{"id":249235,"date":"2021-07-23T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecreativeindependent.com\/people\/writer-jackie-ess-on-making-work-that-doesnt-fit-neatly-into-categories"},"modified":"2021-07-23T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T07:00:00","slug":"writer-jackie-ess-on-making-work-that-doesnt-fit-neatly-into-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/07\/23\/writer-jackie-ess-on-making-work-that-doesnt-fit-neatly-into-categories\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer Jackie Ess on making work that doesn\u2019t fit neatly into categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darryl<\/i> was written over the course of four years. What was the inception of this project and how did you decide specifically on the structure for it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

My partner at the time started a nature photos Instagram account, and I said, it would be the funniest thing in the world if it were a guy that put in just completely insane captions on the photos. Like a Rorschach inkblot thing. And I was thinking what if Darryl Cook was in our world? I started mostly just doing a characters as a bit.<\/span> Most of them are just caricatures, as Darryl sort of is at the start, but I think it got more interesting, he had more subjectivity. Then I started a Twitter account for Darryl (later deleted), but on there, I would do these little monologues as Darryl, and I think you see that the chapters are a little bit like Twitter threads, I mean they\u2019re kind of micro chapters.<\/span> I was getting way too into them. I was being Darryl for an hour a day.<\/p>\n\n

A year before, I had put down an experimental novel I tried to write and just decided it was no good, and wasn\u2019t thinking I was writing another, but I think around the point I imagined the character Clive, I was like, oh, this is the story. This is the world, and this is like a novel-sized thing. At that point, I had moved out to Eugene to live with a partner of mine who was a student there. I had a job where I was working from home, and then I lost the job.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

It was kind of like now, in terms of not leaving the house. I was able to set up a good routine and write every day, and it just started to happen. I could get up in the morning and I was always ready to write Darryl\u2019s diary. I was learning to write as I was writing the first draft of this, and you can see a record of that a little bit in the story.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Last year I was studying method acting exercises to figure out more how to inhabit different character mindsets. Was there any moment when you were thinking about this character, that you had difficulty trying to inhabit Darryl?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Yeah. I mean, it is a lot like method, and honestly, I\u2019ve done things that are like that for other characters that have not really made it into books. There\u2019s that story about Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man<\/i>; there\u2019s a torture scene in this movie. Dustin Hoffman comes in one day and he was all beat up and just looks horrible. Olivier says, \u201cWhat\u2019s been going on with you?\u201d and he\u2019s method, right? So, he says, \u201cWell, my scene calls for my character\u2026who\u2019d been up all night, he\u2019d been beaten and so on. I\u2019ve been awake for 36 hours, slapping myself across the face.\u201d And Lawrence Olivier says, \u201cWell, let me give you some advice. You should try acting.\u201d It\u2019s pretty good advice I\u2019m finally starting to take as a writer, which is to \u201ctry writing.\u201d<\/span> I don\u2019t think that becoming Darryl was very difficult. I would say becoming some of the other characters was a little bit more difficult. There\u2019s quite a lot of characters who are very cringy in some sense, and I think it\u2019s hard to inhabit that without slipping into making fun of them more.<\/p>\n\n

There\u2019s this one line I\u2019ll never forget, where Darryl says, \u201cWe can forgive ourselves for needing this. We can forgive ourselves for needing to be fucked this way.\u201d It\u2019s such a good line. Was humor in the work something that came naturally to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

I think that\u2019s always been with me. A lot of my favorite art has always had an element of humor to it, and actually, I don\u2019t really know how to be serious. Or, not at length.<\/span> I can get very serious for a second, but I\u2019m probably going to break it up with a really dumb joke, and in that sense, a format like Darryl<\/i> is the only one that I could do. When I was young, my favorite writer was Samuel Beckett, and Samuel Beckett breaks into slapstick all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

There\u2019s a great scene in Molloy<\/i> where a guy stares at the ocean, thinking about throwing himself in, and he\u2019s just sucking on rocks, and it becomes this long digression about his whole system of how he gets the rocks out of one pocket and into his mouth, trying to keep them balanced, until he accidentally eats them. <\/span> That kind of silliness where you can go into a bit of a game, or into something mechanistic, or something that\u2019s just the goofiness of language. I want that. That felt very natural to me. In the case of Darryl<\/i>, it did start with a joke. I had a joke before I had a story.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

I would say if anything, I had to discover the seriousness of him.<\/span> I wanted to give this person a chance to speak for himself because that is the funniest thing to me in the world. He definitely borrows a little bit from a certain kind of mood of internet stridency. The funny thing is that, to me, what I connect with, where the book connects with trans culture, more than what he says about gender or what he says about the trans people he encounters, is that there is kind of a culture of asserting itself and trying to be real, and trying to be recognized, and trying to be valid.<\/span> He is incredibly caught up in that in a strange way, given that he does not have the kind of identity that is part of that process.<\/p>\n\n

On a craft level, how would you determine whether or not something was funny for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

This book went through a bunch of rewrites over the course of a few years. I read a lot of stuff out loud. I have an overdeveloped internal censor, and this is one of the places where it actually helps me, because it really hurts, I think, when it comes to writing things for the first time. All that second guessing: is that really the sentence that I want to write? Or, is that really how that should go? Or, maybe I should write this other paragraph first, or something.<\/span> But if I can get to the point where I have some kind of manuscript, then what I find is that when I read things out loud, I have a lot of unconscious editorial resources. Many people who know me will tell me things like, \u201cI never know when you\u2019re doing a bit\u201d and I feel a bit bad about that. I\u2019m probably doing a bit less often than people think, but maybe more often than normal people are. It\u2019s probably a psychological problem. At some level, there\u2019s an intimacy that\u2019s lacking or being avoided. There\u2019s a sense in which this thing that I do, which is fun, is also compulsive and a little defensive. It\u2019s like all the things that make me a worse person are helping me be a better writer.<\/span> All is redeemed.<\/p>\n\n

In Darryl<\/i>, I felt every word needed to be there. There was nothing unnecessary in the whole story. I\u2019m always asking the question, does this sentence, or does this scene absolutely need to be here?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

I did actually have a little anxiety about whether I ought to put more female characters in my book? There was a moment where I was like, ok, it makes sense that this is Darryl\u2019s limited point of view, but did I try though? Maybe I should think about this a little bit more. I worried about that a little bit. And also, of course, for a long time, I worried whether I wanted this kind of thing attached to my name.<\/p>\n\n

In early 2018, I showed it to Jeanne Thornton and that was really helpful. Jeanne has a book, Summer Fun, coming out this summer, and she runs Instar Press with Miracle Jones. That was the home I thought for it because this is a really, really indie press and they\u2019re connoisseurs of very weird trans writing, among other things, and they published a book-length study of porn on Tumblr that just came out a few months ago. Jeanne was very encouraging, and was the first person who really told me that it was a good book, who I believed. There was a little bit of editing that happened after CLASH got their hands on it, but I would say that in general, my process of editing is that people give me really good advice and it plunges me into doubt for a little while. Then I disappear for a long time, and then I come back and I don\u2019t do the thing that they told me to do.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Probably, the person who I take workshoppy advice from most consistently is my friend Torrey Peters<\/a>. Torrey had had a very cool perspective on the book and did make a suggestion that I kind of took. I would love to learn craft from people, as I\u2019m not convinced I\u2019m actually any good at it.<\/span> I think with anybody trying to imitate my example, I should be giving them the Lawrence Olivier advice, that they should try writing, because I think I definitely live with my characters in too indulgent a way.<\/p>\n\n

Can you talk a little bit about the unsurety of having something attached to your name, and also what convinced you to know that this is what you wanted to publish?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

At a certain point, the thing that I had to be convinced of was more to do with its quality, than its moral suitability or whether this is like the right political message to be putting in the world, that\u2019s it. I don\u2019t have a lot of anxieties around stuff like that. Go bother somebody who isn\u2019t a writer about those kinds of things.<\/span> How I would see the story is that for me, at some point in my life, I transition, and for a while it really sucks because I feel like I look like a freak, and it\u2019s not a subjective opinion. People will tell me so on the street. I\u2019ve got a lot of shit from people, and was quite frightened of that. I had a very defiant attitude and I thought about it a lot, and I operated with the assumption that there was no privacy, because it felt like there was none, because anything I did would be seen through that lens.<\/p>\n\n

In particular, it became cheap for me to do things that were revealing, because I was only revealing what I assumed that everyone could see. At a certain point that stopped being true. Now it\u2019s sort of like, well, yeah, I kind of have privacy if I want it. Of course, people are invasive occasionally, but when they are, it\u2019s no different than just people being rude. I think I had to recalibrate on that, and that recalibration was timed in my life to where I had finished this manuscript. I was like, \u201cHuh, I have the choice that people can see me as less of a weirdo if I want. What would that be like?\u201d<\/p>\n\n

I wanted to go and find out what it would be like to be seen as a fine upstanding citizen. I\u2019m not sure I did a very good job of it, but you know, closer than now and closer than before. I found out that it\u2019s really boring. I think I just needed to separate out for myself how much of this is a choice. It is.<\/p>\n\n

In your writing life, what has been the biggest struggle for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

In general, believing the things I say are worth saying or worthy of being read can be a real difficulty. I think humor protects me from that, because when you\u2019re cracking a joke, you\u2019re not really worried about it. It\u2019s one form of speech that\u2019s very willing to impose. And I have access to this very easy confirmation, like, are people laughing? Are they turning the pages?<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Actually a gigantic problem I had about this early on that influenced Darryl<\/i> was that I\u2019d come out of this trans literature orbit. I thought, \u201cOh man, everything I write is going to get read through this category and it\u2019s going to be worse than just being about my categories. It\u2019s going to be read as though it\u2019s about me.\u201d I don\u2019t want to write something that is going to be like the trans woman novel, the trans woman of color novel. I don\u2019t speak for anybody.<\/span> I really think I\u2019m both non-representative and specifically, probably a bad representative of many of the groups that I\u2019m a member of. I don\u2019t ever want to be a voice of a group.<\/span> I had just come out of this world where I felt it was very easy to get tokenized, then I was like, \u201cOh wow. If I write in the character of this middle-age white guy, I can do anything.\u201d That set me free.<\/p>\n\n

I wanted to write characters that were a bit unlikeable.<\/span> But I think Darryl is a very lovable character. He\u2019s fucked up in some deep ways, but I care about him and I feel like most readers who get into the book do care about him. Even when they see him make really catastrophic mistakes that hurt other people, there\u2019s a sense of, \u201cI can see how it\u2019s happening and I wish he wouldn\u2019t do that.\u201d I want that, but I think I really wanted to write outside of a slightly valorized political identity, because that\u2019s something that felt very uncomfortable for me to wear. I walk poorly in heels and balance poorly on pedestals. Just let me wobble on this way.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

I think in general, the whole trans conversation seems to be very much shifting its coordinates, and it\u2019s much more about trans kids these days anyway, just in the sense of that\u2019s who a lot of the attacks are on right now. It actually feels like I\u2019m much, much less in the hot seat, like, ah, some 30 something person who nobody cares about. That\u2019s great. Maybe I can finally write about people like me once I\u2019m really totally sure that nobody cares. We\u2019re almost there. I\u2019m almost irrelevant. I can\u2019t wait to be irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n

Were you worried about whether or not the book would be successful or picked up by a publisher?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

A little bit, yeah. I knew that it was definitely going to be destined for the indies. No bigger. I will say that I was very pleased that I got it on a Lambda hot list. I was thinking about it and was like, \u201cWhat category are these people supposed to put me in? Is this trans fiction? There\u2019s a trans character. There\u2019s a character that thinks a lot about transition. Is he trans?\u201d Well, life is complicated. So maybe. Is he bisexual? On the face of it, yes, he has sex with men and women. Is he gay or? On the face of it, he seems in love with this man. There\u2019s a lesbian character in the book who observes this all with somewhat some cool regard, and she says, \u201cI don\u2019t really want it to be a part of this bullshit,\u201d but she shows up. It\u2019s like, \u201cWow, like this book is really L, G, B, and T, so what the hell category are you supposed to enter it in if you want people to read it?\u201d It fits very uncomfortably into these categories which I really appreciate for what it\u2019s worth. Because life fits poorly into those categories.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

These literatures, they\u2019re there to promote work that is really hard to promote otherwise and would not sell really, if it didn\u2019t have a little bit of categorization and a little bit of genre scaffolding around it. I definitely feel like I wrote something, that I was pretty much willing to self publish or not publish. The next book may have a slightly similar vibe. Although, I think the next book is more heterosexual. That\u2019s how I\u2019m going to really hit. Really start playing for the majors. That\u2019s how I\u2019m going to really get in there. I know how straight people think.<\/p>\n\n

I wasn\u2019t sure if I knew, but now I know that I do, because I wrote how I thought it was and they told me I was right, so now I can do it. No, but I have no idea. It definitely is a somewhat marginal book in a way. At the end of the day, I don\u2019t think that this story says anything really cruel about anybody. I hope that people end up seeing that.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\n\n

Jackie Ess Recommends:<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n

Stories by Paris Green\/Frog K<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n

W.E.B. Du Bois\u2019s In Battle For Peace: The Story of my 83rd Birthday: an account<\/a> of starting a peace group in the early 50s and being accused in court of being a Soviet agent (he was not)
<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n\n

Daniel Naroditsky\u2019s chess videos<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n

Grow your own herbs and drink more tea
<\/p>\n\n

Julian Charri\u00e8re\u2019s photography<\/a>
<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


\r\nThis content originally appeared on The Creative Independent<\/a> and was authored by Elle Nash.
<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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