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.

Michael Sikkema : An interview with Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

Small Press Intravues:

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

Interview #1: We caught up with Jennifer MacBain-Stephens who has published widely in the small press world and has some new exciting work recently published or soon to be coming out, including, The Vitamix and the Murder of Crows from Apocalypse Party.

How did you get started in writing?

My first memory of writing was writing my mother notes that she treated me unfairly. Then I started writing my whole life down in journals. My first joy in writing was probably in High school writing a different monologue for Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet as an assignment. Then when I was an intern at the Public Theater in New York, I wrote little zines from the intern’s perspective and passed them out to the crew. It was at this time I tried writing short stories but I never knew how to end them. When I moved to CA I joined a poetry group in Lake Arrowhead and we published our own little book. These were the first poems I had ever written and it will always be special to me. Then I got more serious about poetry moving to Iowa City and participating in an Artist’s Way group. I thought I would do more visual art, but instead, I focused on the writing. Now I am also excited to be writing song lyrics with some of my musician friends. I love the collaboration of it.

Why poetry instead of some other form?  I like it because it is short. I feel like I can say what I want to say and not go on and on about it.  This sounds terrible but sometimes when I go to fiction readings now, it’s hard for me to pay attention and sit still and I think “too many words.” Or maybe it’s just hard for me to sit still. 😊

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

 I’m majorly influenced by visual art, other poets, anything gothic or sort of dark, science fiction, feminism, magical realism, and Noir.

With music one example I remember is writing a lot of poems after driving around in one of my first Iowa winters. I listened to the Stars “North,” on repeat and wrote many poems about snow, the cold, things dying, birch trees, etc.

My favorite songs are the ones where you don’t know what the singer is going to say. Like when Spoon lists off “pot holders,” “Elgin soldiers,” and “high rollers,” I can’t even live my life. Lol.

I am also very inspired by horror movies: any movie with a girl in a white dress walking around a windy hillside is my jam and I’ll write about it. I feel like Juliet Cook and Danielle Pafunda and Sarah Nichols write really well about dead girls.

I also like how one never knows what will inspire them. When I went to CO last year, I ended up writing a lot of poems about rocks. Or sometimes something will really gross you out and you have to write about it- like too many little circles in a pattern in one place is gross. Lol.

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.

I think To Explore and To Express would be good ones- because a lot of times I am not sure why I am stuck on writing about a certain subject- and then later, people will tell me- oh this was dripping with isolation, or this was all about trying to connect with someone, and I always love those moments. So many times, it doesn’t jump out to me until much later why I chose to write about something, and I am cool with that.

But I also noticed that if I am at a poetry reading, I will read my  more literal poems like Chain Book Store, or Lisa’s Ghost Twin Sister at the Grocery Store, because people connect faster with less abstract ideas. I probably wouldn’t read my 3 page poem about that time I was wandering around a grave yard talking about granite…

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?  

What a fun question. I love all of these people: Sarah Nichols, Jesse Janeshek, Chris Eck, Ashley Heffernen, Ms. Christine, Fox Frasier Foley, Sarah Lilius, E. Kristin Anderson, The authors at Stalking Horse Press, Grey Book Press, Shirt Pocket Press, surreal art, landscape photography, mountains, the woods, outerspace, putting things together that don’t seem they should go together but then they do. I’ve had fun lately writing about music and landscapes, and demons, and being on some kind of trail.

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

My chapbook The Female Citizens of Sunshine Nation Face off with Light Sucking Demons is going to come out soon from Grey Book Press. And my chapbook Teeth have a Hardness Scale of 5 (the poems about the rocks) is also going to be published this year. I have a bunch of poems out to different places. One project that I am in the middle of are drawings I did of a greenhouse in Washington state and then I am going to put words over the top of these pictures so it will be a combination of text and image. It scares me but also excites me.

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?

Most of my writing is listed on this web site somewhere:

my web site is: https://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/writing/

And here are some books and chapbooks:

We’re Going to Need a Higher Fence (Lit Fest Press.) Can get at amazon

The Vitamix and the Murder of Crows. (Apocalypse Party Press)

The Messenger is Already Dead (Stalking Horse Press.)

Your Best Asset is a White Lace Dress  (first full length) is available from Amazon. (Yellow Chair Press.)

chapbooks:

R O B O T is available from BPL Press: The Birds We Piled Loosely.

Buy Alaphalena  (micro chapbook) at Rinky Dink Press.

Buy Clown Machine here  from Grey Book Press.

Read my poem from “Clown Machine” “The Contortionist has Damaged Taste Buds” here at Literary Orphans.

Here is also “Styling the Bearded Lady”  from “Clown Machine”  at Cider Press Review. 

The Visitant here: Shirt Pocket Press

Here are some poems from The Visitant at Menacing Hedge.

Buy my chapbook Every Her Dies here:  ELJ Publications

Every Her Dies is also available to read at the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange

My chapbook Backyard Poems is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Buy Jeanne (Poems About Light, Ants and Revenge) here: Be About it Press

xx poems is available to purchase from Crisis Chronicles Press here

(“xx poems” is a micro-chap.) Nine poems for $4.99, as part of the Ninesense series.

Dixit: Every Picture Tells a Story, or, The Wrong Items is an e-chap available to read free online at  White Knuckle Press.

She Came out From Under the Bed (Poems Inspired by the Films of Guillermo del Toro) is available to order from Dancing Girl Press.

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

I would say work on something until you are happy with it. Usually if you are happy with it, the work will find a home somewhere. Only you have your voice. No one else has your voice. You are valuable. Follow the energy- wherever that takes you. When you are looking at a place to send your work / manuscripts, look at the web site and see if you like it. If you don’t like it that much, you probably won’t like other things they do…

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

I’ve been listening to Grimes, Soccer Mommy, The Chromatics, Tame Impala, Phantogram, Broken Social Scene, and a mix of music that I just call “Big MF’ing Mix.” I’m going to see Built to Spill in an old barn in Iowa at the end of the summer and I’m looking forward to that – (at Codfish Hollow.)

I’m super psyched to finish the last season of the Good Place with my boyfriend and cry all over each other.

I also love watching Sabrina, the reboot, with my daughter and it has awesome feminist writing. I haven’t seen the film Parasite yet but want to.  So many things.

I also read recently that saying “No” is  the new independence, so I am trying to whittle things down to what I really want to see and do.

Michael Sikkema is the editor of Shirt Pocket Press, a small run chapbook press, as well as the author of 5 full length books of poems, mostly recently You've Got a Pretty Hellmouth, with Trembling Pillow Press. He is also the author of a couple dozen chapbooks, most recently Here on Huron, with above/ground press and Welcome to the Last Earth Show, with Where is the River.