In the following interview, Jill Christman speaks on behalf of herself and not on the behalf of her employer.
Jill Christman, author of “Darkroom: A Family Exposure,” “Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood” and famed personal essay “The Sloth” for Brevity. Christman is a senior editor for both Ball State University’s River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things. Her latest book “If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays” was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022.
On a frigid, blustery day in February, I had the honor of speaking with Christman about her life as a writer, teacher, mother, and — in my opinion — an immensely creative human being.
CS: It seems like you teach, edit, and breathe creative nonfiction writing — did you always know you would write CNF?
JC: I applied to grad school to get my MFA in 1995 after getting my undergrad degree from the University of Oregon, and then tried ‘to be something, anything else,’ as the Lorrie Moore story says. I ended up at the University of Alabama for my MFA, but I like to tell people that I hadn’t gotten into the creative writing major at the University of Oregon. It was this crazy process where you slid a story under the door of an old professor and he decided whether you’d be a writer or not — and I would not, according to him. It was some years of recovery and writing, of course, because that’s what I really wanted to do. There were no creative nonfiction programs… maybe one creative nonfiction at the time. It just hadn’t been a part of academia yet. So, I was a fiction writer. But now, of course, I do teach, read, and breathe, as you said, creative nonfiction.
CS: How does teaching influence your writing practice and vice versa?
JC: I never sought out to be a teacher. It wasn’t a dream of mine as a child. It was what I was given to do for my assistantship at the University of Alabama, but pretty much right away, I loved it.
I remember being assigned an honors composition class in my second year of teaching and I was fascinated with banned books, so I made it into a special topics, banned books class. I thought ‘Huh, what you do with this teaching thing is you get obsessed with something, turn it into a class, then spend a semester thinking about it with smart people… this is fantastic!’ This helps with writing. I’ve continued this practice.
I try to change things up all the time. I am not a professor who teaches the same things over and over again because I want a life. While that might be easier, it wouldn’t be so engaging. So, I like to try new things out all the time, just like I do in my writing. In many ways, I use my teaching as a jumping off point for my writing.
Sometimes this works in reverse. At one point, I was asked to write an essay for Roxanne Gay’s “Not That Bad,” or a collection that became Not That Bad. I had an essay in there that was about a sexual assault that I experienced in college at the University of Oregon. Writing that essay made me think really hard about the state of sexual assault on college campuses today, which has gotten no better since the 90s. A while back, I proposed a class on the state of sexual violence on college campuses that was approved, though it no longer exists. We had a podcast called “Indelible” made by a tremendous group of students. It was all we did: the podcast, the website, learning materials, and actions on campus, all to figure out what is working in terms of curtailing sexual violence and assault on our campuses and what is not working.
I think all of these things send inroads to each other: teaching, editing, and writing. I just developed a class on writing flash nonfiction because it’s my world at Beautiful Things. I taught a class on the structure of an essay because I didn’t understand the parts of an essay and thought ‘I’ll teach a class on it!’ It often comes from my curiosity to understand something and then to share or work through those things with others.
CS: How does reviewing and editing pieces for River Teeth inspire you in your practice as a writer?
JC: Even yesterday, as I sat in the local inn having dinner by myself, Mark [Neely] had sent me six finalists for River Teeth. I’m fortunate that River Teeth is a well-known magazine that gets tremendously excellent submissions and I don’t see them until they’ve made it to the very top. I’m reading the best contemporary creative nonfiction from around the country and so, how could it not be inspiring? These are people I’ve been watching for my whole life, so it’s wonderful to see what they’re coming to. There are some really great introductions or editors notes where both Mark and I as well as the previous editors, both Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman, where we explain why a River Teeth essay is a River Teeth Essay. It’s the feeling when you wake someone up in the middle of the night to say ‘You have got to read this.’
Joe Mackall said that he wants an essay that doesn’t flinch, so I’ve thought about it in that way. What is the point in a story that makes us flinch? Maybe it’s a truth that’s too hard to tell, or maybe it’s something we can’t remember so we want to skate around the not remembering instead of digging into the space that may be really fruitful in terms of the not remembering. It may feel politically dangerous to us. I just taught a class on writing difficult material because I’m really interested in how writers go after the hard stuff. What I’ve learned is that when you get right down to it, it’s all hard stuff.
CS: How do you go about writing ‘the hard stuff?’
JC: I like to use objects to trick or distract myself out of thinking that I’m not supposed to write about these moments. At different times in my life, those artifacts have been different things. It almost never matters what the object is. Choose a thing. Maybe it’s a photograph. You’re not describing the overall photograph, you’re picking out things within it and drawing them out.
When I wrote “Going Back to Plum Island,” I was going back to a site of trauma. Some things that I wrote about were Swedish Fish from the island store, beach grass, and the sand that I gathered when I was there. I used those things to get to the core of what I needed to get to. Sometimes you move the object from place to place and have to think about what that change means.
One thing that I have realized was that, for me, writing these hard things is the safest place I know. I am the god of it. I am in total control. Writing gives me a space where I feel fully in control and safe. I don’t remember this coming up in my writing hard things class, but I also had to find a way not to be alone in the text, somehow. So a recommendation I’d give to others is to find a way not to make it a solitary space.
CS: You’ve mentioned in a previous conversation that you are interested in chronology. Is there a way that you’ve fractured or played with time in your writing?
JC: When I wrote my first book, I felt like my experiences were so fragmented that the possibility of writing something linear and chronological didn’t make sense, because that was not of the experience. I was making up my own form for the experiences I had.
CS: Do you find writing a collection of essays different or similar to writing a memoir?
JC: Time. I mean, all along in my writing life, I’ve been writing memoir, which has been a great surprise to me. I thought that you wrote one, got it over with, and then went back to fiction writing. This turned out not to be the case. So, I became an essayist partially because I had gotten a tenure track job and I needed to be publishing. Mark looked at me one day — a poet — as I was 400 pages deep into something that I didn’t even know what it was, though it turned out to be my second memoir. He said ‘You’re going to lose your job.’ Thanks, Honey. So I turned to essays, because academia was just starting to turn to essay writing. It was so wonderful. It happens to be the way I think — you follow a question to another good question. That’s all. So, mine often have a narrative aspect because I grew up as a fiction writer and am drawn to storytelling…
I’m trying to tell the truth here: I think I started writing essays by mining memoir manuscripts for pieces that could be shorter. Then it became a reciprocal process, where I would pull something out of a memoir. My piece “The Googly-Eye” in my latest collection is about when my daughter Ella stuck a googly-eye up her nose. When I asked why she did it, she looked up at me and said ‘I thought it would be different,” so it’s about how I thought everything would be different — every major error I have ever executed in my own life is because I thought it would be different. So, I pulled out that scene because it’s action-packed and kind-of funny, and brought that idea back into the book while still keeping the moment an essay. There’s always a relationship between my writing: what can and can’t be pulled out.
I like to think I’m using all of the parts of the animal when I’m writing. Some things might be bacon, you know, or a roast. But I also write a lot that doesn’t see the light of day. But while I was always writing a memoir, I was thinking about what could be pulled out. I also think that prompts from the outside world help, such as Roxanne Gay’s call. I hadn’t set out to write something specifically about sexual assault, but I saw the call and thought that I could write something based off of my quintessential college frat story.
CS: Is there a piece from your collection that you find the most interesting or important to you?
JC: Yes, “The Avocado.” It was an essay I wrote to figure out what I was doing with this other book that I was writing, which was about how we hold, explicitly in our female bodies, all the love and all the grief across all time. “The Avocado” started as me looking at an avocado, a volcano, and ants. I had to look outside of myself to this out. It helped me figure out what the memoir was going to look like, and I actually kept it by my side as I finished the book. It was a representation of the true thing I had figured out, and so I used it to see how I could carry it through a longer narrative and maintain its truth. It’s my favorite essay I’ve ever written. When writing it, I actually questioned whether I was done with memoir, if everything I needed to say was contained in the 10 pages… but then I decided that maybe I was wrong.
CS: You describe yourself as a ‘serial memoirist,’ how do you go about your life, knowing that you might write about it? Do you allow yourself to think about making moments that would transcribe well to the page, or let life come as it will?
JC: I used to think about that all the time and would question myself if I thought the things I was doing were for good stories or if I actually wanted to do them. It felt like watching myself for moments of inauthenticity… I was very suspicious of myself. Now, I just live my life.
I am not a person who thinks you have to wait a certain amount of time before writing something down. You can write something twenty years from when it happened or pick up a pen immediately. No one is keeping a stopwatch on your time between the event, processing what it means, and writing it down. I don’t even know what processing time means, because my processing happens when I am writing. As someone who lives through writing, I have just gotten used to living.
But, I used to be hyperaware. In “Darkroom,” I wrote about my uncle who was a marijuana grower and was serving time. I thought that my story was about how we both confronted our demons — how I became this super rule-follower and he did not. Then he died in prison. I was reeling. It was weird, how it happened. My mom and I took a trip to the prison to get his ashes — the whole thing was crazy. I was in grad school at the time and was working on this book for my thesis and I was thinking about how the whole thing might have been too much. It was freaking me out that I knew I was writing about it, but it was about my uncle who I loved so much and who had just died under very strange circumstances. I was questioning whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to write about it. If I took down notes about what my mom told me when she got the call, was that love or was that something else? I ended up writing all of that in there. I put it all down because I didn’t know what else to do.
With years and with softening, I have come to realize that it is just the way I live.
