Ask the Author: Jaclyn Gilbert
Answered Questions (6)
Jaclyn Gilbert
I was running along the Bronx River Parkway past a local golf course when I wondered what would happen if I stray golf ball hit me. All through my time as a runner at Yale I had trained for cross country on a golf course, and suddenly the threat of this accident seemed terrifyingly plausible. I spent the next five years researching the accident I'd imagined, refracting its fragments & ghosts through the present narrative of a coach obsessed with training young women as a means for forgetting a trauma from his past. The coach's repressed history unfolds simultaneously through the voice of his wife as she seeks to understand the trauma her husband won't acknowledge--her narrative becomes about trying to forgive what can't be controlled, predicted, or changed. As a whole, the novel is about love, running, and perfection as evasive ideals countered by the body's search to let go of its past.
Jaclyn Gilbert
Reading great works, both classic and contemporary, never cease to inspire me. Reading Madame Bovary for the first time last year, for instance, vastly opened up my ideas what is possible in crafting a novel. I like to feel like I am part of a larger conversation, especially in reading works that seem most unlike my own work. Disparate titles (thematically and stylistically) make me ask continual questions about what I am trying to say and how I might consider saying it better. This way, I am never bored....I am filled with a restlessness much like the one that drives my need to run daily...an uncertain tug urging me to explore unchartered terrain. It's what gives me the courage to draft a new section or chapter, same as when I need to run an unfamiliar loop in an unfamiliar city (secretly hoping I might get lost trying to find my way back)--my unconscious mind has to struggle to acclimate, to root itself in that unknown hungry to reach home.
Jaclyn Gilbert
I am working on a novel set in the aftermath of Nickel Mines, a shooting that took place in an Amish Schoolhouse, just outside where I grew up in Lancaster, County. I am trying to give voice to the survivors--all of them young women--by looking at the reverberations of this trauma through multiple perspectives, including that of a suburban family, a geneticist who works and lives among the Amish, and the mother of one of the survivors of the shooting searching for self-forgiveness out of her community's rigid ideals around questions of faith, pacifism, and recovery.
Jaclyn Gilbert
NEVER GIVE UP! When a rejection notes comes in from a journal, agent, or editor, get back on the saddle and keep writing. Cheesy as it might sound, I truly think writing is about that mindset more than anything else. As someone who has been a dedicated distance runner since I was thirteen, I've had to learn to not let "failure" stop me. Distance running & marathon training training especially, like writing, is grueling work. Some days flow, mind and body working as one, but for most others, mind and body feel separate, and the last thing a writer wants to do is sit down with the chaos of her psyche and try to order it into a story that will take days into months and years to revise toward a larger unity. Writing a first draft is as joyful and freeing as any childhood endeavor, but more than that it is hard work. I think it's really about dedicating yourself to sitting down and doing it and setting lots of goals! I finished the first draft of my novel by committing to writing 20 pgs a day on a legal pad, and then I worked toward other tangible deadlines...(deadlines for fellowships/conferences, deadlines for submitting the finished manuscript to agents...deadlines for working with agent to submit the manuscript to editors)....each goal (big/small) allowed me the vision to focus on the craft in a daily way over the course of several years...enough for the work to find a home & community of readers!
Jaclyn Gilbert
The freedom to follow your imagination into depths you did not know were possible. love the process of becoming obsessed with a particular idea: a question that I have to research (to a point of no return) and interrogate through constant drafting and revising so that the merging of that process/experience can let me see the original idea completely anew. I love that writing is so much about self-discovery; even when you think you are writing about something "other" & unknown, the writing always brings you back to the mystery of yourself and human life as a whole.
Jaclyn Gilbert
I read poetry, listen to the radio, or run...a lot! For poetry, I love anything by Sharon Olds, Kevin Young, and Elizabeth Bishop---and Jack Gilbert (no relation!). Poetry helps me consider small details, moments, and rhythms that can say more than a whole scene or chapter sometimes--especially when I feel stuck trying to compress time around a character's arc. I run almost every day to let the sensory, impressionistic nature of a running loop mix with what I'm working on, hopeful this experience might incite new ideas and opportunities by the time I return to my desk. Mixing up my running loops helps too--I go everywhere from Central Park and East River Park through upper & lower Manhattan, to Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Rockefeller Park in Westchester. Same goes for travel...when I am on trains (usually above ground on the Metro North), I like to listen to the radio and watch places slip by through those hours. I often free-write during this time, when my mind is in transit and propelled by a lack of stasis. I like to search for narrative out of this flux.
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