10 Questions with Jenny Land
You teach English, and you obviously love to write, so explain what it is about writing that you like so much.
I’m perennially fascinated by the constant process of discovery in writing— both about my characters and about myself. I usually have an idea where I am going with a story, but I never know what my characters are going to say or do until I write it down. Frequently, the outcome I’ve envisioned changes, too. I love not knowing ahead what will happen and being surprised by what I write down. I’ll often think, “Where did that come from?” I don’t try to bring my characters back around to my original idea. That’s a process that hasn’t ever worked for me. When did you first take an interest in writing and why did you choose it as a career? I’ve been writing stories and poems ever since I was growing up. Like many children, and like my character Susannah, I was thrilled by the prospect of a blank book and the excitement of dreaming about the stories that would fill its pages. My parents and my grandparents strongly encouraged my writing. When I was about nine years old, I remember my grandfather reading aloud at a dinner party a poem that I’d written for him. I knew even at that age that it wasn’t great literature, so I felt more than a bit mortified, but also very proud that he had that kind of belief in me as a writer. As I grew older, I gravitated towards all creative assignments in school. In middle school, whenever I finished assignments ahead, I’d spend the extra time doodling poems and stories in my journal. My creative writing teacher in eighth grade and my creative writing teacher in high school strongly encouraged my work and helped me to see myself as a writer. Later, I went on to study creative writing both as an undergrad and as a post-grad. I’m certain that I’m writing today and also teaching today because of that early encouragement. What sort of books do you like to read, and do you have any favorite authors? I learned to read at a young age, and by the age of six, I had firmly chosen historical fiction as my favorite type of story. I read novels and biographies alike while growing up, and I still do. In fact, I’ll read almost anything I can get my hands on. The stack on my bedside table usually consists of books that have been passed along to me, because I like to be surprised by ideas I might not have sought out on my own. So recently, for example, I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, which a former student recommended to me, and Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz, which my mother passed along to me. I recently read Simon Armitage’s latest books, The Death of King Arthur and Walking Home. The novelists I go back to most often are British authors Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy, and American author William Maxwell. I’ve enjoyed all of the books of Howard Frank Mosher. As a child, I read and re-read the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery, and Maud Hart Lovelace, and those authors have an obvious impact on my own work designed for a younger audience. What inspires you to write? I am inspired by life in Vermont, both past and present. I love learning about how people lived long ago in any place, and I’m especially interested in learning about day-to-day life in the landscape in which I’ve lived most of my own life. I’m particularly fascinated by nineteenth century and early twentieth century history. I learn by observing, by visiting museums, by reading, and by listening to people. I grew up going to school next door to the Shelburne Museum, and later did an internship there researching costume history. I adored the chance to learn firsthand about how people dressed in Vermont and why, and to observe first-hand how they made their clothes. You can learn a lot about people and their way of life from their clothing. Now I live on the other side of the state, in Peacham. I love hearing the stories of people who grew up living here. There was no electricity in Peacham before the 1950s, so it isn’t hard to find people with a memory of a very different lifestyle than that which we experience today. Because I’ve been reading and learning about Vermont history for as long as I can remember, I don’t do a lot of research before I begin writing; the inspiration is already there. But I certainly go back and research highly specific practices. For example, I wrote a story that was published by Kingfisher in London called “Driving Rosie," a story about a girl who lived in Montpelier during the 1950s whose sister is afflicted by polio and who is sent to live with her French-speaking grandfather in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. She almost moves backwards in time, from a modern world with autos to a world still reliant on horses. I could picture her world fairly well, but I knew absolutely nothing about driving horses, and I had a lot of work to do in researching that. You're married, and you have two twin girls, so when do you find the time to write? How do you balance your career with daily life? It’s hard! My life at home and with my girls is my biggest priority. I’m also a three-quarter-time high school English teacher, and I love that job, too. I also garden, and work on a farm in the summer to help feed my family local food throughout the year. I make time for outside interests like hiking, running, canoeing, cooking, sewing, singing and traditional New England dancing. So I have to be an organized person. I carry writing ideas around with me a lot, sometimes for a very long time before putting them down on paper. When I do sit down, I write fairly quickly. I have found that if I set a schedule for writing each day, and I can’t stick to it (which I find impossible at the moment, with twin girls and teaching), I get upset and angry with myself, which is anything but productive. So instead I establish regular blocks of time on weekends and vacations and during the summer when I know I can have the space to write. And then if I have time to write during the week, I see that as a bonus. I actually write a fair amount during school time, because I believe in writing alongside my students. Nonetheless, that routine does not replace the hours necessarily spent alone to bring an idea to fruition or to revise. In order to find the quietude for writing, I often escape outdoors, or to the library or to a friend’s more placid household. My husband is also a writer, and he has helped me make time for writing, which is the best gift in the world. Since it can be incredibly tricky to manage time at home alone with young twins, I’m incredibly grateful. So explain how The Spare Room came about? I actually began writing the book as a short story in 1999, while in graduate school at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where I completed a Master’s in creative writing. But the story had many differences to the one that exists now. It was told in the third person, and it was not told specifically from the perspective of a daughter in the family. The escaped slave, now the character of Jacob, was hidden by the family in a secret space in their farmhouse until he could be escorted to safety in Canada. Shortly after I returned to live and work in Vermont, I visited the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, and learned that many fugitive slaves played a much more active role in their movement toward Canada once they had made it this far North, away from less immediate danger. Fugitive slaves could live more openly and even work for wages before continuing their trip North. I decided to go back to the story I’d started two years before, and retell it. This time, I envisioned the character of Susannah as the person to tell the story, and I began writing her diary for the year that Jacob came to live with her family. I wrote intensively over the course of two summers, for a few hours each day after my work on a farm. Those day-to-day farm chores and tasks created the bedrock for the novel. Students are often told to "write about what they know." What in The Spare Room did you know about that made writing the story easy, and what about it did you have to research and figure out? While I have a good understanding of daily life in Vermont for a farm family, I had many areas that I touched on in the novel that required more research. I definitely had to research abolitionism, both on a national and a state level. I had to learn about the differences between the nineteenth-century and modern celebrations of traditional holidays, such as Thanksgiving, which did not become a regularly celebrated day until Franklin Roosevelt was president. I had to do a lot of background reading about medical practices during the nineteenth century, which I did with the help of my father, who has practiced medicine for forty years in Vermont. I had to make absolutely sure that I had my dates lined up on the inventions of the day. So, for example, although rail travel boomed during the1840s, no lines existed in Vermont until a few years after 1843, the year in which the novel is set because of the visit of Frederick Douglass. I had to rewrite my train-journey sections that I had written in my first draft and research the history of stagecoaches in Vermont. Describe the process of creating the characters in the book—where the inspiration came from, how you got to know them in your mind, and what the process was like bringing them to life? That’s a hard question to answer, because the characters have evolved continuously ever since I began writing the story. All of the characters, even the minor characters, are completely my own invention except for the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Most of them are there because they serve a definite purpose in the plot, and I worked on exaggerating their traits in order to move along the plot at a faster pace. For example, Mr. MacLeish became a foil to Susannah’s father, challenging the wisdom of hiring an escaped slave to work on the farm. Gradually I decided to have Susannah’s mother question whether they should have an escaped slave in their household, less for political reasons than for social reasons, in order to create more tension within the household itself. When I worked on developing a physical description of Susannah, I decided to make her unusually tall for her age. I wanted to give her a trait that made her distinctive and that set her apart from her classmates. It’s a physical trait that a girl living over a hundred years ago would need to learn to accept, but not one that would prevent her from taking part in most activities with her classmates. How long, from concept to publication, did the process of creating this book take? What was the hardest part about that process? What was your favorite? I began writing the book during the summer of 2001, so it has taken a long time! I did take a complete break from it for a period of about six years, during which I was mostly writing poetry and short stories. It took me two summers to write the novel. I wrote it by hand, and then typed it out and revised it during a third summer. I checked a lot of my research at that point. I have most intensively revised the book over the past two years, since Voyage agreed to publish it; I spent at least twice as long on the revision of the book as in the writing of it. It’s been a frustrating process at times, but I’ve also found it by far the most rewarding. I think it has helped the book that I had a long break from it, because I’ve felt completely open to making sweeping changes. I have made large changes in plot structure and content as well as in language. I cut at least two characters (both family members of Susannah’s) that ended up being superfluous to the plot. There is not a single sentence in the book that has not been rewritten or moved to a new location. What advice would you give to young writers who are trying to create a book of their own? If you love to write, you should write! The best advice I’ve received from anyone is to write for someone else, and to have a specific audience in mind. When you write for an audience, you write more sharply, and the writing has more vivid and clear details. The audience can be the world (it’s fairly easy to write for the world with internet access these days!) or for one person. You’ll also be more open to revising your work, which leads to some of the most rewarding surprises in the process of writing. |
The Spare Room By Jenny Land Published by Voyage 
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Brigantine Media, 211 North Ave., St. Johnsbury, Vermont USA 05819
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P. 802-751-8802 | F 802-751-8804 | www.brigantinemedia.com | neil@brigantinemedia.com