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“Some Cause for Wonder”: An Interview with Jac Jemc

Interview by Megan Giddings July 20, 2015

The writer whose story Jac Jemc picks for her week–July 20-26–will receive a Jac Jemc prize pack (some of her books and a book or two that she likes)!

 

If you had to teach someone about telling a story only using music videos, which ones would you choose?

I love this question so much, and am so terrified by it because I tried to write music video treatments freelance once and never had one picked up. Specifically I remember writing really awful ideas for Blues Traveler and the country singer Jamey Johnson. I don’t think I usually evaluate music videos for story, so I thought about this for a while and it seems like the narrative videos I like also have a lot of production value drawing the viewer’s attention to the artifice of the narrative they’re watching. I love that, with a music video, there can be such a gap between what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing, and depending on your own habits, you might try to make sense of that connection or not. It can be tough to accomplish the same in writing. Music videos often seem to follow more of a dream logic rather than a a more traditional narrative. I fear my choices are going to reveal my age and the time in which music videos were really starting to stick with me. Foo Fighters’ “Everlong.” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.” Bjork’s “Human Behavior.” Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight,Tonight.” That love for the dream logic and artificial production values is probably traceable to my fiction ultimately.

As a multi-genre writer (short fiction,novels, essays, poems), how do you choose a form when you’re inspired? 

I wish I could say there’s a science to it. Essays feel like a totally different beast, and it always feels clear that something’s an essay when I begin working on it. The other three are more interchangeable for me. A lot depends on how I can get the piece to a point where I’m happy with it. I often start stringing together language in a way that looks like jemc-facelittle fragments or poetry. If I want to fill in the gaps, it might start to look more like a story, but if the piece seems to make sense with some space in it, then it might stay a poem. Novels might be a poem and then a story and then keep growing until they’re novel length, which is what happened with My Only Wife, but the last couple novels I’ve been working on, I’ve been pretty sure they were novels from the start. I knew the idea would take time to unfold.

What does a story’s first paragraph need to keep you hooked as a reader? 

I like some cause for wonder. Maybe it’s clear some piece of the puzzle is missing that will take some unraveling.  Maybe something is off about the voice and I want to try to figure out the logic. Maybe I’m told the ending right away but I want to figure out how we got there. I like to have a question in my mind from the start.

What are you currently working on? 

I’m trying to write more nonfiction because I’m reading so much nonfiction I’m excited about and I want to see if I can do it, too. That’s how I started writing fiction and poetry, as well. I’m also working on two novels: a haunted house story that I hope to be finished with soon and a historical fiction set in 19th century Bavaria which I haven’t finished the first draft of.

A story of yours I love is “The Wrong Sister.” It’s uncomfortable, filled with great sentences, and is incredibly memorable. Can you talk more about the process of writing that story? I’m especially interested in how you chose the point of view. 

DifferentBedEverytimenewlargeOh thanks! I wrote the first draft of that story on a plane from Bangkok to the US for a reading I was set to do that evening. I never ever leave things until the last minute, but I did that time. The theme of the reading was “Ghosts of Ray’s,” at this bar where a friend hosted a series. (Spoiler Alert) So I knew a character was going to end up a ghost in Ray’s Tap, and that’s the origin of why the narrator is telling the story from beyond the grave. I’d read a news story in which investigators found five pounds of flesh in a septic tank, ostensibly having been flushed down the toilet, and that was such an appalling detail, I wanted to steal it, though I worry it’s less believable wedged into a fictional story. The disaffected twin who’s willing to take the hit came out of nowhere aka my imagination, but I think she aligns with other characters of mine. I’ve been accused of having a tendency to write people as victims too often, but I don’t see it that way. I see a lot of my characters living with a certain ambivalence, allowing themselves to take what’s handed to them and moving on from there, not trying to intervene and prevent calamity, but also not going after that quenchless more we see people striving for so often these days. I find that lack of drive to be the ultimate horror in a lot of ways; it’s something I tend not to allow myself, and so it ends up coming out in my work often.

About the Interviewer

Megan Giddings will be attending Indiana University’s MFA in the fall. She has most recently been published in the Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review and Knee-Jerk.

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