TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Movies and memory intertwine in Splice of Life. Each
chapter hybridizes traditional memoir storytelling with discussion of a single
film whose plot, symbols, or themes resonate with my lived experiences.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book?
Where does that sort of courage come from?
This is a nontraditional memoir, first because it is
episodic and thematic, and second because I braided traditional memoir
conventions with film analysis. Movies have always been so important to my
life. If I weren’t a writer, I’d be a filmmaker. I wasn’t sure this was a book
people would want to read, but the book as “product” is not something I think a
lot about until it’s all done. Writing is always an exploration for me. Can I
do this? Can I extend it and keep it interesting? Can I surprise myself along
the way? I majored in film studies as an undergrad and film theory and form
have inspired how I write poetry. For this book, I wondered what would happen
if I leaned all the way in that. If I put movies into my book. If, by doing so,
I could create a web of connections between them and me, between them and the
reader, and between the reader and me.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
This was the fastest I’ve ever published a book. I started
writing it in 2018 and dove into the first draft of the last essay in late
2020. I took classes at UCLA Extension with Shawna Kenney and Gordon Grice to
help me revise a few chapters. A literary agent who visited Shawna’s class
suggested I look to an indie or university press for this, so while I queried
agents for a traditional publishing route, I also queried academic presses and
submitted to indie presses, mostly through competitions. The queries weren’t
successful, but then I got an email from Andrew Gifford at Santa Fe Writers’
Project telling me my manuscript was a finalist for their annual prize and that
they wanted to publish it. That was October 2022. I had convinced myself
somehow that this book was unpublishable and unreadable, so it was really
surprising to me. I’m still trying to get comfortable with the idea
people might enjoy reading this—a good reminder that publication doesn’t cure
your insecurities! The way my mind works, I just don’t let positivity in for
more than a few seconds. The high in the publishing process were those few
seconds after I got Andrew’s email, and the lows were almost every other
moment, when I was certain the book would never come together.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
It’s not really advice, but it’s Louise Glück’s introduction
to her collection The First Four Books of Poems. It’s a brief meditation
on the books gathered there, but what she wrote fundamentally changed how I
write. She catalogs how, after publishing each collection, she looked back at
what she seemed focused on, and what she had avoided. Her first book used a lot
of sentence fragments, so in the second she challenged herself to write
complete sentences. She noticed she resisted using question marks in another,
so pushed herself to let questions occupy poems in the next book. If I could
distill it down into actual advice, I’d say something like be sure you know
where you’ve been so next time you can set out for somewhere new.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
My editor Adam al-Sirgany actually pointed this out to me.
There’s a weird mirroring of the chapters in the book, with the seventh chapter
serving as a hinge. The first chapter and last chapter concern competitions
(prom court and Jeopardy, respectively). The second and twelfth are
deeply internal meditations on gender and sexuality. The third and eleventh are
about dangerous seductions and how we are broken by them. And so on. I didn’t
plan that, but it’s present, and I’m obsessed with it!
How did you find the title of your book?
Titles are really important to me, and they usually make
themselves known to me early on. Since I didn’t know I was working on a book
until I had several chapters written, though, it wasn’t until I was done that I
reached for a title. The idea of the cutting room floor was on my mind from the
jump—the idea that in the process of putting together a story, there’s a lot we
leave behind—and when I published the earliest essays, I titled them “Spliced:
[essay title] / [film title].” That naturally evolved into the book title,
which plays on the vignette nature of the chapters—slices of life—but spliced
to include these other narratives. The subtitle changed several times and I owe
the final version to Shawna’s class, where I realized genre was one of the
unifying elements of my lived experience and the films I selected to pair with
them.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://charles-jensen.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Splice-Life-Memoir-Film-Genres/dp/1951631331
READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “Psychological Thriller”:
https://expositionreview.com/issues/vol-vii-flux/psychological-thriller/
