ISSUE 14 - Fall 2022

the heartwood interviews: featured writer series

An interview with Jessica Handler

conducted by Larry D. Thacker, Interviews Editor

HW: We’re all the sum of our choices, as well as choices others make for and around us, interactions, the fates, our intentions and mistakes. Can you think back to the one or a few pivotal instances in your life that set you on the path toward “being a writer”?

JH: My family was intensely verbal. According to my mom, I was reading at the age of five (although not always understanding what I was sounding out from the newspaper, which considering that apparently, I was reading about the serial killer Richard Speck, is probably wise.) My father read poetry to me nightly – I can still hear his voice when I think of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Word games like “the minister’s cat,” which is essentially an alphabetical spoken word game, were constant with my mom and my sisters and me. I learned early on about the wonderful, and sometimes terrible, ways that language frames the world.

HW: Our writing lives morph so interestingly through the years of our careers. It’s nice when readers can see themselves in the successful writing lives of others. Thinking back, say, to the first third of your writing life experience, what used to make you most anxious? What, if anything, brought you out of that anxiousness? In juxtaposition to anxiety in writing, now that you’ve found a solid foothold in your voice and themes, what bolsters your confidence?

JH: Writing was so much easier when the stakes were low! When I was in high school, I wrote stream-of-consciousness essays for my friends recapping our summer fun (and we were wild, and it was the ‘70s, so think “Dazed and Confused” or “That Seventies Show” and you’ll be close.) While I agree that I have a “solid foothold” on my themes now, getting a solid hold on my voice or my characters’ voices is a new challenge with every project. This is true of fiction and nonfiction. Every new project makes me anxious, sometimes every day for the years a book takes to write or for the months or more that an essay can take. Will it be any “good?” Will I do the subject justice? What bolsters my confidence is a good writing day, when I can immerse myself in the work for three or four hours at a time and see and feel the characters’ interactions and the flow of the narrative. That’s when things are popping for me on the page, and when I feel confident about the work. I hope that other writers find confidence in those good writing days, too.

HW: In two of your books – the novel, Magnetic Girl, and the writer’s guidebook, Braving the Fire – you tackle the autobiographical challenges of interpreting and writing out the self. With Lulu, your main character in Magnetic Girl, you bring her to life by way of your authorial possessing of the life, helping tell a story that, without your help would not be told into existence. In Braving the Fire, you assist writers who challenge themselves to write out the loss in their lives. Both are projects of giving voice to truths in the world. Which do you find most challenging, helping others mine out their own voices, or mining out character’s voices from near-lost history?  

JH: My MFA work was in nonfiction, I’ve worked as a feature journalist, and I worked in documentary television for many years, which I think is also a form of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction does help me “mine …. their [or my own] own voices,” to use your terrific phrase. Making the switch to fiction was hugely challenging! I tried to write about Lulu Hurst, the real ‘Magnetic Girl’ as nonfiction at first, but it just didn’t gel. I’ve read historical fiction forever; probably starting with E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” in high school, or maybe we could call the “Little House…” series historical fiction. I love what the genre can do. Once I accepted that “The Magnetic Girl” needed to be a fictionalized version of a portion of Lulu Hurst’s story, I started to use my imagination differently. Of course I did a lot of research into her vaudeville act and into specifics of daily life in her era, but I also relied on some commonalities in order to create fiction. I had been a teenaged girl, and she was a teenaged girl. I had been uncomfortable in my body, had wanted attention and power (what teenager doesn’t?) and from there, I was able to write her story.

HW: Braving the Fire, your guidebook for writers writing on grief and loss, seems to have been as cathartic a project for you as the author as for those potentially gaining illumination from the book. You speak of a sixth level of grieving – renewal. What renews you most in your writing and interaction with writers these days?  

JH: I caution against framing creative nonfiction as “cathartic,” since that essentially means to purge emotions. If creative nonfiction does only that, the written work serves the author but not necessarily the reader. I prefer James Baldwin’s comment from his “Autobiographical Notes” about writing making art out of the disorder that is life.

The writers in my life renew me daily. My husband, Mickey Dubrow, is a novelist – his book “American Judas” is a remarkably prescient political satire – and we have a little writers’ retreat here on our porch at the end of the day where we read to each other what we’ve written that day, and we talk about the challenges and rewards in our writing. He’s my go-to for plot challenges, and I’m his go-to for character development.  I’ve been a member of a terrific writing group for over a decade, and we meet regularly in person here in Atlanta (we met over Zoom during the height of Covid.) My work is stronger because of their meticulous care, and I’ve become a better teacher and critique partner because of their camaraderie and insight. I have an accountability partner, too – the novelist & musician Pete McDade, who’s part of that writing group – and we check in by text a couple of times a week with word counts, or complaints, or delights.  

HW: Let’s talk a little about that one big writing project that’s still in progress – that’s been on your mind the longest but just hasn’t quite crested toward completion. What’s that look like?  

JH: Two things: a novel that’s just about at a functional first draft, and the revision of a long-form essay that wants my attention and I keep telling it, “soon!” The novel is about women and friendship and the secrets we keep for other people’s safety. The story takes place in Cape Cod and in Los Angeles in the 1970s. I worked in entertainment in Los Angeles in the early eighties, so am having fun revisiting recording studios in my mind. The essay has to do with an urban legend regarding the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Flood and my relationship to survival.  

HW: You’re traveling on foot for an unknown about of time. Besides items for sustenance, and given you will remain an active writer on the road and wherever your travels take you, what are the limited contents of your “writers go-bag”?

JH: Assuming I can’t bring my laptop and charger, I’d bring a sketchbook with unlined paper to write in, and a pen with easy-flowing ink. Probably two pens because I hate when they start to skip. I like to listen to the world around me, but maybe I should also have a recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which I listen to almost non-stop when I write.

HW: You mention in your memoir, Invisible Sisters, how your two sisters are passed, yet sometimes interact with you, even to the point of informing your writing. You have, in effect, “observed” their lives unfolding along with yours through the years, growing up together in spite of the early loss of physical connection. Do you believe the writing made this possible or vice-versa.  

JH: I believe that my writing the memoir was a way to make myself think about the family mine could have been: who my sisters were and who I believe they would have grown up to be. I write in Invisible Sisters that Susie wanted to be a nurse. I know this because I have the paper on which she’d written that when she was maybe six years old, in big scrawly little-kid handwriting. Would she have grown up to be a nurse? Who knows? How many of us work in the professions we admired when we were first graders? Looking hard at memories of time together after a loved one has died can be flat-out painful, and I couldn’t do it all in one swoop. I know that Susie and Sarah are dead and are not physically with me, but sometimes I get a feeling or a thought, and who am I to say that it’s not them, for a moment, from wherever they are?

HW: You mentioned in a Psychology Today guest essay (2010) how, though you usually don’t take to slogans easily, the phrase “new normal” did strike a chord with you, especially since it’s been used in the vernaculars of grief and recovery. Taking a step away from the theme of loss, however, and applying the phrase to society’s common experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic when added to our writing lives, what “new normals” are you experiencing and/or witnessing?

I’m seeing a lot of grief for so many reasons, ranging from the deaths of loved ones to grieving the way things used to be. There’s a lot of writing coming from this experience, and there will be more. My own “new normal” is recognizing that I like having a smaller social circle, fewer places to be, less rushing around. I find that my friends feel the same way. Maybe that’s age (I’m 62) or maybe it’s the result of becoming accustomed to social distancing. I used to thrive in busy, crowded environments, like the annual AWP conference or running through an airport to make a flight. This no longer appeals to me, and there’s a “new normal” in acknowledging that that’s okay with me.

HW: What’s your relationship with the so-called blank page? Is it an invitation? Does it intimidate? Is it an undiscovered place and time? A canvas?

JH: Today it’s an invitation. Tomorrow, it might intimidate me. My hope is that the blank page will stay an open invitation to discovery, but there are days when the spelling of my own name doesn’t look right to me.