KR Newsletter—December 2006

This interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work in KR, and is supported 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.

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.

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In January 1939, General Franco, aided by the Italians, took Barcelona. By March, the Spanish Civil War would end with Madrid's surrender to Franco. As 1939 progressed, England nervously eyed Hitler, who would soon invade Poland and begin the Second World War. In 1939, 25 million children attended public schools and 1.5 million were enrolled in college. Ernest Orlando Lawrence received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron and researching atomic structure and transmutation.That same year, Albert Einstein would write a letter to President Roosevelt, urging the development of the atomic bomb. On January 28, 1939, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats died.

In January 1939, the inaugural issue of The Kenyon Review—Winter 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1—was published. Within its pages was a poem by Randall Jarrell, a twenty-something assistant to KR founder John Crowe Ransom. The issue's cover price was fifty cents; a subscription cost $2.25. Here is an excerpt from Jarrell's featured poem. Read the entire poem on the KR site.

the winter's tale

RANDALL JARRELL

The storm rehearses through the bewildered fields
Its general logic; the contorted or dispassionate
Faces work out their incredulity, or stammer
The mistaking sentences. Night falls. In the lit
Schoolroom the hothouse guests are crammed
With their elaborate ignorance, repeat
The glib and estranged responses of the dead
To the professor's nod. The urgent galleries
Converge in anticipation on the halls
Where at announced hours the beauty,
Able, and Laughable commence patiently
The permanent recital of their aptitudes:
The song of the world. To the wicked and the furred,
The naked and the curious, the instruments proffer
Their partial and excessive knowledge; here in the suites,
Among the grains, the contraceptives and textiles,
Or inside the board cave lined with newspapers
Where in one thoroughly used room are initiated,
Persevered in, and annihilated, the forbidding ranges
Of the bewildered and extravagant responses of the cell;
Among all the exhaustible variations—of milieu,
Of compensation and excess—the waltz-theme shudders,
Frivolous, inexorable, the inadequate and conclusive
Sentence of our genius.
Along the advertisements the blisses flicker,
Partial as morphine, the terminal moraine
Of sheeted continents, a calendar of woe.

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A CONVERSATION WITH HOLLY GODDARD JONES | by Nancy Zafris