Author Interview: Jennifer Down
This week, I caught up with Jennifer Down, author of Pulse Points and the novel Our Magic Hour, via email to talk about her short story collection ahead of the next session of the Short Story Book Club on September the 19th. Here's what she had to say:
Many people would have first come to your
writing when you won the ABR/ Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for your story
Aokigahara. I have a strong memory of reading that story
on my lunch break when it was published online, and being unable to keep myself
from crying. What did winning that award
mean for you as a writer?
Jennifer Down: Thank
you! It was pretty surreal. I’d entered the prize the year before, too, and
maybe the year before that. It was certainly validating, because it’s a prize
that doesn’t distinguish between emerging and established writers, and it’s
open to international entrants, and because some of its past shortlistees and
winners are people whose work I greatly admire. But prizes are inherently subjective,
too, and some elements of it do come down to luck and timing.
The stories in your collection don’t always
take place in Australia. We have a story
set in Japan, one in France, several in different state of America, one in
England and so on—to what extent does this reflect your own travels? Could any of these stories have taken place
anywhere else, or was the location you set them in bound up in the story you
wanted to tell?
JD: Setting
is important to me as a writer—I write it pretty much the same way as I write
character, which is really central to my stories—so that specificity is
intentional. Often the setting informs the mood of a story, like the vastness
of that rural New Mexico space in ‘Vaseline’. But they’re not necessarily set
in places I’ve been. Like I spent four months in Japan as an exchange student
when I was sixteen years old, but I’ve never visited the jukai, the sea of trees, in ‘Aokigahara’. And I’ve never been to
that tiny shit-kicking town in ‘Vaseline’, either, or hiked the Appalachian
trail in ‘Eternal Father’. It’s a lot of research, too.
One of the remarkable things about Pulse Points as a collection is the way
that you are able to inhabit so many different characters in different
circumstances. One of the most stark
examples to me is the character in ‘Dogs’—a young man who, to my mind, was
engaging in some despicable acts. Was it
difficult for you to find and perfect these voices?
JD: In many
ways, no—I think much of the time, as a fiction author, it’s more difficult to
write candidly from your own first-person perspective. You have to be careful
to make the voice convincing, particularly if it’s a first-person narrative and
particularly if the voice is vastly different from your own, but it’s also
about empathy. Or maybe emotional sensitivity is a better way of phrasing it.
It’s sort of like being an actor, and having to crawl inside someone else’s
brain. It doesn’t mean you are that person, or share their views or values.
Plus, anyone who reads broadly has read many, many different voices, and once
you acclimatise to them, you learn how they work from a dialogue and
syntactical perspective, I think, and that helps you write them.
Since winning the ABR/ Elizabeth Jolley Prize,
you published a novel, Our Magic Hour,
but obviously ‘Aokigahara’ had already been written. How long did it take you to get the material
that you needed to put this collection together? Were you writing short stories at the same
time as your novel?
JD: I
actually wrote ‘Aokigahara’ a few years after I’d finished the first draft of
OUR MAGIC HOUR! Most writers start off with short fiction and move onto the
longer form, but I sort of did back to front—I cut my teeth writing novellas,
and then OUR MAGIC HOUR, which was picked up by Text Publishing in mid-2014,
and then I won the Jolley a few months later. I really love short fiction; I
think it’s my favourite form to write, and it teaches you so much about
precision and discipline. I was plugging away at new short stories while OUR
MAGIC HOUR was being edited, and then after it was published, too.
Would you say that there’s an overarching theme
to your collection? What did you want
readers to take away from reading your book?
JD: I don’t think there’s a real
overarching theme, but I do feel like the stories fit together. In some ways
I’m reluctant to suggest what I’d like a reader to take away; I can’t control
for how it’s read, and everyone approaches it with the lens of their own
experiences, memories and so on. But it is really incredible when people say
that a particular story really punched them in the gut, or made them feel some
kind of visceral reaction. And I think, generally, we learn a lot about empathy
and sensitivity through reading.
Do you have a particular favourite piece from
this collection?
JD: I like
‘Coarsegold’, the last story—it was a weird, long story, almost a novella, that
took years to write, but I’m glad it made it into the collection. And the title
piece, I think, because it was the first thing I’d written in ages after
feeling like I didn’t have the confidence or skill anymore. It happened pretty
quickly, and I remember being so relieved, like, ‘Oh! I can still do it!’
Which short fiction writers inspire you?
JD: So
many—mostly contemporary, though. Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Van Neerven, Sherman
Alexie, Bruno Schulz, Lucia Berlin, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Noy Holland, Justin
Torres, Claire Keegan, Tony Birch, Yoko Ogawa, Reynolds Price…
Jennifer Down is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in publications including the Age, Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and Overland. She is one of Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year, 2017. Our Magic Hour, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. She lives in Melbourne.
The next Short Story Book Club is taking place September the 19th. If you'd like to join in the fun, all you need to do is register your interest via the Centre for Stories website, and pick up a copy of the book from your favourite local bookstore!