Skip to main content

Interview with Pam Jenoff in Tucson, "I please all of the people none of the time"

Tucson Festival of Books 2015. Photo Jesuiseduardo
Pam Jenoff sat on a panel at the Tucson Festival of Books my first year to attend. She shared that she had been a diplomat in Kraków, Poland, and is writing to work through what living there and working on Holocaust issues did to her psyche.

Q: How do you decide what point of view to tell the story?

Jenoff: A friend was reading a book in first person, pretense tense, Jenoff had an AHA moment,
First person, present tense  – I had to do that.
She took a snippet of the book she was writing and showed it in different tenses to her agent and to her editor, and asked them to choose their favorite.

Q: How do you start?

Jenoff: I start with an image, and throw down the worst 60,000 words and then try to fix it.

"I knew this terrible thing would happen to the Connally family and I knew the end, but didn't know how they were going to get there." (Reference: The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach, by Pam Jenoff)

Q. How do you research, how do you use the research, how do you not screw up the research?

Jenoff: My mom is from South Philadelphia, and ask her, "Close your eyes and tell me . . .

I love periodicals from the time period and letters from soldiers."

Q: Characters you missed after you left them.

Jenoff: My protagonist is usually a woman in unusual circumstances. The protagonist would have lived a normal life, but is pushed out of her comfort zone.

Q. What are you reading?

Jenoff: reads across all genres, currently reading, A Small Indiscretion, by Jan Ellison.

"I am an avid library person. I'm there four times a week."

Advice:

Jenoff: "You have to write on a schedule. If I was an attorney and said, 'Oh, I just don't feel like writing a brief, today.' I would have lost my job."

Stops when you're tired.

"I can't do plot twisty turning things if I'm fatigued."

Topic:

Jenoff: When looking for a topic, looks for a question she can answer. If she researches too much, she's not writing and in danger of an informational dump.
I please all of the people none of the time.
Reviews

Jenoff: Reads everything, responds, "I always appreciate the chance to learn from my readers."

She is a law school professor. When her law students are afraid to show their work, she tells them, "Read my bad reviews."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I got here and why it matters by Carol Doane

When I learned to write complete sentences I had one goal, to write a book. Somewhere in the youthful march through grade school, in some secret place long forgotten, is the book I started. I was seven-years old. I wrote prose, neatly in pencil, on blue lined notebook paper and added tiny illustrations at the top of my chapters. I drew my brother's birthday, bunny cake that celebrated his arrival at the terrible twos with frosting smeared onto his nose by my mother before she took his picture — with a film camera. I wrote about my uncle's visit from the distant country of Texas. I wrote about the way the world hurt and how small I felt. As I raced through school and ploughed down the writing path, I wrote stories and essays that high school teachers returned, scratched with red grammar corrections and tantalizing notes, such as, "This would make a good book." When I graduated college, my reward was to take a break, stop writing, and read what I wanted to

Review: Everything I never told you by Celeste Ng

“Everything here reminds her of what Lydia could have been.”   Lydia, a high school student has died and her mother drifts into her room to experience the smells and sensations of the girl who used to inhabit the space. Across town, Lydia’s father has dropped into another woman’s bed and sleeps tranquilly. Nothing in life has happened as it should. Love gets lost in withheld touches and unspoken thoughts. Parents’ expectations are driven into successive generations and serve as baggage rather than inspiration. Words hurt: “ this,”  referring to Lydia’s parent’s marriage, “isn’t right.” Words are avoided: mixed, interracial, mismatched. Words that could reassure lay stagnant and not vocalized. Words are smithed to cope: “disappeared, fell in the lake, drowned.” The family’s search to understand the daughter who died, their search for a killer to pin their grief on, the destruction of trust, and the slow melting away of relationships show a family on the brink. The sprint to finish this

Review: Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah

“And the word  divorce  is whispering in his ear, a secret no when else knows.” Muneer, a 23-year-old journalism student from Saudi Arabia attending university in the United States, is considering divorcing his 19-year-old wife, also from Saudi Arabia, who is pregnant and about to give birth. He has this thought when she is shoveling snow without a jacket, scarf, or gloves. She seems to like the cold. Before the baby is born, she strips down to her underwear and walks into a lake in winter. Is this a suicide attempt? It’s hard to grasp that concept –a young woman so unhappy she walks into a lake pregnant, a couple who doesn’t share, has no team goal, with divorce thoughts shortly before their child is born. The couple divorces. The wife, Saeedah, or Sadie as she is later known, flees with their daughter and spends the next seventeen years hiding from Muneer, his family, and her family. How is this life of hiding, that Sadie has taken her daughter Hannah on, different from a culture th