ISSUE 17: Spring 2024

THE HEARTWOOD INTERVIEWS: FEATURED WRITER SERIES

AN INTERVIEW WITH Jonathan Corcoran

CONDUCTED BY LARRY THACKER, INTERVIEWS EDITOR

Jonathan Corcoran is the author of the memoir, No Son of Mine (April 2024, University Press of Kentucky), and the story collection, The Rope Swing (2016, WVU Press), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and long-listed for The Story Prize. His essays and stories have been published and anthologized widely, including in Salvation South, Still: The Journal, Best Gay Stories, and the Oxford University Press textbook, How Writing Works. He received a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. Jonathan teaches writing at New York University and in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more at jonathancorcoranwrites.com. 

LT: In your short story, “Black Walnuts,” published in Still: The Journal (Summer, 2022), your speaker reminisces about his late mother and time they spent at their favorite park, pointing out how the arrival of black walnut season – particularly the scent and textures of walnuts – reinvigorated his emotional experiences and memories. I think as writers, we sometimes forget the incredibly strong connection that smells and memories share. What are your thoughts on memory, emotion, aesthetics, and the senses as elements of writing? 

JC: I believe the senses serve as a gateway—to memory, to emotion, to desire. I’m always harping at my students, begging them to include as many of the senses as possible in their writing. Our job as writers is, on one hand, to create worlds that our readers can fully imagine. We have to give them these keys—and sensory details serve as powerful keys. They unlock secrets and feelings and potential futures. Go ahead—walk into your childhood closet or your basement or your attic. Run your fingers over that old trophy or flip through that photo album covered in dust. Grab that old t-shirt you couldn’t throw out and put it up to your nose and take a big whiff. When you close your eyes, what do you see? What do you remember? What are your forgotten dreams?

LT: So! A new book, and it’s memoir! What were your greatest hesitancies when leaping headfirst into a memoir? And somewhat oppositely, what portion or process of the memoir were you really chomping at the bit to get started? What had you most anxious heading into initial distribution?

JC: I had to admit to myself that I was ready to assign the events of this part of my life to the past. It’s not that I’m over any of this, but by tackling this project, by writing this all down, I had to be willing to start letting go. Of my mother. Of both the pain and joy I felt with her. It’s funny—writing is an act of preservation, but it’s also an act of processing. I’m at my writing desk making sense of these memories, these lived experiences, but I’m also filing them away, putting them in a folder that is accessible but not omnipresent in my waking life.

I was deeply afraid of hurting my family by writing this story in a truthful, unfiltered way. I suppose that is one reason I waited until my mother had passed away before committing myself fully to writing this book. She was so many things to so many people—and she was deeply loved and loving to so many. But she also hurt me deeply by not accepting certain parts of my life—namely that I, a man, loved another man.

I have two sisters, and I worried that they might take umbrage with how I portrayed our family and our history. They’ve read the book now, and I realize that writing can serve as a bridge to deeper understanding. It’s never easy to have these tough conversations. I’m lucky to have these sisters in my life. As my book enters the world, I hope it creates bridges for other people—that others might find something in my work that leads them on journeys toward understanding, toward authentic living, and even toward healing.

LT: In your new memoir, No Son of Mine, there’s a passage. You’ve gotten word about your mother’s illnesses, her dementia; how she shouldn’t live alone and will go to live with your sister “in a trailer by the rusty-orange creek.” You say: “The time to work on our relationship is nearing the end […] but in reality the time to work on our relationship is up. / We have to keep moving.”  

I feel like that’s a mantra of sorts for the entire story: We have to keep moving. It means so much – can mean so much – in only those few simple words. I imagine you’re speaking to yourself as the writer in that conscious moment in the book, but also existentially, and also as a reaching out to anyone who needs to repeat it to themselves? Thoughts?

JC: I’ve always had a deep desire to thrive—I’m a sap about loving life and the people in it. But to thrive, you have to first learn how to survive. You can see me there, in the book, girding myself with these words and reminders that there’s something worth surviving for, that there will be something beautiful and wondrous waiting on the other side. Trauma takes a toll on the body. I could feel that trauma in my body waging a war of sorts—giving into that pain was always an option, and there were times that I did give in. But somehow, by some gracious gift—maybe that gift was taught to me by the people who so generously loved me—I learned how to compartmentalize as an act of survival. The risk of compartmentalizing these tough emotions and moments is that you don’t find space to unpack it all later. I learned this lesson, that in the hardest moments in life I could hold on, that I could preserve enough self and dignity, that I could get myself to a place of safety and love—that I could get myself to a place where I truly thrived. Life is a long game, but it’s worth playing. 

LT: We writers write to sometimes figure ourselves out, to pinpoint where we are in the world. In the constant balancing of self-questioning and possible catharsis that unfolds in your writing, can you tell us whether you regularly end up with more questions than answers, or are finding more and more healing as the writing progresses?  

JC: Great question. I write for different reasons depending on the project. With my first book, The Rope Swing, I think I wrote, in part, to make sense of a world I grew up in, of a place—a town and the mountains that surrounded me—and of the tough decisions I’d seen people make in life. Writing that book was a true exploration of the home, the land, and the people I’d been watching my whole life. But with that book, I had the gift of fiction—the power to bend and skew and imagine alternate realities. Writing this book has been an entirely different process. I went through a long, tough ordeal with my mother after she found out I was gay. When she passed away after some 15 years of our messy estrangement, I needed to make sense of her memory. Writing this book was a process of breaking myself and my mother into a thousand pieces, spending some time making sense of what I saw, and then reassembling our bodies and lives into something whole. The people in my life know some of the details in this book—maybe most—but to lay these events out so clearly, side-by-side, and to ask others to go on this journey from beginning to end—I think that’s something akin to catharsis, and in sharing this story so honestly and asking others to feel so much of what I’ve felt—I think that sharing of burdens and pain and also joy provided me some kind of healing. There is a power, also, in saying “this happened” instead of “this is happening.”

LT: You’ve said that the book is “about a journey through the darkness back into light”. Since everyone’s darknesses and lights vary, how do you describe the light you’re now immerging into for the first time, or back into?

JC: The light I’m finding is soothing and buoyant. That light comes as my inner self begins to find peace, certainly, but also from knowing that I made it through this process intact, that I made it through this process with a strong, loving community at my side. The more I wrote, the more I realized I had always been deeply supported and loved by a community that stretches from my hometown to my current city and beyond. That’s a healing experience: to remind myself that despite everything I went through, I’ve spent so much of my time in deep friendship, love, and community.

LT: As home lost its focus with the off and on estrangement with your mother, you talk about trying to “invent a history,” even “grabbing and clawing” at it. You go so far in your days at school as to learn to fiddle and dance, among other ways of filling in the blanks of a cheated, even stolen, home experience. How have you seen others do the same, as witnessed or in writings you’ve experienced?

JC: I can’t help but think of displaced peoples—most presciently in Ukraine and in Gaza. How do we make space for refugees to preserve their homes and memories? In Gaza, homes—the actual physical spaces—have been obliterated from the face of the Earth. My experience is not the same as theirs, but I do know something of what it feels like to lose those physical spaces and the culture that comes with them. I think now, more than ever, we should all try to read books by those in diaspora. These stories, these histories, keep repeating. People have been writing about these deep losses of home for as long as there have been books. These books can teach us understanding and steer us towards empathy—and perhaps smarter, more humane political solutions.

LT: I realize this is a tough one, and it’s so subjective, but what’s three books you believe every reader of Appalachian literature should eventually experience?

JC: You’re trying to get me in trouble! There’s too much good literature coming out of Appalachia right now to select just three. It feels like we’re going through a bit of an Appalachian writing renaissance, though there has always been outstanding work coming out of the mountains.

I’ll give myself an artificial constraint—I’ll give you three books that deeply informed my thinking and writing, and all three of those books just happen to take place largely in West Virginia or are written by writers who were formed by this place. Two are lyrical and incisive short story collections and one is a gritty and honest memoir.

Black Tickets – Jayne Anne Phillips

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake – Breece D’J Pancake

The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls

LT: What’s the one writing project that has most eluded you so far in your writing experience?

JC: A novel! I’ve had so many stops and starts at finishing a novel—whew—I guess I wrote this memoir, so I’ve taught myself how to sustain a longer form project. I better get off of here soon and get on it!

LT: How goes your ink pen upgrading process these days?

JC: I’ve been a user of sad, chewed upon, second-hand pens for the last decade. If a bank gave me a free, branded Bic once upon a time, you better believe I still have it. I thought I’d ask social media for a little advice on upping my game—a mistake! Ha. People have strong opinions about writing utensils. Writers doubly so. I’ve got a recommendation list that’s ten pages deep. I’m paralyzed, Larry. I’m sitting here chewing straight through another one—an ugly, yellow Bic with “The Days Inn” of Elkins, West Virginia written on the side. That place doesn’t even exist anymore. It went out of business years ago. I’m hopeless.