An Interview with Jessie Janeshek
Conducted by Eva Harris
Eva Harris – Congratulations on your recent graduation of the doctoral program here at UT! We’d like to know a bit about what that experience feels like.
Jessie Janeshek – Thanks Eva, I appreciate it. The actual graduation felt great, mostly because I knew family would treat me to a nice meal afterwards.
I wouldn’t trade my experience as a Ph.D. student at UT for anything. Working with the professors here opened up my poetry in ways I never would have dreamed. Several of my professors recommended poets I hadn’t read before, who have become very influential to my writing. Through Marilyn Kallet, I found Brenda Hillman; through Ben Lee, Lyn Hejinian; through Art Smith, Leslie Scalapino.
You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s terribly important to connect with a faculty member who is willing to mentor you in your graduate program. My mentor was Marilyn, and I couldn’t have asked for a better one. She provided me with lots of opportunities to share my poetry at readings and conferences—both locally and nationally–and to attend the workshop she leads each year in Auvillar, France.
Before you think it’s all wine and cheese, though, getting a doctorate is very hard. For me, it wasn’t that it was difficult in an “I-have-too-much-reading” way. I expected that. I expected the late nights grading student essays, the living on coffee, and all that stuff. It was hard for me emotionally. Maybe I was naïve coming in, but I was not prepared for the politics, not prepared for the fact that success in grad school is sometimes more about whom you know than how hard you work. It felt at first that everyone else was speaking a different language than I. Fortunately, there are a lot of wonderful people in our dept. who helped me learn that language and who showed me how to become a woman in academia. I’m still figuring out how to do that, but I feel I’m off to a good start. I came out of the program a different writer than I would have been otherwise, and I’m happy with the poems I created during that period. I’m also a much better teacher.
EH – You also have a new book, Invisible Mink. Tell us a little about the process of having a book published.
JJ – For me, the “book-making” process was very positive overall. My book is a revised version of my dissertation, so the poems in it were already prepared to show their little powdered faces to the world. The fact that I had already edited and proofread the poems intensely for my dissertation manuscript helped a lot, although I revised the dissertation significantly again to make it into a book. The diss version was six sections and the poems were arranged so that they would correspond with the fifty-page critical introduction I had to write for the diss. When Iris Press accepted Mink, I had a hard time reimagining the poems in any other sequence because I’d been immersed in the six-section version so long. Marilyn Kallet helped me a lot there; she suggested I “collapse” the book into two sections. This was a bit scary to me; after reading and thinking for a few weeks, I ended up making it four sections, a happy medium that I think works well. I cut about 7 or so poems from the diss manuscript and rewrote a few poems that I wasn’t crazy about before I submitted the revised book ms. to Iris.
Beto Cumming, the designer at Iris, was extremely helpful and patient with me. We had to go through a lot of sets of proofs since many of my poems engage with white space on the page. Beto also hooked me up with Cynthia Markert, whose painting, “Four Women,” we used for the cover. I knew Cynthia’s work but never would have thought to use it for my book, and I’m so pleased he had that idea! I’ve gotten to know Cynthia since then and our aesthetics are very similar.
EH – Here in the South there seems to be a penchant for narrative and the stylistically formal, whereas your work strays toward the experimental. Do you think that your work has been influenced by what is being produced creatively in this region?
JJ – It’s always striking to me how people set up this binary opposition of “narrative/traditional/formal” and “fragmented/experimental/informal,” or whatever, when talking about writing. I do it in my classes, too, because it’s often a good way to generate discussion. As a scholar I like thinking about work this way; as a writer, I don’t. When Dorothy Allison read at UT last year, she puzzled over the term “creative writing.” “Shouldn’t all writing be creative?” she asked. I thought it was brilliant, and I feel similarly when it comes to “experimental” writing. Shouldn’t all writing be experimental in that it should try something new while nodding to and embracing past tradition? That’s why I try to do in my work.
I’ve gotten to read (and have gotten to know!) a lot of poets while I’ve lived in Tennessee, and I’m sure reading their work has influenced me on some level, although I can’t necessarily pinpoint how right now. It sometimes takes several years for me to figure out how a work has influenced me. Linda Parsons Marion’s Mother Land, for example, stays with me as a graceful book with deep and often difficult roots. One of my favorite contemporary poets is Simone Muench, who grew up in Louisiana and Arkansas and who involves the landscape of the South in her innovative work, especially in her collection Lampblack & Ash, which I teach in my 363 workshop.
I also love me some good “Southern gothic”—and I know that’s too vague of a term, but forgive me for generalizing; you really can’t beat Poe, Faulkner, and Carson McCullers. And I adore Zelda Fitzgerald.
EH – Invisible Mink feels confessional in that it includes autobiographical detailing, but you also mention the influence of poets like Lyn Hejinian. Given the nature of her work (especially My Life), would you say yours shares the same method of skirting the line between actualities and playing at the architecture of the authentic? To what extent is Invisible Mink a confessional work?
JJ – Hejinian’s poems and her poetics, particularly what’s collected in The Language of Inquiry, have helped me in revising and revitalizing my own process. Once upon a time I think I was a rather “confessional” poet. I relayed what I considered my “rough” life, my middle-middle-class only-child woes, and hoped my experiences were somewhat lifted by my making “art” of them.
I still enjoy the voices and the sassiness of some of those older “confessional” poems, but I came to a point several years ago where I was very bored writing them. I realized that my life was not that unique, and I think I grew up some as well. I was reading a lot of feminist theory, as well as Hejinian, Hillman, and Eileen Tabios, and I became much more interested in conveying women’s experiences in Western culture via other speakers and narratives, rather than conveying “Jessie”’s experiences. Jessie could be a character in the poems, but she was no longer the star. She wasn’t interesting to me anymore, but the world—and how women survive and interact in it—was and continues to be.
EH – Invisible Mink uses several characters that carry over from section to section. What is the significance of developing characters like Jezebel and Lucy Snowe among several poems?
JJ – I love dramatic monologues…you probably remember we read a lot of Robert Browning in the poetry workshop you took with me. A good dramatic monologue often tells its story by what the speaker doesn’t say as much as what he or she does say. I’m definitely a believer in the idea that no poem is ever “spoken” by the writer; there is always some degree of distance between the writer and the speaker or persona he or she creates. In poems that are explicitly spoken by other characters, the distance between writer and persona is a wonderful place in which to play. I create different characters for different kinds of poems. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette, there is a stark contrast between “cool,” rational, British Lucy Snowe and the “hot,” passionate French with whom she lives and works. I felt a similar contrast when I spent time writing in France, so Lucy seemed to me a good threshold through which to experience Auvillar, and I wrote a lot of poems in her voice, some of which made it into Mink. Jezebel is kind of an amplified version of me, and I enjoy writing poems in her voice. She’s smarter, funnier, prettier, much more exciting, and she can afford better shoes.
EH – How deeply, if at all, are they entrenched with the author? How much of them is pure character and how much is derived from you?
JJ – You’ve probably heard many writers say they “steal” anything that strikes them as interesting. I get material everywhere—from what I watch, what I read, what I dream, what I observe, and of course from what I live. I don’t privilege one source of material over another, though. If something happens to me and it’s intriguing, I’ll use it, though it might not happen to “me” in the poem and it might not occur anywhere near to how it “really” happened in life. I don’t feel the need to write “about” anything specific that has happened to me. I want to write poems I like and that keep me interested in the writing process, and I’ll get the ingredients for them anywhere and everywhere.
Jessie Janeshek’s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). She co-editor of the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008), and she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville with an M.F.A. from Emerson College, Boston. She is a freelance editor and teaches poetry and composition as a lecturer at UT. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in print and on-line publications including Moria, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square, Passages North, Rougarou, and Review Americana. Promoting her belief in the power of creative writing as community outreach she is co-directing a variety of volunteer workshops in the Knoxville area.
(This interview can also be found in our spring 2011 creative writing issue)
