Interview with Jill Moyer Sunday by Mary Cook
Jill Moyer Sunday
Writer, Assistant Professor, and the founding director of the Writing Center at Waynesburg University.
Jill Moyer Sunday, writer, Assistant Professor, and the founding director of the Writing Center at Waynesburg University. In this interview, Sunday shares her story of writing the nonfiction piece, “The Long Shadow” and offers advice on the publishing process, handling rejections, and juggling writing with daily life. Interview by Editor: Mary Cook.
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MC: Thank you for taking the time. As is common in your work, your family takes center stage in “The Long Shadow.” How is writing about family? How does your family, especially your children, react to seeing their lives unfold in your writing?
JMS: Thank you for asking me about my life as a writer! I’ve had the most fun thinking about these questions. Every writing textbook advises that we write about what we know. For me, what I know well is family. I’ve always been interested in family dynamics and in unpacking the complexities underlying family function or dysfunction. I grew up in an alcoholic, co-dependent, abusive household, and I dreamed of creating a model family unit. Many of my essays focus on reconciling the disparity between my two worlds.
Of course, this question also brings up one of the quintessential ethical dilemmas about writing personal creative nonfiction. How much can we tell without hurting those who surround us? Anne Lamott tells us in Bird by Bird that we own what happens to us—that people should have treated us better! David Sedaris opens the door to the dysfunction in his family in essay after essay, writing with outrageous honesty about OCD, alcoholism, hoarding, and mental illness. Yet even with Sedaris’ fine examples, I don’t think I would be writing about my father’s alcoholism if he were still alive. The thought of him reading my take on his story—even though he was a writer himself—makes my heart ache. So, we each have to make hard decisions about where we will and will not go.
After I wrote “The Long Shadow,” I sent it to Laura, who is the focus of the piece. I have only a couple of events I won’t write about because I know those stories would devastate people I love. My parents are both deceased, and my husband doesn’t read my work (That’s another story). So that leaves my children, and luckily, I’m blessed with four children who are creatives, whose artistic perspectives help to frame my writing for them. When they were little and I’d scrapbook their activities, they’d ask for more: “When will you make another page for me?” They enjoyed seeing their stories unfold. When I was blogging regularly, they’d share my posts with their friends and text me when a little too much time had elapsed before another appearance on blueplatesundays. I think that now, even though the pieces I write can be somewhat dark, perhaps even haunting, they love seeing our lives spill out onto the paper. Perhaps they, too, are looking for meaning?
But yet, we’ve never had a real conversation about the content of my writing. So, when I saw this question, I asked my children their thoughts about using them as my writing material. While I got a general thumbs up from all of them, I thought I’d share a little portion of what Laura sent to me, especially since “The Long Shadow” is all about the two of us:
“I truly believe that life is made of ups and downs, twists and turns, and there’s no shame in writing about any part of that. I love my mom’s beautiful way of writing about the good and the bad struggles. I hope to look back one day and read all of her writings and just feel her close to me when I need her.”
MC: “The Long Shadow” was published by Connotation Press, but your work has also been published in other journals - Writing on the Edge and The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, to name a few. How do you decide what journal is a ‘good fit’ for your creative nonfiction, and how do you know when a piece is ready for publication?
JMS: One of the first steps in the publication process—and a time consuming one—is to research publications. If you are relatively unpublished, you’ll want to look for journals that are open to emerging writers. The next step is to read the actual journals. Every minute spent reading journals is well spent because you can see if your style fits the publication, if you like the looks of the layout, and if your writing fits well into the level of writing published there. I go through these steps when finding homes for my work. I found The Anthology of Appalachian Writers on social media through a friend of mine who is a fiction writer. After I investigated the publication, I loved the mix of new and established writers, as well as the writers-in-residence featured in each volume (Frank X. Walker, Charles Frazier, Dorothy Allison). And the anthology is issued in print. While online journals are equally important, it’s lovely to hold a book that contains my name as a byline.
My piece in Writing on the Edge, “Essential Truths, or the Sermon in the Suicide,” illustrates the point of finding a subject-specific home for your piece. Writing on the Edge is a hybrid journal that features articles about teaching writing and creative nonfiction pieces, both of which are in my artistic wheelhouse. I wrote my piece specifically for that publication, intentionally (and unintentionally) braiding the two components valued by the publication into a piece combining my teaching of creative nonfiction theory with the death of a former creative nonfiction student.
The second part of your question is more difficult to answer. I try to teach the gut feeling of when a piece is ready to go, but it’s a feeling borne of experience. I still don’t always get it right. Sometimes after I send a piece out, I read it over later and think “Well, Jill, that sure could have used another go!” Really, we have to be honest with ourselves. Did we, as Annie Dillard suggests, ignore the drunk uncle pulling on our sleeve wanting us to add more? Did we follow Anne Lamott’s protocol of the dental draft, in which we apply the ghastly metal pic and the curved mirror to our writing? Have we, as Hemingway advised, written the best true sentences? Have we invited the reader inside of our writing by allowing room to breathe via white space? Can our piece withstand Lee Gutkind’s yellow highlighter test? (If we use a yellow marker to highlight all the scenes in a creative nonfiction essay, the paper should be more yellow than not.) The bottom line is…did we put in the work?
MC: Prior to teaching, you worked as a journalist and consultant. How did these endeavors transition into writing creative nonfiction?
JMS: A large portion of what I know about creative nonfiction writing I learned as a journalist. I was lucky to come onto the journalism scene in the late 70s, early 80s. This timing is important because what would become creative nonfiction was developing in the newsrooms of the mid 50s and the 60s. By the time I arrived, using creative writing techniques in feature articles wasn’t something new, and I didn’t have to fight with my editor to publish pieces that weren’t in old form.
In one piece I wrote about cults, I started the story in the voice of a young Pittsburgh man who’d been coerced into joining the Moonies while visiting San Francisco. While this was a risky writerly move to tell someone else’s experience by using the personal pronoun, I spent many hours with him, listening to his speech pattern and recording his experiences. After the piece was published, he said he might have written it himself. In another piece about alleged corruption at the Allegheny County Jail, I began with a recreated Prison Board meeting during a late August afternoon. Using the transcript of the meeting, interviews with the warden, prison guards, and inmates; official complaints made by inmates and their lawyers; and a weather report for that day, I was able to construct a scene that contrasted the physical realities of the two important parties in this story—the Prison Board and the inmates. The risk-taking practice afforded me while I was part of that staff and formed me as a creative nonfiction writer.
The rest of my career as a writing consultant to business and industry and as an academic writer has helped me to streamline, revise, and meet the needs of specific audiences. I’ve learned that good writing is good writing is good writing. Strong word choice, clever arrangement, and active voice works in almost every situation. Writers who understand how to adapt their skills to meet different needs will always be able to make a living. Above all, each facet of my writing career allowed me to practice and move forward.
MC: You currently teach at Waynesburg University, serve as the director of the Writing Center, and write and publish creative nonfiction. How do you balance your teaching career and your writing career?
JMS: This question may be the most challenging of the bunch. I’m always working on balance, and I always feel like I’m failing. During the years that my children were growing up, I wrote only between the hours of 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Now that they are all on their own, I can find pockets of time during more normal hours in which to write. I do tend to write more consistently in the summer because I’m not teaching then, and I can hammer out a few rough drafts of pieces that I can tinker with over the rest of the year. I often publish in bursts because of that schedule. As Anne Lamott tells us in Bird by Bird, there’s the get-it-down-draft, the fix-it-up draft, and the dental draft. The get-it-down-draft for me is where all the hard work is done. The other two stages are fun for me, and those can be completed in spurts in between my academic responsibilities.
MC: Writer’s block is an unfortunate situation many emerging writers find themselves in all too often. Do you have any tips to combat writer’s block?
JMS: Yes! Keep a journal or develop a method to collect stories and ideas. Years ago, I attended a workshop by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, author of a great little book called Poemcrazy that is really an immersion into the creative process. At the workshop, Wooldridge showed one of her journals that was full of drawings, word pools, vignettes, and ideas. I was struck, in particular, by her system of collecting words; she gathered compelling place names, odd and beautiful expressions, and well-shaped syllables. As I’ve taught creative nonfiction, I’ve seen ideas like Wooldridge’s repeatedly; almost every creative nonfiction writer I admire keeps some sort of collector’s notebook. In “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion describes the process of collecting “bits of the mind’s string too short to use.” Anne Lamott recommends adding notecards to pockets so that a detail can never escape the wandering mind. David Sedaris uses his diaries to record vignettes that he later weaves into more complex braided essays. It was notes from his diary about his experience as an elf in Santaland that launched his career.
I know that my students groan when I suggest keeping a writer’s notebook, but I promise that the assignment isn’t busy work. Keeping notebooks has allowed me to rescue and then build on my ideas. Sometimes a story isn’t ready to be told, but a moment falls into our writer’s consciousness. What should we do with those floaters? If we record them, they won’t leave us. Much of what I wrote in “The Long Shadow” came from small ideas I recorded in my writer’s notebook over the years. The opening scene began with a flash of recognition on the L in Chicago when a couple dressed like 50s sock hop dancers got on the train. I recorded the woman’s stare, their clothes, and the feeling of riding from a gleaming modern city into an area populated with 50s-style apartments. The rest came later.
MC: What advice would you give to emerging writers who are working to publish their first piece?
JMS: Buy yourself a subscription to Poets and Writers. This publication is a lovely monthly journal designed to encourage and inform writers. In addition to timely articles by people in the industry, Poets and Writers publishes lists of contests and descriptions of publications. Spend some time Googling creative nonfiction journals. Take a look at sites like DuoTrope and Writer’s Market that list journal criteria and submission details.
Think like a writer. In her workshops, Anne Lamott recounts the many requests she gets about how to get published. Sit down and write, she responds. Do the work. Then worry about the publication. Find yourself a good writer’s group. This group might just be one other person, or you might find a community group. Getting feedback before you send out your piece is essential. Ask questions. Revise. Hemingway said that a piece is never really finished, but train your writer’s gut (your honest writer’s gut) to recognize when the piece is ready to leave you.
MC: Emerging writers often face rejection, especially early in their writing career. Do you have any advice on handling rejections?
JSM: First, remember that every writer…let me restate that…EVERY WRITER…receives rejection notices. And I can tell you that they never feel good, but it’s important to remember that humans are reading your work, and those humans may have different perspectives and sensibilities than you do. If your piece is rejected, you have to decide if it’s been rejected because it doesn’t fit the publication to which you sent it or if you need to rework the piece. When one piece I wrote about my mother’s gardens braided with the theme of domestic abuse was rejected, the response puzzled me. I’d spent so much time weaving the two ideas together, and even more time finding words and terms to fit all of the different flowers in her garden. I was trying very hard to model my own mantra of “calling a thing by its name.” The reviewer asked me: “Why you certainly know a lot about gardening, but how does it relate to the other scenes of domestic abuse?” I thought that the relationship was all there, waiting in the white space. Later, when I looked more closely at the journal’s site, I saw that the pieces published were closer to journalism than creative nonfiction. Later, the piece was accepted without revision to another journal. In that case, I didn’t rework the piece. My “writer’s gut” told me that what I’d written was important. I looked for another journal until I found one whose perspective was more closely aligned with mine. Getting your work published is hard work. There’s no magic in it.
MC: Your golden retriever is lovingly named Hemingway. How has Hemingway’s writing influenced or inspired you? Are there other writers who have impacted your writing?
JMS: I’m so happy to answer this question! I love going into the back yard to call “Hemingway! Time to come in!” Much of my love for Hemingway (the writer, not the dog) came from my favorite college professor’s teaching of American Literature. My senior project was an examination of Hemingway’s concept of grace under pressure, and over the years, I felt like I had a different view of Hemingway than the standard package of macho, womanizing adventurer. Once I started to read more of Hemingway than The Old Man and the Sea and “Hills Like White Elephants,” I found his early stories and his creative nonfiction memoir A Moveable Feast. What inspires me in stories like “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Down in Michigan,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “The End of Something” is Hemingway’s raw emotion conveyed simply through minimal wording. So much of creative nonfiction is built on his principle of the iceberg theory; just the tip of meaning is on the surface, and so much meaning waits to be discovered just below the surface. Creative nonfiction techniques we discuss like white space and negative space correspond beautifully with Hemingway’s iceberg theory and writing style. I think it’s important to remember that creative nonfiction was borne out of mid-century writers’ desires to write the next great American novel, and while they worked as journalists, their creative writing techniques crept into that field to make an entirely new genre. Hemingway began as a journalist, too, and I always have these words of his in the back of my mind: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know” (A Moveable Feast).
My love of Hemingway also comes from our shared backgrounds. I began my career as a journalist, too, writing investigative news features for Pittsburgher Magazine. I think there’s a bit of a tie to my father, as well, who was a police officer but wrote daily columns for a newspaper. In his older years, he looked remarkably like Hemingway, and I’m sure all of that is rolling around in my subconsciousness.
But there are so many writers who inspire me! I do spend a lot of time with The Lost Generation, but Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Brenda Miller, and David Sedaris are my creative nonfiction favorites. If you are a writer, you must read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Stephen King’s On Writing is as fine a book about writing as you can find. The bottom line is that every writer must engage in an apprenticeship to the masters. Sometimes I have writing students so eager to just write, and they are reluctant to do the work of reading, but I know from experience that the words we read live inside of us and guide us. I read every day for pleasure, even when my reading ends with my face smashed into the pillow. Recently, I’ve read great fiction like There There by Tommy Orange, The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, Things in Jars by Jess Kid, and Circe by Madeline Miller.
MC: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?
JMS: I just finished a narrative poem called “Letter from Eve’s Daughters” about Eve’s experience and legacy. I was inspired by the retelling of Circe’s tale by Madeline Miller. Eve’s been consistently viewed through the male gaze and patriarchal history, and I wanted to give her new light. I don’t often write poetry, but sometimes it just arrives at my door.
I’m also working on a hermit crab essay, which is an essay inserted into a found form. In my creative nonfiction class, we read “The Professor of Longing” by Jill Talbot, which uses the form of a syllabus for the writer to share elements of her personal life that occurred while she was teaching a literature class one semester. That found form of the syllabus intrigues me, and I want to write about my experience of teaching during the pandemic. I’m also working on an essay about losing my sight in one eye that is braided with my son’s career as a photographer. The essay is about seeing in different ways, me seeing through his eyes, me not seeing at all (literally and figuratively).
One of my long-term projects is a creative nonfiction cookbook. I’m combining the stories behind the dishes that have been in my family for so long. Some stories are quite dark, but the recipes are all good! The working title is Blue Plate Sundays. But honestly, I’m always writing…in my writer’s notebook and in my head. I might be nodding and smiling while we talk, but I’m probably writing a story in one of the many open tabs in my brain.
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We look forward to the publishing of Blue Plate Sundays one day. In the meantime, you can read “The Long Shadow“ by Jill Moyer Sunday here.