Issue 9 Spotlight

An Interview with Jackie Shannon Hollis
by Tricia Callahan

In other interviews you’ve given, you’ve revealed that it was short story writer Raymond Carver who made you want to write. Tell me about what you drew you to his writing.

First there was the simplicity of his language (of course, when I started writing, I saw that it wasn’t simple at all, how he did that). He could say so much with such small gestures. I loved that he told stories about ordinary people in ordinary situations and made small moments so powerful. His stories force me, as a reader, to read carefully and really bring myself to it, because so much happens in the space between the words.

Now tell me about the first story you put to paper.

The first story I actually remember putting to paper is memorable because of the consequences. When I was a kid, maybe eight or so, I wrote a story for a school assignment. Something involving a cat and a monkey. My sister saw it when I brought it home with a gold star and she said it was a story she’d written, that I’d copied it. I denied it and was humiliated at being caught in such an obvious act of theft (I had wanted Mom to see that gold star—so, stupidly I showed it off). But it was my sister’s story (she liked monkeys). Now, it occurs to me as I’m answering this question that I sound a bit like Mama in “Her Own Special Touch,” but I swear it was just that one time. However, even now, when I’m having a dry spell as a writer, struggling to start something new, I return to an assignment one of my writing teachers gave me for such times. That is to take a favorite short story of a favorite writer and write the story in my own handwriting, just to get the feel of good writing in my muscles. It is a great way to bring me back to my OWN words. And then I throw that copied story away so that after I’m dead some unknowing family member doesn’t come across it and think I’m still at it.

The first short story I actually completed, and felt was a whole story, was “What I Did on Summer Vacation.” It started from an assignment in the first writing class I took (with Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred, who teach at the Pinewood Table—wonderful, wonderful teachers). The assignment was to write two pages about a memory. We brought the pages to class the next day and read them and got a critique. What I learned in that critique really opened up the writing for me. It was gentle and supportive. I was a new writer and I needed that. They showed me how to use the language to explore the intimacy of a moment. Then we were told to take one paragraph from those two pages and expand it to two pages. I couldn’t believe how that one paragraph became the story; it went from a memory to a piece of fiction and I loved the freedom of that.  Over time, I worked on it some more and eventually sent it off to Flashquake. They liked it and published it and even nominated it for a Pushcart, which pleased me to no end. 

How did “Her Own Special Touch” come about?

I’m interested in how children are witnesses. How they see things going on in the world around them, take it in, and interpret it from their young perspective. How when problems are happening with the adults in their lives, they know “something is wrong here.” But they need to normalize things, make them okay in their own minds, because the adults are the people who are responsible for them. And meanwhile, they’re just trying to be kids. So they carry this tension. The tension in that place between is interesting to me. So this idea of a mother with this odd, sort of unnamable problem started the writing process on this story, and I paired it with an image in mind of that sad and bare front yard.

Let me tell you where I was won over by “Her Own Special Touch.” This paragraph: 

I heeled my way over to the cement porch and sat on the second step. Mama turned away from the yard, toward the street. Her shoulders and elbows were sharp points and she was still. When Mama was like that, still and pointy, it got inside me and made me still and pointy too. 

It was the characterization and the voice that grabbed my attention. The story proceeded to live up to its promising beginning. Tell me about your decision to tell this story in the first person and from the point of view of the nine-year-old boy. Do you typically write in the first person?

I’d recently written a story from a young girl’s point of view and was curious how the voice might be different with a boy narrator. Many of my stories tend to start in first person and most of them stay that way. I like being in the narrator’s head. Occasionally a story will start right out from third person because I want a bigger perspective. I have a series of stories set in this small town of Springs and some of my stories have the bigger perspective, as though the town is telling the story. With my novel, the first draft was in first person/present tense, then I revised it to third person/past tense, and then a third draft was first person/past tense. I learned a great deal by trying these different ways of telling the story.

What projects are you working on now?

I’ve completed a novel, At the Wheat Line, and am querying agents. You may not know this but in the 1970s on American farms, and especially farms in Oregon, teenagers did the work. Boys driving combines, girls driving trucks. Teenagers and machines and the heat and dust of harvest can lead to dangerous mistakes. Eighteen-year-old Carly Lang is a girl who drives one of these trucks on a harvest crew that moves from farm to farm cutting wheat. At the Wheat Line is her story of love and grief and coming of age.

While waiting for the elusive agent to fall in love with my novel, I’ve gone back and restarted the memoir that originally led me to writing. I’m really excited about how it is coming along, both in terms of the sound of it, the structure, and format that I’m using to tell the story and because of the topic, which is about having been raped by a stranger when I was a college student. There have been other memoirs written about this, but what makes my story different is that I was a girl who really wanted something big to happen to her. Then a big thing did happen, being raped, and it was something that was hard to talk about— it made other people uncomfortable, and I questioned my reasons for needing to talk about it so I eventually didn’t talk about. A number of years later I began to write about the rape. I talked with my family, the detective on the case, and I corresponded with the rapist who is in prison.

What are you reading now, and I’m curious, in what format—a paperback, hardcover, e-book?...a book you own or one you’re borrowing?...something you’ve read before or reading for the first time? Or maybe you’re not reading anything right now. Talk to me about what drives you to read certain authors. 

Oh, I’m quite a mishmash. I read in all formats. I like softback because it’s easy to take along to whereever, slip in my purse or luggage. I’m tough on books. I always have one with me—in my car, in bed, eating—and they get a lot of wear and tear. I get anxious if I don’t have a stack of books waiting for me. I read e-books on a Kindle, especially when I travel. I read manuscripts on my laptop, of other writers I’m in a novel critique group with. On my Kindle, I just finished State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and have now started The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. I’m really enjoying this book— it’s so different from anything I’ve read lately. Another book I read recently that I absolutely loved is The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss (an Oregon writer). Wow. Oh! C. E. Morgan’s All the Living is a beautiful book where so much happens with the writing even though it’s a small story—it’s beautiful. Well, you’ve got me started and I could go on and on about authors I like. There are so many great writers. Sometimes I think I should stop writing and just spend all my time reading. Then I feel the edginess of not writing and realize—I must write. 

I find out about books from other writers; we’ve got a great writing community here. My mom is a big reader and she passes books on to me. I read book reviews, especially in our local paper (yes, I’m still attached to having that paper in hand on a Sunday morning), or learn about books if I read a short story in a literary journal and want to read more of that writer. One thing leads to another.  

I read almost every genre, though I left romance when I left my teens and have not read much science fiction. I continue to LOVE short stories and am so happy that these great collections continue to be published, and I read a variety of literary journals. 

I read for the sheer pleasure of it. The pure beauty of the language. I read to learn about the world. I’m drawn to writers who can say something that I’ve been feeling but haven’t put into my conscious thought, or never put words to; there’s that sense of “ahhhh, s/he knows.” And then I get a little bit envious that I didn’t write it. I read to learn how to write— to see how an author uses point of view or pacing or tense. In fact, being a writer has really changed my reading, kind of messed it up, and it takes a really captivating story for me to suspend the studying part. And I must confess, I read to help me fall asleep.  

I’m a fan of asking our Spotlight authors to give potential subscribers a snapshot of their story—and in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story (“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”). Can you introduce “Her Own Special Touch” in just six words? 

Good Lord, Tricia. I’ve loved that heartbreaking six-word short story of his. I feel a bit intimidated. But okay, I’ll try. “Mama’s crazy for other people’s stuff.”

Jackie Shannon Hollis grew up on a farm in a small town on the east side of Oregon. She now lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon, where their cat, Fred, likes to sit at the windowsill and watch the cedar trees while she writes. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines, including the Sun, Rosebud, Inkwell, High Desert Journal, and Flashquake. She is seeking representation for her novel, At the Wheat Line. You can see more of her work at www.jackieshannonhollis.com. 

Tricia Callahan seeks fiction for Slice by night, typos for Penguin by day. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read "Her Own Special Touch" in Issue 9.

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