Jen Julian will be giving away a copy of her debut short story collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, which won Press 53’s 2018 Fiction Prize, as well as a copy of the major arcana tarot deck she illustrated, to the writer whose story she selects for publication!
What is your writing process like?
I would like to say I have a steady ritual where I wake up at 6am to write every day, and I drink decaf tea at my desk and light my aromatherapy candle and whatnot. But that’s not the case. Sometimes I write all day on my laptop at the library. Sometimes I write longhand for thirty minutes in bed with coffee. However I can fit it into my day, I’ll do it. I procrastinate, and I’ve hit some walls producing work; editing is easier, when I have rough material I can shape into something more complete. But every week, I actively seek to produce new writing, even if it’s silly and just for fun, even if I never show it to anyone. And I find ways to feel like I’m not writing in a vacuum, so trading work with friends, discussing and keeping tabs on our progress. It helps me when I approach writing as a community experience rather than just sitting alone at a computer, even if that is a lot of what writing is.
What is special about flash fiction for you?
The capacity for play and experimentation. One of the things flash has allowed me to do is to try out images and concepts and worry less about sustaining them with a more traditional narrative structure. There’s something so exciting about that, to not feel pressured to make complete sense of things, to embrace mystery. Also, reading and writing flash has made me a better writer period. I’m more attune to the beauty, weirdness, and flexibility of language.
In addition to being a writer, you are also a talented illustrator! Your website features a Steampunk Tarot Project. As someone learning to read tarot, I’m very interested in this project. Can you tell us more about it?
That project I initially did as a going-away gift for a friend (who was very into Steampunk), but tarot as a whole is fascinating to me. I only illustrated the Major Arcana, so that’s narrative archetypes like the Fool, the Lovers, the Devil, etc. I see these archetypes as the fundamental units in the stories people tell about themselves. They can be rewritten and reshaped or blown apart at the discretion of the storyteller. A few years ago, I read this space opera, Samuel Delaney’s Nova, which depicts a distant future where tarot reading is considered a psychologically legitimate way of making decisions. The act of framing the self through archetypes can open up new solutions in your narrative. I thought that was pretty cool. Maybe one day I’ll illustrate the rest of the deck.
What kind of story would you love to find in the queue this week?
I want a story that cracks me open and makes me jealous. I love strangeness. Honestly, I think a story needs some element of strangeness or dissonance to be illuminating. Familiarity can so easily veer into sentimentality. So your breakup stories, your death-in-the-family stories, your childhood coming-of-age hunting trip stories—if the narrative treads a path as familiar as that, it had better be weird as hell. It needs to make me shiver at the language level.
