Michael Sikkema : An interview with Jessie Janeshek

Small Press Intravues:

Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem

Interview #4: Jessie Janeshek's full-length collections are MADCAP (Stalking Horse Press, 2019), The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017), and Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), Channel U (Grey Book Press, 2020), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, 2020). Read more at jessiejaneshek.net. 

How did you get started in writing?

I wrote a short story called “Sara the Horse” in second grade that won for my county in the West Virginia Young Writers Contest. I recall that Sara had two horse-sisters, Susan and Shelly. Even then, I didn’t think it was my best work. I continued to write fiction and essays throughout my childhood but got into poetry by taking a couple of summer workshops in high school. Everyone seemed to think I was really good at it, and at that point in my life it was about pleasing people. I read Plath and started using poetry as therapy throughout college. I got over that and began to use poetry as a vehicle to make art.

Why poetry instead of some other form?

Limited talent? Limited patience? Partly those but also because poetry is, at least to me, the most flexible and permissive genre. I always refer to these lines from Dickinson’s #466 when asked this question:

I dwell in Possibility – 

A fairer House than Prose – 

More numerous of Windows – 

Superior – for Doors – 

In Emily Dickinson’s Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge, Daneen Wardrop compares Dickinson’s poems to haunted houses on the page with secret passages and hidden gambrels. I like to think of the form this way.

At the same time, I think I should try to write something else. Still figuring out what that might be.

What other form do you see your work influenced by or continuous with? Music? Magic? Science? Journalism? Gardening?

Movies are the no-brainer if you’ve read my stuff. Music. Walking/hiking in the woods. Walking outside at night. Sleeping or not sleeping, depending. Semi-trance states.

What infinitives best sum up your writing practice? To explore, to investigate, to express, to interrogate, to perform, to reveal, to layer, to obfuscate, to connect? Please choose as many as you wish and explain.

To enter the past(s), to process the past(s), to repeat and reappropriate the past(s). To futurize the past(s). To shake up the past(s) like a glittery snow globe. By pasts I mean both my personal past and the broader cultural past and how those pasts have affected my female speakers. “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” Jay Gatsby’s got nothing on me, but he probably won’t ever make it into any of my poems unless he’s a vampire.

What ecosystems do you see your work fitting into? That is, who are the other artists and makers and writers that your work is in relationship with?

I did an interview with Allison Pitinii Davis for Grist recently and went pretty in-depth about this stuff, so I’ll leave the link for that here, if that’s ok? It’s the first question, so you don’t have to scroll too much:  https://gristjournal.com/interview-with-jessie-janeshek-interviewed-by-allison-pitinii-davis/

What are your current projects? What are you working on? If you’re not writing, are you busy with something else?

So, I teach literature, composition, and creative writing at the college level, and we went completely online on March 23. Right now I’m busy finishing up the semester, teaching three different kinds of classes for the first time online as well as teaching online for the first time ever in general. I think I’ve done a decent job with it considering and have come up with some creative assignments, but it’s been quite tiring in several ways. 

I have been writing a bit during the pandemic, but I don’t think I’m the type who’s going to flourish creatively under these circumstances. Maybe it will get better in the summer, I don’t know. I guess I’m working on a manuscript; I’ve written 100+ poems since my most recent full length MADCAP came out in October. (I haven’t written all those poems since October; I mean since I finished MADCAP in spring 2019.) I guess the manuscript is “about” French movies, David Bowie, Christmas lights, my many sad neuroses, Louise Brooks, violent crime. The woods. Dead deer. Blah, blah, blah. You know.

Otherwise, I like to do creative stuff I’m not good at to take a break from poetry. I’ve been doing some sewing and knitting and punch needle here and there, but my wrist hurts from all the “teaching online” so not so much. I used a bit of the stimulus money to order a fancy keyboard. I took piano lessons for nine years as a kid and have been wanting to get my piano down here, but I don’t have room. So maybe I’ll mess around with that when it arrives. Or maybe it’ll end up on eBay.

What stuff do you have out in the world, and how can people get their hands on it? Books, chapbooks, individual poems, essays, other interviews, songs, anything else?

My website (http://www.jessiejaneshek.net/) links to where to order my books, my poems published online, and reviews and interviews. Please visit it so all of the traffic doesn’t come from my devices in rural WV.

I’ve had a good year with work coming out, although this work has been written over the past four to five years or so. My third full-length MADCAP was published by Stalking Horse Press in October. My chapbook Channel U was published by Grey Book Press in February, and my chapbook Hardscape just came out from Reality Beach this month.

What would you tell people who are just starting to get involved with writing and publishing?

Don’t. Just kidding. No, I don’t know. I certainly don’t think writing programs make one a writer. It pains me when I see great writers who feel self-conscious that they don’t have a graduate degree in the field when plenty of boring writers have MFAs. 

I’m 39. It’s a different world now than when I started this game. I feel like writers are professionalized much younger and are really able to self-promote better than I’ll ever be able to do. These days, if you do want to go the academic route, it almost seems like your have to have had publishing success before you can even get into a graduate program. Like when I did my MFA (2003-2005), I know of one person in the program who got a book during that time. When I did my PhD (2005-2010), I wrote my first full-length during that time as did most of those in my cohort. Now I know of people who are in graduate programs who are already well-published. I sort of went to graduate school to establish a writing practice and a community so I’m unsure why people are going if they already have those things. I supposed it’s to teach. Getting a teaching job is really hard these days. I’m grateful I have one. If I had known what all this would be like I don’t know if I would have gone this route, but I was relatively naive in the mid-aughts. I mean it worked out. And hindsight is 2020 and all that.

So, yeah, advice. Read. Read. Like, really. Read. Actually learn about the history of poetry. Follow your own path at your own pace. Don’t be overwhelmed by what you see others doing all over the internet. Don’t feel rushed. Use social media to form connections. Some of my favorite people are writers I’ve only met online. Maybe that’s because we’ve never met in real life but for now I’ll keep the faith. For poets, you’re not going to make a living off of this ever. 90% of America (or more) couldn’t care less what you’re doing. Try to see that as a freedom. Write what you want how you want it because why not?

What media are you enjoying lately? Music, tv, movies, art?

Always music. The new Waxahatchee album St. Cloud has been a constant since it came out last month. Other than that, my pandemic playlist has been Magnolia Electric Co.; Bowie; always Bob Dylan, Jenny Lewis, and Rilo Kiley; Vampire Weekend; Old 97s; a bit of Bright Eyes; and also my Britney playlist that lifts me up in these trying times....

Movies: I’m an obsessive movie watcher, like I watch between 250-300 a year, but I haven’t had a ton of time with the online teaching. Trying to watch at least a couple a week. I subscribed to Criterion in January, so I’ve really been enjoying that.

TV: I watch some really shitty reality shows; the real global question is how is Covid-19 going to affect the next season of 90-Day Fiancé? I’ve also been watching way more CNN than I should be during the pandemic, but Chris Cuomo and Dr. Sanjay Gupta are bae, so.

Books: I’d been reading a bunch of thrillers for the last few months, but I felt like I needed something meatier, so I’m reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession. There was a copy left on our “free books” shelf at work, and I grabbed it on a whim. It’s really good. There is another dimension where I wrote a dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelites at Oxford instead of doing this poetry thing (seriously...I did a semester abroad there in college and I was planning it with one of the tutors and everything), so the weirdo Victorians will always fascinate me.

Michael Sikkema is a solar powered monster truck and the author of Caw Caw Phony, forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press in 2021.