Jaimee Wriston Colbert: Read the modernists! Roethke, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, poets who were writing when a lyrical, musical quality to the poem was important. I started writing as a poet then switched to fiction in graduate school. I still honor the lyrical, rhythmic quality of the sentence, and that could be my poetic training.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is a very, very busy woman. As the author of Dream Lives of Butterflies, first prize winner in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards in the Short Stories Fiction category; Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing Prize; and the forthcoming Shark Girls, which will be published in November, 2009, she also manages to receive nothing but glowingly positive reviews on ratemyprofessors.com for her work as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.
Her stories have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, have been a finalist twice for the Katherine Porter Fiction Prize, and have appeared pretty much everywhere, from TriQuarterly to Prairie Schooner to The Tampa Review to The Connecticut Review to New Letters to Louisiana Literature to being broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." With all that on her plate, Jaimee was kind enough to find time to discuss her writing process, non-linear story telling, poetry, and shark attacks with Knee-Jerk.
Knee-Jerk: “Novel in stories,” “episodic novel,” “linked stories,” “interrelated” or “interconnected stories,” or something else? Do you have a preference how some of your work is labeled? Or doesn’t it matter?
Jaimee Wriston Colbert: There are degrees of differences in some of these labels. An episodic novel and a novel in stories are more novelistic in their structure, whereas linked/interconnected, etc. stories are stories that are related to each other in a significant way, such as sharing characters or place, but don't necessarily move in a novelistic arc, nor do they have to conclude the book as a whole. My book Climbing the God Tree is a novel in stories whereas Dream Lives of Butterflies is interconnected stories. Its last story does offer a conclusion of sorts, but not to every character's conflict within the whole.
K-J: When you begin writing a story do you usually know that it’s either self contained or going to be part of a larger set of linked stories? When writing novel length material, are you writing in order or do you jump to whatever’s taking your attention?
JWC: I don't know these things in the beginning, and I definitely let the work take me where it wants to go. I'm a very non-linear writer.
K-J: With many of your stories being published elsewhere before appearing in your books, is there often a re-writing process to make a story stand on its own or become part of something larger? What’s your process of pulling them all together?
JWC: Good question. I don't recall having to rewrite any of the pre-published stories, but I've had to create new stories, particularly in Climbing the God Tree, to make it all fit as a whole--move in that novelistic arc I mentioned previously. Some of these stories work like chapters and wouldn't stand alone.
K-J: What attracts you to the novel in stories format? What benefits do you see in this form? Any pit falls you’ve encountered through it?
JWC: I've always been attracted to more non-linear forms. I love stories for what they tell us of human nature, but I also view them (the good ones!) as an art form, and artistry to me means some experimentation with form, as well as language. The pitfalls are that many readers don't like non-linear story telling; they prefer to be told it straight. I don't know about you, but my life doesn't unfold in a straight line--it's messier than that. Why should story telling, which reflects life, be any different?
K-J: Can you discuss your approach to dealing with time and doling out the necessary information when in the confines of a short story?
JWC: You just tell the story in the early drafts, then when you have the book, that's when you worry about these sort of things, through many, many revisions.
K-J: A sense of place informs a lot of your writing, from the Missouri to Maine to Hawaii probably playing the biggest or at least most often recurring part. Can you talk about how some of those choices have been made and how you see them affecting the writing?
JWC: Place is hugely important to me, and I've lived in a lot of them! Stories need to be grounded in place, life takes "place" in a place, after all. When I was living in St. Louis, for instance, as a visiting writer, the stories in Dream Lives of Butterflies started coming to me, and they were very specific to that city, to, even, where I was living in that city. That book would never have happened if I hadn't lived there, smelled the air, the things that grow there, viewed the neighborhoods, heard the Metrolink rattling by every day, etc. We experience life through our senses, and this is the way people experience stories as well. Every place has its own rich offerings of a particular world, which can become the world of your stories.
K-J: You’ve worked in several different prisons as an educator, much like your character Eli in Climbing the God Tree. Did these experiences play a big role in the development of that book?
JWC: Climbing the God Tree would never have been written if I didn't have the experience of teaching in a maximum security prison. So, yeah, in that sense I (and most writers) feed off my experiences for my fiction, but then the imagination takes hold and creates from this its own story.
K-J: You also have a very poetic nature to your narration style. Climbing the God Tree is even prefaced with a Rainer Maria Rilke poem. When it comes to poetry I usually know what I like but often feel like I don’t have the qualifications to know why I might not like something. Who would you recommend reading?
JWC: Read the modernists! Roethke, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, poets who were writing when a lyrical, musical quality to the poem was important. I started writing as a poet then switched to fiction in graduate school. I still honor the lyrical, rhythmic quality of the sentence, and that could be my poetic training.
K-J: Can you talk about your writing process in general? What’s your ritual? Do you need to write at a certain time of day? Do you need silence?
JWC: Any rituals I might have had have had to bow down to the fact of my life, which is not near enough time for writing. Being on a university faculty means I cram most of my writing into the summer now. I do like to have my "special" rock beside me when I write. And yeah, silence is heavenly--I can't think without it.
K-J: At Knee-Jerk we’re really interested in the cross breeding of different artistic mediums. I asked about your interest in poetry. I know you’ve had your stories broadcast on the radio. Are there any other artistic mediums (painting, drawing, music, anything) that you enjoy even as a hobby or that you’ve always wanted to experiment with?
JWC: I wanted to be a painter and had no talent along those lines so I bring my "painting" --color, the sensory world, to my fiction. I love the other arts and feel writers can and should be inspired from other art forms--listening to great jazz, blues, going to plays, museums, good films, touching wonderful sculptures, you name it!
K-J: Your new book, Shark Girls is forthcoming this year. How was the process of writing it? Is it a novel in stories? What can you tell us about it, what can we expect?
JWC: Shark Girls is a "real" novel! I say that with tongue in cheek of course, but it has one narrator, though it is divided into parts where two different stories are told, and slowly they converge together. It's a big novel too, and a lively one that was inspired by a real shark attack that happened when I was a child in Hawaii, and uses Hawaiian myth, Catholic mysticism and pop culture to tell a very unusual story. It took me five years to write it, and it went through a couple agents who loved it but ended up quitting the biz because the Trades are such a hard sell right now. They want very conventional stories, seemingly, and Shark Girls is anything but. I was happy Livingston Press decided to take the plunge (no pun intended). That's why we must support smaller literary and university presses, because they are willing to publish riskier work; in fact, it's their mission.
