back to archives | CURRENT INTERVIEW | printer-friendly version

READ JONES' STORY FROM THE WINTER 2007 ISSUE OF KR

[This interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work in KR. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.]

Holly Goddard Jones is a young writer whose story “Life Expectancy” appears in our Winter 2007 issue. Other stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Epoch, and Gettysburg Review. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Ohio State University and is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Denison University. Jones was born in Kentucky and lived there until coming to Ohio for graduate school. She has received grant support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. This past summer she was a recipient of a Peter Taylor Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

NANCY ZAFRIS: It’s a pleasure catching a talented young writer as she begins what is sure to be a stellar writing career.

HOLLY JONES: Thanks so much.

NZ: The Kenyon Review story (“Life Expectancy,” Winter 2007) is your second publication, I believe?

HJ: “Life Expectancy” was what I think of as the second acceptance of my real writing life. Before the piece in Southern Review, there were two others: one in Limestone, which is published by the English Department of University of Kentucky, and one in American Literary Review. Both were fine experiences, the first a result of a reading I gave in Lexington as an undergrad; the second—and this was the best feeling—plucked from ALR’s slush pile. I don’t regret the publications because they were signs of encouragement at times when I needed encouragement, and because the editors both times were wonderful to work with. I don’t think I’m that same writer, though, and those stories aren’t part of the collection I completed in grad school.

NZ: Tell me a little bit about that collection.

HJ: There are nine stories at this point, though I may need to cut one for length. I tend to write long, and many of my stories cover spans of years. I like seriousness and sweep and—to one of my professor’s constant aggravation—exposition. When I talked about my “real” writing life, I was referring largely to my discovery that short fiction could be generous and soulful, in the manner of Andre Dubus, and not just a brief glimpse at some moment or idea. I think the collection reflects that interest. I wrote “Good Girl,” the Southern Review story, at the beginning of my second year in graduate school. It was a leap forward for me. I learned something about the writer I wanted to be in the process of getting that story down, and I can look back at it two years after completing the draft and think, Yeah, that’s not bad. That’s still me.

NZ: “Good Girl” is a fabulous story. When I read it in Southern Review, I was awestruck. It’s a story that follows a retired widower, Jacob, in a tiny town. His son is in trouble with the law. What is it in that story that is the “writer you want to be”?

HJ: Well, the generosity of vision is certainly part of that. I was told a few times that it could be a novel—frankly, I get that a lot about my stuff—but I knew that it wasn’t a novel. I didn’t need 250 pages to tell Jacob’s story, so why force it? A short story can have something of a novel’s breadth and richness, and it can also address heartbreak—frankly and painfully—in a way that maybe a novel isn’t always meant to do. Let me qualify that. I’m not willing to spend years working on a book that doesn’t have hope at its center, and as a reader, I don’t tend to enjoy that sort of extended abuse, either. I think stories can go darker, or at least I’m willing to go darker in my stories.

NZ: That’s very interesting. I’ve never thought of that before. I think you have something there. I wouldn’t classify “Good Girl” as a dark, depressing story, however. Would you?

HJ: I think it’s hopeful in the sense that Jacob is a truly decent man. He’s flawed and he probably ends up making a bad choice at the story’s end, but he does so thinking that it’s his duty as a father to put his son first, no matter what that ends up costing him. And it does cost him, which is the depressing part. It hurt me to leave Jacob with so little at the end of that story, because I cared about him. If “Good Girl” had expanded into a novel, maybe I wouldn’t have had the fortitude to finish things that way, even though I’m fully convinced that any other ending would have been insincere.

NZ: “Life Expectancy,” the Kenyon Review story, takes on a high school coach embroiled in an affair with one of his students. Both “Good Girl” and “Life Expectancy” seem written by someone much older, if I may for the moment equate age with wisdom. Where does someone in her twenties come by such maturity and empathy? Most writers your age seem to stick with writing about people similar to them.

HJ: That’s really kind of you. I feel sometimes like I have a better lock on the empathy part than the maturity part, so I’m grateful. If it’s there, and it’s authentic, I can’t say for sure what inspires it. I suppose it could have something to do with the fact that I married young—I was nineteen—and went through most of my undergraduate years as a married woman, living on financial aid and trying to figure out how to do laundry at the same time I was figuring out how to be a wife. But actually, it makes more sense to me that my interests as a writer come from the same place—the upbringing and experiences and personal quirks—that made me decide, rightly and luckily, that getting married when I did would work for me.

NZ: Did you get feedback when you were younger—teachers commenting on your “insightfulness,” for example?

HJ: I remember my father telling me I was “tenderhearted” when I was a little girl, and that seems right. It’s the tenderhearted part of me that wants to tell stories, and the characters who inspire that quality are folks like my dad—good people trying to figure out how to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.

NZ: Does that mean you’re more at home with older characters?

HJ: I’m interested in characters who have dignity and intelligence, even when they’re making self-destructive choices. You can have dignity and intelligence in a twenty-something narrator or even in a teenage narrator, and I write about those characters, too, but there’s not the same sense of permanence. The stakes can’t be as high. Part of Theo’s tragedy in “Life Expectancy” is that he’s beyond the point of a true fresh start. He set certain things into motion when he was younger—marriage and parenthood, his career—and those things can’t be undone, even if he’s unhappy.

NZ: So are stories about younger characters fated to have less consequence?

HJ: No, certainly not. It’s a different sort of consequence, though. My younger characters are often forced into an unwelcome understanding about the adult world—a preview of that permanence I mentioned before. I’m fumbling my way through a novel right now, and recently I was writing some exposition from the point of view of a teenage girl who realizes that her mother’s boyfriend is being kinder to her, in giving her money for a school trip, than she and her mother deserve from him. And I felt heartbroken for that man, that minor character who will probably never make another appearance in the book, because I knew something about his goodness and his sadness.

NZ: You write a lot and you talk a lot about goodness and good characters. I’m sensing Erin McGraw’s influence on you. She was one of your professors, right? I love her narratives because she’s one of the few writers whose riveting and usually very funny stories ask such an intelligent question—what does it mean to be good, to lead a good life?

HJ: I adore Erin. Yes, she was one of my professors at OSU, and she is as wise and sharp as her fiction, which is saying a lot. A person might be tempted to think that her dialogue is too brilliant and snappy to belong in a strictly realistic fictional world, but if you’ve ever been engaged in a conversation with her, you know that’s not the case.

NZ: That’s absolutely true. My son adores having a conversation with her because she can get him laughing so.

HJ: Oh, same here. She’s been an enormous influence, a mentor, and also a very good friend. I hope she wouldn’t mind my putting it that way.

NZ: Let’s call her right now and ask. Sorry, not a very good line. Erin would have come up with something much better. So, Holly, stories in the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review. . .that’s pretty impressive. I know other young writers out there must be reading this and going CONNECTIONS! Let’s deal with that. Did you go right through the slush pile?

HJ: With “Good Girl,” I was going to the slush pile with a recommendation from one of my professors. I’d workshopped the story at OSU, and she was supportive of it. She told me where to send it, and she told me to use her name. I’m not sure what the process was once the story got to the Southern Review office, though. “Life Expectancy” did bypass the slush pile, as you of course know, because I was lucky enough to take a workshop you offered in Columbus.

NZ: Gee, those people living in Columbus, Ohio, get all the breaks. It’s not fair.

HJ: Oh, yes. It’s the hub of all things literary. In all seriousness, though, that was a great opportunity. I went into it after you’d rejected another one of my stories, so I had no clue what to expect.

NZ: Please, don’t tell me it was that Southern Review story.

HJ: No, it was the one about the boy whose father takes him to see a peep show. Oh, I remember.

NZ: Yes, that was nice story. But there was something about the way you structured it that seemed kind of academic, all the images in place or something.

HJ: I actually got a lot of grief about the structure of that story in workshop, so I thought at the time that I was resisting some of the conventions of condensing the chronology, having a traditional boom-boom-boom story arc. I think that image thing you refer to was my way of trying to justify the other, less “academic” elements, like the leaps forward in time. It was a good lesson. I’ve done a lot of revising to that story since then, and—maybe doggedly on my part—it’s still one of my favorites in the collection.

NZ: When I saw that you were in the weekend workshop, I immediately identified you with that story because of your unusual name, Jones. Good, though, good for you. I’m glad you’re sticking with the story. Never shy away from revision. I’ll be anxious to read the final version.

HJ: Thanks. I hope you get the chance to.

NZ: There were a lot of good writers in that weekend workshop.

HJ: Definitely.

NZ: And all of them living in Columbus! Why don’t they ever submit? There were more than a couple stories that with a little rethinking and revision could get into The Kenyon Review or the equivalent.

HJ: I have no idea! I just consider myself lucky that you liked the story enough to have me formally submit it.

NZ: We’re so delighted to have your story. I hope people take note. Don’t you have another story coming out this fall?

HJ: Yes, a rather long story called “An Upright Man,” in Epoch. Michael Koch, the editor, read “Good Girl” in the Southern Review. He solicited a submission, which I was all too happy to provide, because I think Epoch’s a terrific journal. Each acceptance has been an enormous honor. (Editor’s note: The day after completing this interview, Gettysburg Review accepted another story of Holly’s.)

NZ: That’s great. That’s how it should work. First thing, though, you’ve got to have a great story. So getting down to the actual story level, how do you think getting an M.F.A. has helped you?

HJ: There are so many ways, and I can’t say enough in praise of the program at Ohio State. I didn’t know what an M.F.A. was until a couple of months before I started applying to schools, and even then, I didn’t really think there was much I could formally learn about creative writing. I’d taken workshops as an undergraduate, and there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on craft at that level. It was all about conversation and inspiration and support—wonderful, of course—but I didn’t know what exposition was, for instance, or the many complexities of point of view. So one of the first things I learned in grad school was a vocabulary. It was empowering. I learned how to revise my work, which was critical, because I’d despised the revision process before. I think you can get good drafts down using pure instinct, but it takes a more conscious knowledge of craft to be any good at revising, and I’d lacked that before.

NZ: So inspiration and talent gives birth to the story and knowledge of craft takes over in the revision?

HJ: That seems to have been my process, anyway. I know that revision became a lot easier and pleasurable for me when I was able to consciously consider issues of structure or point of view.

NZ: Speaking of craft issues, I’m curious: Do you write more often in first person or third person?

HJ: Third. I wrote quite often in first person when I was an undergraduate, and as soon as I started to understand my style and interests more, I became wary of it. For a while, suspicious of it. I've since backed away from that stronger reaction, and the story coming out in Epoch is narrated in first person. Even so, I've had to figure out the circumstances in which I'm willing to write a first-person story.

NZ: You mean if you need an unreliable narrator or something like that?

HJ: Not exactly. I guess it goes back to that whole issue of who I am as a writer, the kind of story I want to tell, the characters who inspire me. For one thing, I think my narrator has to be at least as intelligent as I am, which perhaps isn't saying much, but that's all I've got to go on. No little kids, no empty-headed rednecks. That latter, especially, is what soured me on first-person stories. I write about home, which for me is working-class southern Kentucky, and I have a lot of respect for that place, for the people. I think it's a little too easy to find a voice that doesn't really exist—the rube-with-a-heart-of-gold, for instance—and to exploit that for something fake and degrading. First person can be a window into that, though it's certainly not the only window.

NZ: There’s immediacy with first person, certainly, but third person can be immediate as well.

HJ: I've found that third person is the point of view that lets me have it all: intimacy, distance, the spectrum of understanding in between. There's so much versatility. Most of the stories in my collection are told in a deeply embedded third person point of view, which allowed me to grasp a character's mental state without sacrificing a more sophisticated authorial voice. What's so rich about that approach is that you can occasionally adopt the point-of-view character's language—just a turn of phrase or a precise way of seeing something—and it's like a direct injection of that character, a spiritual possession.

NZ: Exactly. As a Kentuckian, you must appreciate how Flannery O’Connor does that. She injects their southernness in a phrase, then backs off. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit says to the grandmother, “ ‘I pre-chate that, lady.’ ” That little word—“pre-chate”—that’s all she needed.

HJ: Oh, it’s brilliant. And she does that shift to the vernacular in the narrative as well as in the dialogue: “She wanted to visit some of her connections,” for instance. That story moves very subtly between a narrative perspective that’s clearly more intelligent than the grandmother, but also at times seems to be adopting her sensibility, relating things to the reader in the way the grandmother might. I love that move. I love when I'm able to pull off something like that. For my novel, though, I'm growing more and more certain that I need a narrative perspective that's capable of greater range and distance, so I'm thinking a lot about omniscience these days. Wondering what sorts of rules I can write for myself.

NZ: Now that you’re out of school, I guess you can make up your own rules. How was the M.F.A. program for you in terms of atmosphere? Some people feel crushed socially. Others thrive.

HJ: I felt the support and the agony, both. I adore my professors, but those relationships were earned, worked on. I wasn’t very good at making myself vulnerable when I came to grad school, so it took me a while to understand that the professors wanted to hear from me outside of workshop, to see my interest and excitement. I was afraid to be too forward with my peers, too, and it took a full year for me to participate in the community that extended beyond workshop. It was immaturity, and I’m still learning. But I have these friendships now, and I’m very protective of them. One of my best adult friendships came out of graduate school, and that’s significant, because I thought for a long time that I wasn’t any good at that. Maybe I’m not, but she puts up with me anyway, and we’re able to share the hopes and anxieties of trying to be writers. We both get it. That, and she’s a very wise reader with a sensibility that’s similar to mine but not troublingly so, which means that she’s always able to surprise me with the right kinds of questions and suggestions. Every writer should have someone like that in her life.

NZ: Do you think getting an M.F.A. has any disadvantages?

HJ: That’s an interesting question. The experience was so positive for me, finally—despite that difficult first year, and plenty of difficult moments in the second two years—that my perspective is probably slanted. Some people say there’s an “M.F.A. story,” but my professors were so different as writers and teachers that I’d be hard-pressed to come away from OSU with a sense that one aesthetic was being advocated. Certain wisdom gets circulated, of course—mostly structural principles—but you get to a point where you know the conventions, you learn to recognize them, and you take them or leave them. Maybe others would disagree. I don’t think that the credential could really hurt you, though of course it might not help you, and I said from the start that I wasn’t going to take out loans to finance grad school. Looking back, I still wouldn’t.

NZ: You also mentioned some of the social pressures.

HJ: Oh yes, that’s part of it. I’ve known people who felt dissatisfied with the grad school experience. It’s not uncommon. They feel like they didn’t get enough support or like their work was misunderstood. The workshop environment inevitably generates bad feeling, because your ego is at stake, and people have different ways of offering criticism, some less tactfully than one would hope. It all feels very dramatic when you’re in the middle of it, and I certainly had my low days. I can imagine a very different outcome for myself if I hadn’t received the right kinds of validation at the right times. It’s easy to lose sight of what brought you to the M.F.A. in the first place.

NZ: What about networking?

HJ: Well, it’s probably necessary—and smart—and I’ve benefited from certain kinds of networking. I’m wary of it, though, but maybe that’s because I’m bad at it.

NZ: Bad at it? You, Holly? This from the woman who holed up in an Austin hotel during the three days of AWP? I’m sure that if you had left the room, you could have networked beautifully.

HJ: That’s exactly what I mean. I wasn’t a complete hermit, but yes, I have a difficult time in environments like that. I enjoy the AWP book fair—getting good deals on a stack of journals, picking up a souvenir back-scratcher, you know. But there’s a lot of networking, too, and some of it seems so misguided that it’s painful. As a grad student, I took a turn manning our department’s journal booth for an hour or so, and I had several conversations with writers who were clearly trying to make a connection, plant their names into my subconscious, whatever. And I wanted to say, “Look, you’ve got the wrong person! I don’t have any power or influence!” Or course I couldn’t say that. Even if I did have that power, though, I doubt that my judgment would be influenced by such a superficial meeting that has nothing to do with the work itself.

NZ: What kinds of networking have worked for you, then?

HJ: It’s easy for me to sign up for a workshop like the one you offered in Columbus, because it’s structured, it has a purpose, because I stand to learn something. I can put my work into the mix, and if I’m not charming—and that’s pretty much going to be a given with me—it’s not a total bust. I went to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference this summer, too, and that was an amazing experience. I met my literary agent there. Again, though, it was very structured, and I functioned best in the parts of day that didn’t involve standing around with a canapé and a mixed drink, though certainly I enjoyed the canapés and the mixed drinks. Grad school worked for me because I was able to form bonds with professors who believed in my work and were willing to act on my behalf, and that seemed OK, too, because that’s what the teacher-student relationship is all about, and because I liked my professors very much. If I’m ever in a position to help my students that way, I’ll pass the favors along. That said, I’m not good at that whole “face-time” dynamic I talked about before. I don’t see the value, the pay-off, in making myself uncomfortable, just to have an awkward one-minute exchange with someone I hardly know. I’ve done it, and I’ve realized the futility as soon as I walked away from the person. I don’t have the right temperament for that kind of interaction. I fret, I dwell. I beat myself up for saying something stupid. So I try to avoid it.

NZ: Those are very wise remarks, Holly. I’m glad you’ve learned to play to your strengths. One last topic: You’ve graduated and now you’re teaching at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. How’s being on the other end affecting your writing?

HJ: I had to teach one course a quarter through my second two years of graduate school, so I went into the job thinking I had a grasp on how much work was ahead of me: multiply effort times three. I knew it would be hard and draining. I knew that the commute would become a nuisance after a while. I’ve been surprised, though, by how much teaching takes out of me emotionally. It’s not really an issue of “time for writing,” because I can always carve out an hour or more a day to spend with my own projects. Logistically, it’s more than possible. I take teaching personally, though, which means that I’m always dealing with a lot a disappointment but also a lot of joy. I come home some days thinking, That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to give. Of course, I’m wrong. I say that not to set myself up as extraordinarily generous with my students, because I don’t think I’m at all extraordinary in that regard. I do believe, though, that some teachers are better at disconnecting their sense of self from their perceived success in the classroom, and I haven’t yet figured out how to do that. But that’s OK, maybe, because I appreciate the successes all the more for the frustrations. If it came easily to me, I’d suspect that I wasn’t working hard enough.

NZ: Let’s at least end on one of your successes.

HJ: I was watching my freshman seminar students give presentations a couple of weeks ago, and I had a moment in class that was sort of beautiful and surprising. They seemed very earnest up there, doing their PowerPoint on rhetorical analysis. Very young and full of good. It was instantaneous: this realization of how much I cared, how much I wanted them all to succeed, in my class but also in life. I couldn’t write an epiphany like that into a story, because it would seem trite, probably, but I felt it, and it was powerful.

NZ: That sounds a lot like writing—those moments of sudden understanding.

HJ: My approach to writing is actually pretty similar to my approach to teaching. I figure that it’s the passion that makes the lows so low for me, the highs so high. I see it, perhaps incorrectly, as proof of my commitment. I lead a pretty balanced life, the kind of life that would make terrible fiction. I have a great husband who makes me laugh. I have a dog that everyone hears way too much about. I run on a treadmill four times a week. I get along with my folks. The writing’s where I go to imagine the loss of those things. It sounds morbid, but it’s my way of reminding myself of what matters.

NZ: Thanks, Holly. It’s been a pleasure talking with someone so talented and thoughtful.

HJ: Thank you, Nancy. I’m grateful for the opportunity.

HOLLY GODDARD JONES’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review and Epoch. A recent graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Ohio State University, she is now Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Denison University.

NANCY ZAFRIS is the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review.

Work that appears on the KR web site is from The Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.