{"id":7190,"date":"2022-10-27T07:00:22","date_gmt":"2022-10-27T07:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=7190"},"modified":"2022-10-27T07:00:22","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T07:00:22","slug":"interview-jill-talbot","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/interview-jill-talbot\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Jill Talbot"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jill Talbot’s A Distant Town<\/em> was the winner of our 2020-2021 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award. (Available for purchase here<\/a>!) Nicole Neece and Mirek Stolee, PhD candidates in UCF’s Texts and Technology Program, asked Jill questions about her process, themes, prize-winning entry, and what makes for a standout submission.<\/p>\n

The Florida Review:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Distant Town<\/em> explores the role of written letters in human life from multiple angles. \u201cNo Return Address\u201d takes the form of a letter, and you even pull one of your epigraphs from a letter sent by Joyce Johnson. What draws you to the letter as a literary form?<\/p>\n

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Jill Talbot:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The distance a letter implies, but also the intimacy of it, the way a letter often details a yearning or communicates a desire or a decision. The delay of it\u2014those days or weeks between dropping a letter into a mailbox or through a slot at a post office and the day it arrives. The imagined moment of that letter being read. But also for the recipient, seeing the handwriting on the envelope, the anticipation of opening it and unfolding the pages\u2014the tangible experience. Recently I re-read the letters my maternal grandmother, who passed in 1995, wrote to me during the last good years of her life. Holding and reading those pages brought her back, her loneliness, her love for me, the disappointments in the way she lived her life.<\/p>\n

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TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Distances between people, places, and times are central to many of the stories. The title A Distant Town<\/em> implies a distance between the setting and the reader. Do you feel that, in writing these stories, you\u2019ve left the themes you\u2019re writing about in the past? Is this \u201ctown\u201d now distant from you, the author?<\/p>\n

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JT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I selected \u201cA Distant Town\u201d as the title story because like the first-person narrator in that story, all the characters in these stories are working to get to or away from some place so that they can feel settled, mostly within themselves. When I wrote the ending of \u201cA Distant Town,\u201d the moment when the blue-black haired narrator hits another car while in reverse, I hoped the reader would realize that the \u201cdifferent town\u201d she had planned, that secret she keeps to herself that night at Applebee\u2019s, has now become a distant one, because she\u2019ll have to deal with the damage and the money she planned for the leaving will now go to repairs or insurance. Also in the way she\u2019s going backwards, away from what she desires is something so many of these characters have in common\u2014like Alice Sanders in \u201cRumor,\u201d who can\u2019t keep away from daring herself in that \u201cside-of-the-highway dive,\u201d or the man in \u201cRailroad Blues\u201d who carries the letter of the woman who left in his wallet. Then there are the characters who exist in a distant town, like the woman in the final story or how M writes a letter from \u201ca restaurant along 380.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for me, I\u2019ve always been drawn to distance, to the idea of elsewhere, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll every lose that. In my essays, I\u2019ve written about how I carry distance inside me and how I chase the distance. Writing these stories, creating characters who struggle with addiction or missing or unrequited love allowed me to push those ideas into more dangerous or desperate or even dark places.<\/p>\n

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TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The box is a salient image throughout several stories. A box implies containment: a division between inside and out. As you show, a box can contain potent memories. It also seems that many of the characters find themselves in a box that they cannot escape. What was the process of character construction like?<\/p>\n

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JT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What a great question! You\u2019re excellent readers. The inspiration for the box is autobiographical. I once lived with a man who kept a taped Priority Mail box in his closet, and I never saw him open it, and I never asked about it (or don\u2019t remember doing so). I used that man as a starting point in crafting Earl, the man who wrote the letters in the opening story, \u201cDesert.\u201d The letters haunt he woman who\u2019s unwilling to let them go. Then there\u2019s the mystery of the abusive boyfriend\u2019s box in \u201cA Distant Town\u201d and the way the first-person narrator packs boxes before (trying to) leave town. I think of the boxes as metaphors for the weight or the secrets that the characters carry, and in that way, there are, as you point out, boxes that close characters in, or off, and the literal box of a prison cell or addiction or even the way missing someone can keep a character so within themselves they become a closed box to others. Before I had the Johnson line as an epigraph, I had one from Jackson Browne\u2019s \u201cBright Baby Blues\u201d:<\/p>\n

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\u201c’Cause I’ve been up and down this highway<\/p>\n

Far as my eyes can see<\/p>\n

No matter how fast I run<\/p>\n

I can never seem to get away from me<\/p>\n

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No matter where I am<\/p>\n

I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away<\/p>\n

From where I want to be\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jake Wolff, the previous Editor in Chief of your wonderful journal, told me the lines needed to be cut or replaced due to potential copyright fees. But Browne\u2019s lines are still behind the characters and their relationship to boxes\u2014they\u2019re all carrying something that\u2019s heavy in them. By the way, I\u2019m listening to Jackson Browne as I answer your questions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cRailroad Blues\u201d contrasts with the other stories in its three-part structure and its hypothetical refrain of \u201clet\u2019s say.\u201d What drew you to employing these stylistic changes and placing the story where it is in the collection? Do you see it as a turning point in the work?<\/p>\n

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JT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been drawn to metawriting, so the \u201clet\u2019s say\u201d refrain is intended to create the idea of a writer working through a story, imagining how it would go, where it would go, but in conversation, as if the reader is helping to write the story, too. Those moments when the writer\/narrator identifies the words for things, like allow<\/em> and surrender<\/em>, it\u2019s a call to the ways we, as writers, have to choose the words that will best convey our characters, how we work to get the right words to describe them physically, as well as their interiority.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also drawn to the triptych form as a writer and reader\u2014using the form allows me to set up three major movements, and in this story, the man\u2019s walk to the \u201cRailroad Blues,\u201d the time spent in the bar, and his leaving the bar and walking home. Readers don\u2019t know until the final section\u00a0that the trip to the bar was more than the usual end of the day beer, it was to get that record from the jukebox.<\/p>\n

If I structured the collection toward an arc of characters moving from stasis to moving on or breaking free, \u201cRailroad Blues\u201d would be positioned before the final story, \u201cPurgatory,\u201d but the worlds my characters inhabit\u2014their lives rarely move in this trajectory\u2014so I wanted the collection to reflect that.<\/p>\n

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TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a strong musical undercurrent that weaves through the stories. How did songs contribute to your writing process? Did you find yourself trying to choose which song belonged in which moment or did the songs contribute to building the scenes?<\/p>\n

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JT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny that I just told you I\u2019m listening to Jackson Browne while writing these answers, because I think answering interview questions is writing, too, and I need to get in the mood of the stories, the collection. When I write essays, I usually listen to Phillip Glass, but if I need grit in my work, regardless of genre, I turn to Jackson Browne or Waylon Jennings or the classic country songs that appear in these stories. In writing these stories, I chose the songs to help build scenes, the sensory details of those songs for those familiar with them, and the lyrics as reflections of the character\u2019s states of mind. That\u2019s why I created the playlist for A Distant Town<\/em><\/a>, as an accompaniment to the stories, including all the songs mentioned in the chapbook, but also bonus tracks for the songs I imagine these characters sing in the bar, in the post office, on the long drives.<\/p>\n

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TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What advice do you have for hopeful entrants to our 2022-2023 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award?<\/p>\n

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JT:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my experience as the judge for this year\u2019s contest, I was impressed by the submissions that had cohesion, either in their themes, locations, or characters, as well as submissions that reflected a writer\u2019s care in selecting the best piece(s) for the submission. Like they really thought about it, you know? The work felt balanced in some way. In my experience as the writer of a winning chapbook, I can tell you that I looked back at my Submittable \u201cDeclined\u201d section and discovered I submitted this collection to a different journal\u2019s contest in 2020, and it was a finalist. (Why didn\u2019t I resubmit to a different contest right away?) I also submitted an essay collection to this very contest that same year and was a semi-finalist. As writers, we\u2019re often told to keep sending the work out, but we (meaning me) get distracted or forget or get down on ourselves and think, yeah, I should give up on this one.<\/em> Don\u2019t! Someone will read your work and realize it\u2019s what they didn\u2019t even know they\u2019d been wanting to read.<\/p>\n

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