by elizabeth edwardsWhether volunteering with the Peace Corps in Bulgaria, living in Mozambique on a Fulbright grant, or working for USAID in war-torn Iraq, Jamy Bond has gone through life all over the world. It is evident in both her fiction and nonfiction that experience is what inspires her. Jamy’s writing is shaped by experiences both unforeseen, such as losing her younger sister to a car accident, and chosen, like dodging bombs as a daily part of work in Iraq. Both aid her in creating work that refracts those personal experiences into a fragment of collective human experience. As I read Jamy’s piece, “Learning to Fly,” I felt a heaviness of familiarity and fear. The piece anchored me with an emotional weight that only the best writing can place on a reader. Her story intertwines violence and vulnerability, desire and innocence, and fear and calm into connecting threads between the characters. As a writer, and a reader, I have found that those life experiences and emotions that expose our malleability, and train us to resist it, are those that best infuse a story with the same ability to affect people. Jamy draws out those emotions and builds from those experiences, mooring readers so deeply in the story and then finally setting us free as the story releases its grip, teaching us to fly along with the characters. Jamy explores the darker side of the human experience with equal parts grace and gravity, making her a fitting contributor to this anthology. You write both fiction and nonfiction. Which did you primarily write first?
I started out writing fiction, which was my MFA concentration at George Mason University, but I’ve always been drawn to creative nonfiction. Writing is how I process difficult life experiences and creative nonfiction often feels like the most comfortable form for doing that. When my sister died in a car accident, the trauma of losing her felt too close and too real to write about it as fiction. The fictive aspect of the story felt like an unnecessary barrier that would keep me from capturing the emotional truth of it. So, I wrote it as nonfiction. How has your nonfiction writing inspired your fiction? Or what have you learned from nonfiction that carries over into writing good fiction? For me, writing is about conveying the deepest emotional truth, and for a piece of writing to be good, for it to resonate, the writer must dig deeply and darkly into the experience she is writing about. Both fiction and nonfiction require equals amounts of craft, but nonfiction adds an element of unmasked self-examination for the writer and the act of doing this on the page can be very cathartic for the writer and the reader. I write in order to make sense of things that happen in my life and when what has happened feels enormous – losing someone I love, for example, or living in a war zone – I feel the need to use my craft in order to self-examine. I need to answer the big questions: What exactly has happened? Who am I in the middle of this? Who am I at the end? Who am I older, looking back? The process has definitely made me braver in my fiction writing. I am far more comfortable now going into the mind and heart of a character and really stirring things up. The narrator in “Learning to Fly” has such a clear, distinct voice. How did you develop that voice? Voice is the driving force of any piece of writing for me. It is how I know to keep going and that I have something worth continuing. But voice is also one of those elusive elements that is often unconsciously developed. I think a captivating voice has a lot to do with rhythm. I read my writing out loud a gazillion times as I’m writing it. Often, I’ll read the entire piece out loud each time I add a new line or two. There is the voice you hear in your head as you work the sentences, and then the voice you hear as you read the lines out loud. Hearing my own voice reading the lines is how I find small, but meaningful ways to refine it. In “Learning to Fly,” I wanted to capture a balance in the voice between the innocence of young female desire and the sobering reality all girls must absorb when we realize that desire is intricately tied to sexual violence in our society. The story is written in the past tense, so the narrator has already experienced everything she is telling. However, I imagined that she is not too far removed from the experience. She is not a middle-aged adult looking back on what happened with the wisdom of time. She is still a young girl, one who has just stepped over the line into understanding what her own sexual vulnerability means in this world. How did the idea for “Learning to Fly” come about? Did it just start as a story about friends finding a body in the woods? Or were Jessie and the narrator’s stories always going to be connected in that out of body experience the narrator describes? If it came later, how did you make that connection? I wrote the first draft of “Learning to Fly” many years ago and it has been revised countless times since then. I wanted to write about a young girl’s sexual coming of age. I knew the story was going to be about a group of friends finding the dead and mutilated body of a girl they know. I knew that the narrator would be forced to process seeing this dead girl in light of her own developing desires. That’s all I had in mind when I started writing. Once I had a strong voice, the rest just came. For me, writing is about making connections and the best connections are made in the act of the writing itself. It doesn’t matter how much or how little I have in mind when I begin, the real story takes shape on the page during the process of writing it. So, to answer your question directly: No, I did not have the idea to connect Jesse and the narrator’s stories in the out-of-body experience until I was writing those final paragraphs, reading them out loud, hearing their rhythm, seeing their imagery, making the relevant connections and then refining it. This piece captures the strange relationship that humans have with death. I think many people are familiar with that feeling of finding little links to people who have died, whether or not you were close in life, especially with those who die young or unexpectedly. Death often makes us think differently about our own lives. Did you find it difficult to write about such a sensitive subject? This is a very interesting question for me, because when I wrote early drafts of “Learning to Fly,” I was young and had not experienced tragedy and loss in the way that I have now that I’m older. However, I was writing the story at the same time that I was being stalked by an ex-boyfriend, and I felt very frightened all of the time, even a little paranoid. I was acutely aware of my own vulnerability. This is probably how I tapped into the deep emotional connection we all have with death and desire. The experience of writing about sensitive subjects is challenging, because in order to make the words resonate, you must be willing to go to dark places. For me, the challenge is worth it if by going to those dark places I can capture some truth about what it means to be human. There’s enormous comfort in that. In her book Dying: A Memoir, Cory Taylor writes, “we are all just a millimeter away from death, all the time. If only we knew it.” Many of us spend our entire lives running away from this awareness. But as a writer, I feel like I’m always running toward it. Your life has taken you all over the world, how have you drawn from that for your writing? How did you end up in D.C. and how, if at all, has that changed your writing? For me, writing is about capturing the truth of human experience in all of its complexity and depth, its ugliness and beauty. Traveling and seeing the world from so many different perspectives has deepened my understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to live and love and suffer. There is so much cruelty and suffering in this world. But there is hope and kindness too. All of it is fuel for writing. There are millions of stories to tell and not enough time to tell them, I’m afraid. I came to the D.C. area to go to college and decided to stay. I love D.C. For years, I lived at New Hampshire and 17th in Dupont Circle and this was the first time in my life that I’d lived in a single place for more than a year or two. I developed real roots and a strong connection to the city. Now, I consider D.C. my hometown. There is a vibrant and thriving community of writers and artists here that keeps me inspired. When someone asks me the inevitable question that once gave me pause – where are you from? – I always say Washington, D.C, because it feels like my home. What are you working on currently in your writing life? I’m very close to finishing a novel about a woman who learns a secret about her father that gives her a new and troubling perspective on the evolution of their lives.
3 Comments
Sue brower
4/21/2020 07:27:52 pm
Great interview, Jamy! Looking forward to reading the collection.
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3/28/2023 02:32:06 am
More and more often, people are using the internet to broadcast their personal fashion recommendations, which is a great way to get a pulse on spring fashion. Sites like tumblr and Pintrest have specific sections devoted to fashion.
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3/28/2023 02:32:42 am
Travel blogs are a great place to see different trends that span the globe.
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