"Terraforming" by Andrea Jarrell

​Andrea Jarrell’s essays have appeared in the New York Times “Modern Love” column, Harper’s Bazaar, Literary Hub, Narrative Magazine, the Washington Post, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies. She earned her BA in literature at Scripps College and her MFA in creative writing and literature at Bennington College. A Los Angeles native, she currently lives in suburban Washington, D.C. Her memoir, I'm The One Who Got Away is avaliable wherever books are sold

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Barton Drew Perkins is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama. He studied at Sewanee: The University of The South and is currently pursuing his MFA at American University. He has had short stories published in places such as Night Picnic Press, Grim and Gilded, and other such places. He is also an avid fan of comics, fantasy, and horror stories. He can often be found walking his beloved elderly Bichon Frise, Truman, around the streets of Adams Morgan.

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Introduction to "Terraforming"
​by Barton Drew Perkins

  Parents are outlived by their children. It’s one of the things we expect in life. A sort of cold inevitability. I experienced it myself a few years ago when my father passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. It’s an odd, indescribable pain, and a hurt that you really cannot prepare for no matter how long you have. But, it wasn’t until I had read Andrea Jarrell’s Terraforming that I started to think of the other side of that pain. Of what it must be like to be a parent, looking forward and realizing that there will be a time that you will inevitably leave your children behind.
    
Jarrell wrote Terraforming after having a conversation with her daughter about how some day, with any luck, humanity may colonize Mars and make it able to support life. The resulting piece of nonfiction is Jarrell exploring the theme of parent and child dynamics and how, in the end, children move on to ‘new worlds’ away from their parents. It’s almost like an instruction manual in some ways, a road map for parents to read when they realize that their children are starting to move away from them and on to the next stages of their lives. 

Jarrell’s use of the 2nd person, which she has told me was experimental in this piece, is masterful in conveying both a sense of close personal connection and instructional detachment to the reader. Second person is a tricky technique for any writer to pull off effectively as it’s making the reader a direct part of the story. It’s telling them that they are performing certain actions and believing things that they might not in real life. This closeness and instructional nature makes the second person far easier for a reader to reject and go against than a narrative told in 1st or 3rd person. The risk of rejection is why a lot of writers are afraid to experiment with the 2nd person narrator. But in Jarrell’s case, her experimentation has paid off wonderfully here, as it builds into the idea of how we can learn from the lives of others and make them a part of us.

Andrea Jarrell is no stranger to nonfiction work, as her amazing memoir I’m The One Who Got Away illustrates. ‘Terraforming’ is similar in a lot of ways to I’m The One Who Got Away because both pieces are about the ‘mid-life’ point of the author’s journey. They are very much grounded in the present, with almost fear for the future. There is a degree of reassurance and certainty in Terraforming that part of the parent will live on in the child forever and thus influence future generations, but there is not as much thought or optimism about the writer’s personal future. 
  
However, since writing Terraforming and publishing it with Grace and Gravity Jarrell is at a different stage in her life. She is looking forward to the future, and reconnecting with people that she has not spoken to in recent years. She attributes this to things that have changed in her life, her children being out of the house, her plan to move to the country with her husband, but also major world events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic. In a lot of ways, Jarrell herself has been ‘terraformed’ by recent events in her life, shifting from one stage to the next. 
    
I used to think that people never change. That no matter how much time goes on, people fundamentally stay the way that they’ve always been, be they depressive artist, radical liberal, or staunch conservative. But as I’ve gotten older, I have come to believe that the opposite is true. What goes on around us, children growing up, parents dying, science advancing, changes people. They gradually shift, in disposition and political ideology, eventually being ‘terraformed’ into looking at the world with new eyes. I now think that it’s important to look at people that way, to think of the world that way, to look towards the future and hope for the best as opposed to worrying about the worst. Looking towards the future, I am eager to see how Jarrell’s work continues to shift and evolve into even more outstanding pieces.

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To learn more about Andrea Jarrell's work, visit her website.