Q and A with Joshilyn Jackson

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, Book Club fair, and the kind of smart horror Stephen King writes when he isn't writing mainstream or lit fic. 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---I'll read anything by Michael Connelly, 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 (I'd irritated him by reading it 15 times in a row) 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 James Bond books and my mother's Jane Austen, my brother's Michael Moorcock and J.R.R. Tolkien and the neighbor lady's complete collection of Harlequin Romances. She'd only loan me the ones that were written before 1972, when 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. 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. Eventually I realized I was trying to stuff natural born novels into the shape of 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 niece 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 then I wrote Fisher, this abandoned little girl who feels anything BUT chosen, so the real experience I had as a child snuck into the novel.

When did you first start blogging?

When my first novel sold, I knew I needed an author website, and I started looking at other author websites to see what they were like. Most were static. I went once, I read the bio and the jacket copy, I looked at the covers, and I was done. I didn't have a reason to go back, and worse, many of them seemed...impersonal. I'm a book-junkie. I read constantly, and when a book hits me just right, it IS personal. It's a connection. I never wanted my website to ever feel "not so fresh" because it had unchanging content, and I wanted an open line of communication with readers. I'm a techno-geekhead-gamer-chick, so I knew about blogging. In fact I was already dedicated to reading several blogs daily, so it was a no brainer.

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 stay-at-home-mom type who married very young. She's actually an art quilter, but if you saw her in the grocery store, you wouldn't even blink, but inside her head is a whole different world from the ones most folks see, and her family has a very literal skeleton in their collective closet.

I tend toward an odd blend of humor and violence, and this book begins when a young girl drowns in Laurel's backyard pool. In the fall out from that event, Laurel 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. Laurel, scared for her own child, calls her hell-on-wheels blacksheep sister Thalia for help. 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.