Jessalyn Wakefield’s new book is out
It’s called
Unsleep’s Village, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
That’s right.
I said
heard.
Buy the book, but see her read it if you can. Believe me, it’s worth it!
I sat down to talk to Jessalyn about writing, her book, her in-person performances, and the fuzzy line that separates them.
RS: what can people expect from your work
JW: I’m an experimental fiction writer – I’m really interested in the limits of narrative –of traditional storytelling, and I believe there’s an element that can’t be told using traditional narrative. I’m interested in deconstructing narrative and don’t use traditional tools like plot or characters.
I am interested in attempting to write stories that attempt to touch a part of the human experience that narrative can’t access. Unsleep’s Village is my first long attempt at doing that. It’s a story as stripped of characters and narrative as I could make it.
RS
So the book is comprised of three stories, do you see a thread connecting them, or are they three separate entities?
JW: There’s definitely a thread connecting them. There are similar themes – the structure and presentation of those themes is different.
RS
I noticed a religious tone – in a very broad sense in the book, and in your work in general. Could you talk about that, and the way you relate religion and the religious experience to the human body and the sexual experience in your book?
JW: Yes! My experience as a person and as a woman is highly spiritual, it’s not especially focused on a physical plane, it usually has a religious connotation for me, and I’m much more interested in reconciling them than I am in separating them. The language that I have for spirituality is the language of Christianity, and that’s the language that im able to use. Sexuality is a very raw experience for a lot of people, and I think spirituality aught to be too.
I've personally had a very complicated sexual past, as well as a very complicated religious past, so a lot of my writing tries to reconcile my own history. – figuring out what those experiences meant to me, and what they mean now.
RS: so would you say that the book is the world relating to you, or is it you relating back to the world?
JW: it’s a very selfish book, in that I wrote something that would be pleasing to me and didn’t take my reader into consideration at all. Its absolutely about me. At the same time, my experience is very universal in a sense. My internal world is definitely reflected I the world that’s around me.
RS: to switch gears for a minute, I read that you’re a letterpress printer, and a font aficionado. Could you talk a bit about that, choosing your fonts, printing and so on?
JW: sure, I gravitate towards very humanist fonts. They’re very based on the writing form of the human hand. I like fonts that evoke humanity and connectedness. The font used in this book is Centaur, designed by Bruce Rogers, which is simultaneously classic and modern. Adrian Wilson, who was a San Francisco printer – it was one of his favorite fonts. There's a fantastic photographic of Wilson above the printing presses at the San Francisco Center for the Book, which is where I trained so I have a personal connection with this font as well. I've spent hours printing under his image.
The font is graceful and gorgeous, but very human, I found it very accessible but interesting.
RS: Yeah, I feel like the font goes very well with the tone of the book – it’s very non-2010, I feel like the font really embraces your word choices, and the tone of your book.
JW: Yeah, as a writer, and even more so as a typographer, that’s what I aim to do, I’m glad to hear you say that.
RS: You tend to have a really good balance between eloquence and content – reading your work, it doesn’t seem as though you have to sacrifice either! Your work seems to have such a marriage between the two, could you speak about your word choices and how it affects your content?
JW: it’s really a challenge. Since I’m not using conventional literary devices, I have to say to myself “okay, what can I do, what other tools do I have that can make this effective” and for me, the tools that I’m interested in using is language itself, so my choices are very deliberate. My grammar, punctuation and words are all very deliberate.
RS: Do you find yourself sacrificing one or the other when it comes down to it?
JW: I find that I tent to incorporate either more plot, or more characterization than I would usually like, yeah.
RS: What about your live performances? What’s it like trying to imitate your written voice with your human one?
JW: One of the reasons that I started printing letterpress is that it gives a physical component to my writing that I didn’t know it was missing, and then when I found it, I thought “holy shit, this is the other part – it’s making writing physical” so with letterpress, I’m physically setting the letter into place, touching the words, and moving the paper with my body, so when I read, I try to bring my body into the words, I try to be very physical with my presentation, because it’s hard for me to separate the two.
Reading is very intense., writing for me is very personal, and then to read it, I’m reattaching it to myself. It’s very raw, and very intense.
RS: Would you say that it’s a stretch to say that you’re a “performance artist”, or would you settle with being called a writer that’s reading her work?
JW: I feel as though I’m heading in the direction of performance art more and more. My eyes aren’t down, and performance compels me. I’m moving in that direction for sure, but it may not be fair for me to characterize myself as that at this point.
RS: Where can people see you? Where can one find Unsleep’s Village?
JW: Unsleep’s Village is available on my website, amihuman.net, independent bookstores around the country – pins and needles in San Francisco, dog-eared books, Elliot Bay in Seattle, and there’s one here in Sacramento that’ll carry it here [
in Sacramento]pretty soon, but I forget the name, honestly.
I have a reading at the end of the month in LA at a book store called book soup, which is a really fantastic book store. It’s called “LA experiments with women” which is all experimental fiction with women.
I also have a reading on April 23rd in LA at a book store called
Book Soup, which is a really fantastic book store. I'll be reading with a great group of other women writers: Elizabeth Hall, Emily Kiernan, Katie Manderfield, Amanda Montei and Allie Rowbottom. The reading starts at 7 PM. I also just had a piece come out in the University of Alabama’s literary magazine, “Black Warrior Review." I have a few more Sacramento readings in the works as well. I’m doing these readings and have a new manuscript gestating in my mind.
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