Q&A: Jessica Claire Haney

An Interview with the author of "Navigating"

by Brenna E. Raffe

In 2010, Cheryl Strayed let out into the universe what would come to be, in my opinion, the best Dear Sugar column she ever wrote. Writing may be hard, she said, but if you are a writer, it’s harder not to write. Strayed concluded the piece with the now-famous line: “Write like a motherf---er.”
 
Jessica Claire Haney realized in 2005 that writing was a necessity for her. While grappling with Graves’ Disease – autoimmune hyperthyroidism – as well as celiac disease, depression and related complications, she turned to creative writing as a component of healing. Motherhood and writing have thus always been inextricably linked for Haney, whose work draws heavily from her experiences as a mother of two.
 
Haney’s first publications came out of Writer’s Center workshops. After her health had improved enough for her to have her first child, she joined one writing group and formed another, making fruitful and lasting connections.
 
Recently, she has been focusing more on health and wellness advocacy, but is dialing back her commitment to writing about those topics to spend more time on her emerging novel, The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds. Before she began writing, she was an English teacher—she draws from those experiences in her forthcoming story “Navigating,” which is an adapted chapter from the novel. You can follow Jessica on Instagram @MindfulHealthy, Twitter @CrunchyChewy, and Facebook.
 
 
BER: Your story for Grace in Darkness, “Navigating,” and the story published in the previous edition of the DC Women Writers Anthology, “Out of Scale” are chapters from your forthcoming novel. Tell me a little more about The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds, how these chapters fit in, and your plans for the book’s future?
 
JCH: The Unspeakable Passing of Clouds follows three Northern Virginia women through three years each a decade apart; we see them in 1992, 2002 and 2012. All women face an experience of unplanned pregnancy, and all grapple with shifting notions of identity and community in a world with evolving definitions of connection. Their lives connect in side-swept ways, as do the lives of strangers.
 
We see Kari most in 1992 when, in her early 20s, she surprises her colleagues at Planned Parenthood by continuing an unplanned pregnancy. As an outspokenly feminist white woman now with a mixed-race baby, she finds herself confronted with unexpectedly complicated ideas about belonging and privilege.
 
Elaine, the character in “Navigating,” is a struggling first-year teacher in 2002 when one of her students confides she’s pregnant. Already on shaky footing and unsure how to reach her needy students, Elaine tries to connect with this pregnant student at school while, in her community, the only connections she seems capable of making are to people from whom she buys furniture on Craigslist. 

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An age-mate of Kari’s, Melanie has children later in life and is surprised by to find herself pregnant at 41 after miscarrying and having stopped trying to conceive. In 2012, we witness her ambivalence about starting over with a baby just when she thought she was ready to move on and reclaim some parts of herself. In the story in Abundant Grace, she is about to have an unassisted homebirth four weeks early after a labor that was too short for the midwife to arrive.
 
The book explores how both brick and mortar changes in the landscape as well as the influences and reach of technology affect our sense of self and/in community.
 
Elaine’s story was the first work of fiction I attempted back in 2006 with my mom’s writing group in a long, sprawling story that I could never rein in. In 2012, the ideas for the two other characters descended out of the sky with Elaine in the middle.
 
Over the years, I fashioned parts of Elaine’s story into different chapters in the novel. In the process, I learned a lot about the character. Much of the book has been written, but editing and rearranging remain. I would like to focus this spring and summer on that global work toward a complete draft but am open to opportunities for publication of excerpts. Working on this one was certainly a very rewarding and rich experience!
 
BER:  It’s evident that motherhood is not only something very important to you, but also something you draw a lot of inspiration from in your writing. Can you tell me more about that?    
 
JCH: It was the worry that I would not be able to have a child that forced me to take my healing seriously and that led me to creative writing. Motherhood and writing have been connected for me since before I was a mother! The physical, emotional, mental and spiritual experiences of mothering are incredibly rich. Motherhood really does change everything. The lens can never be the same. I think motherhood is worth mining and exposing not just in venues targeted at women but in literature that aims to reflect on the complexity of the human experience.
 
BER: What do you think the benefits of providing emotion-ridden birth/ motherhood narratives—written by someone who has experienced both— are?
 
JCH: Every birth is different. It’s important that women be encouraged not to think that things have to be a certain way for the experience to “count.” After I’d had my c-section, stories of other people’s births – joyful, complicated, ambivalent, challenging, healing – were important for me to hear to process my own experience. After I had second child at home, I spent less time chatting with other moms but often drew on earlier conversations and readings to help me process that very different experience. I love being surprised the diversity of other people’s experiences and also by commonalities across stories. All are important for perspective.
 
BER: How do you feel these narratives fit into the feminist movement/ fit into empowering women?
 
JCH: There is no one right way to do anything. There is no one right way to feel. Feminism is about many things but especially about not telling women how they should be or how they should feel about who they are and what they do. If women are empowered to make choices about how they birth and get support for whatever they feel before, during and after, they will be more resilient as individuals and better able to cultivate resilience in their children, which will result in a healthier community as a whole.
 
And even before a woman even considers choices around birthing and parenting, certainly the choice even to become a mother is a necessity. No woman should feel compelled to become a parent for any reason. Feminism means not operating out of shoulds or shame or obligation or from a place of depletion. A multiplicity of narratives helps break down the sense that there is a mold into which we should fit.
 
 
BER: You keep a personal blog where you write about holistic living. How does writing fit into your lifestyle?
 
JCH: It’s been a labor of love. I began blogging after I became a parent but didn’t get serious about building a resource site until 2014. I first founded the Arlington/Alexandria chapter of Holistic Moms Network, in 2009. Then I decided to go ahead and create the site I wished existed when I first became a parent and began publishing Mindful Healthy Life to reach more parents in Metro DC.
 
I love sharing about events that promote mindful parenting, school gardening, clean air advocacy and so much more. I approached the site as an extension of my volunteerism rather than as a true business. I will continue to use my site as a platform to connect with other local parents and to showcase to freelance clients the way I can help them shape their message and reach their audience, but I’m no longer approaching my blog as my top regular commitment. It’s time for me to focus on a few volunteer projects, on my health, on my children and their unique needs, on work that supports my family, and on creative writing.
 
 
BER: Finally, let’s talk about “Navigating.” What was the inspiration for this piece? Where do you see the themes of Grace in Darkness at play? What drew you to write about these characters?
 
JCH: When I was a teacher, the challenges of my students weighed heavily on me, as they do on many teachers. Elaine has no real friends and no strong connection to her family, so she’s floundering even more than I was. The then-bourgeoning internet’s impression of everything being possible can feel challenging to someone who is overwhelmed. The sense of belonging has shifted, I think, as barriers across communities and countries have supposedly been broken down.
I was grateful for the opportunity to work on Melanie’s story, “Out of Scale,” for Abundant Grace. That was a chapter that didn’t need much editing to make it fit in the book as it was already approaching stand-alone quality. When I thought about Grace in Darkness, I thought immediately of Elaine’s story, even though it required a lot more work to fit in the volume.
 
“Navigating” explores the idea of finding the light in the darkness, of sometimes needing to be in – and to experience – profound darkness in order to appreciate and receive light. Reminders of this important concept often come in nature, as in the striking visual of the dark clouds amid bright sunshine that Elaine sees while driving on the highway. It is in moments of contradiction and in the journey – not in some celebratory moment or any kind of accolade – that she grows and changes her perspective. Isn’t it always?