and never put back together right. Florence is a lot more me than Arlene is. Really. Oh, but there is something about Arlene -- she TALKS like me, but I meant in essential nature.

Rochelle Krich: Arlene's humor that comes through in your blog. Don't you agree?

Joshilyn Jackson: Oh sure.

Rochelle Krich: Will Arlene and Clarice be returning?

Joshilyn Jackson: No, and I'll tell you why. No, I won't -- I would give away too much *grin* But I will say this -- I think Arlene's story is done. The character who glimmers for me in gods who is that glass in the "bif" field? Rose Mae Lolley. Her I may end up writing about again.

Rochelle Krich: She's an intriguing character. I'd like to learn more about her. What's next for Joshilyn Jackson? And tell us about your tour schedule.

Joshilyn Jackson: Well, I am finishing up Between, Georgia -- just doing line and copy edits. I'm excited about it...it's a harder book to sum up in a line than gods is. But it's very funny to me, and has probably a stronger love story in it. The tour -- LORD I am all over the South and then up in the NE a little -- you can see an entire listing of where I will be HERE: http://joshilynjackson.com/tourinfo.html

Rochelle Krich: Faster than kudzu...

Joshilyn Jackson: If I come close to you, come out and meet me, I'd love that.

Rochelle Krich: Congratulations on your debut, Joshilyn. And thank you again for joining us this morning at ReadersRoom.com! We wish you success in a "bif" and big way.

Joshilyn Jackson: Thank you -- my pleasure.




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