Heading “South” For an Interview With Author Joshilyn Jackson

Interviewed by Byron Merritt

Joshilyn Jackson is on a literary roll. Her first book, Gods in Alabama, became a Book Sense #1 reading pick as well as being heralded by The New York Post as “Required reading.” Her southern sensibilities come sweeping off the pages, and now she’s continuing that trend by heading a bit east into Between, Georgia, a fictional community with some slick, modern day Montague and Capulet parallels.

This 38-year-old author and mother of two lives in Georgia, so she knows the South well, giving the reader a great sense of place along with some really messed up characters (that’s a compliment). But she didn’t always write with community in mind. Her early writing career – preadolescent – began with Crayolas and a stapler, filling in notebooks with terrible poetry and even worse horror stories. However, as this wonderful author grew up, both physically and in her writing, she devoured such authors as Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor and Haven Kimmel, three writers she holds in very high regard. That her Crayolas gave way to more up-to-date methods of writing was obviously inevitable.

Mrs. Jackson puts out some great stories and they are a blessing to those who enjoy reading about characters with depth and a firm sense of belonging (be it a place or a family).

 

FWOMP: One of the prime characters in Between, Georgia suffers from Usher’s Syndrome. Can you explain this disease to us?

Joshilyn Jackson: It’s a bad genetic hand to be dealt – you are born deaf and then as an adult you begin to lose your eyesight. My narrators’ mother, Stacia, is profoundly blind by the time she is in middle age. It’s especially challenging for Stacia, I think, because she’s an artist. In her youth, she was a doll-maker of some renown, and losing her vision certainly meant she had to reassess how she defined herself. She remains an artist, but her art changed radically.

FWOMP: Why’d you pick this syndrome? Did you feel the need to speak out about a particular disease process?

JJ: No, I really didn’t. I didn’t know Usher’s syndrome existed when I started writing this book. When I was drafting Between, Georgia, my narrator was a librarian at UGA in Athens. I knew I wanted her to be a person who lived “in between” on a number of levels, and part of that was her inability to tell her own stories, to have her own voice. So I wanted her job to reflect that. Librarian wasn’t quite right. Interpreter was perfect, because it put her in a position to tell other people’s stories and the town’s story…. but very few girls from tiny towns in rural Georgia speak French with a perfect Parisian accent. I had a deaf friend when I was a girl, and I started thinking about how sign language was her little sister’s native tongue as surely as English was.

I also knew I wanted the sisters that raised Nonny (Genny and Stacia) to have a symbiotic relationship. Genny has OCD [Ed. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder] – although that diagnosis is never stated in the book, people who are familiar with OCD have written me, recognizing her symptoms and behaviors – and is emotionally dependent on Stacia. I wanted Stacia to be physically dependent on Genny, and I wanted them to be equals. I knew Stacia would be deaf, but honestly, that made Genny’s level of dependence on Stacia much higher. It wasn’t balanced.

I couldn’t make Stacia be deaf and blind and still have her make the kind of dolls I wanted her to make. My brother is an artist who sculpts the greens for toys and action figures, and he assured me a person who was born blind could not do his job, so I started researching the ways people who are deaf lose their vision later in life, and Google told me about Usher’s Syndrome.

At that point, I realized I was in over my head and I called the Helen Keller National Center here in Atlanta to learn about Ushers and meet the extraordinary community of people who live and work and fall in love and get married and raise their babies and have good, full lives while living with Ushers. I couldn’t have written the book without the help of the Deaf-Blind community and HKNC [Ed. Helen Keller National Center].

FWOMP: You’ve got a couple of screwed up families — the Crabtrees and the Fretts — in Between, Georgia. But they’re also representational of old family feuds; the Hatfields and McCoys, and the Montagues and Capulets. Was this intentional? How do you feel about these comparisons?

JJ: I don’t know much about the Hatfields and McCoys outside of the Bugs Bunny cartoon parody of it with Yosemite Same, but yes, of course I thought about Romeo and Juliet when I was writing the book.

FWOMP: The budding relationship between Henry and Nonny (the main character) is pretty interesting. You allude to the fact that Henry’s parental lineage is in doubt, but there still may be a family tie (albeit a distant one) between these two. It seems like you’re playing with the possibility of incest (kissing cousins?) How did this relationship come about from a writers progression standpoint?

JJ: Oh, I think I make it pretty clear that even if Henry’s dad is Reaux, the blood tie is very slight – third cousins four times removed is such a distant connection that if you marry someone whose family comes from the same region, the two of you are probably at least that related.

I didn’t want to play with incest at all – it’s not a fun toy. It’s icky. I wanted them to be tied in with their families to keep the Romeo and Juliet thing going, but every move I made in revisions distanced the blood tie, and then I came up with the idea of having Reaux not be his biological father at all. The progression was away from anything that smacked even faintly of incest.

FWOMP: The title of your novel has multiple meanings (the relationship/referee position Nonny is put into “between” her families, etc.) How many definitions do you think Between, Georgia has in the book?

JJ: I think one. Between is the town, and in many ways this book is the story of a town. The town shapes and molds them all, and sense of place is hugely important. Yes, Nonny is between girlhood and womanhood, between nature and nurture, between men, between Athens and Atlanta, between being the child and being the mother; but these are all coming from the place.

FWOMP: Were the title’s multiple meanings purposeful or did it evolve as you wrote the story?

JJ: Absolutely purposeful.

I found the town first, over twenty years ago, when I used to drive back and forth between Athens and Atlanta at least once a week, and have been looking for a story to tell it in ever since.

FWOMP: Are any of these characters representative of actually people (living or dead)? How much of “you” is in Between, Georgia?

JJ: None of the characters are me, but of course they are all “mine.” None of the events in the book actually happened to me or to anyone I know. I make it all up, with a few little “stranger than fiction” images that are jumping off places for me. Though I can see a lot of my fierce, odd, clever niece in Fisher.

That said, I tell myself stories as a way of explaining the world to myself. I may not be aware of how personal a book is, thematically, until it’s finished. Then I can begin to relate parts of it back to my own life in ways that surprise me.

FWOMP: What are you working on now? Anything we should be watching out for in the near future?

JJ: I’m working on a Southern Gothic ghost story called The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. Two sisters – polar opposites – begin digging up a neighborhood’s secrets after the ghost of a drowned girl visits Laurel, the happily married, conventional, quiet sister. Thalia, an Actress with a capital A, pushes buttons and boundaries until Laurel is investigating her own life. And these sisters have a very literal skeleton in their own family closet. It’s my blend of humor and violence, this time set in the panhandle of Florida.

Read the FWOMP review of Jackson's Between, Georgia

(Interview copyright FWOMP/Byron Merritt and Joshilyn Jackson, September 2006)