Solid Objects: Jac Jemc
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Jac Jemc. Jac’s latest book, Empty Theatre, is out now from MCD x FSG.
My partner knows that my love language is artist monographs, most often photographers, and so for birthdays and Christmases I’m usually the lucky recipient of one or two art books. These volumes end up being integral to my writing process, in direct and indirect ways, and so they sit stacked on top of the bookshelf beside me, ready to be pulled down at any moment. Usually there’s one open on the corner of my desk already.
I do my work in the world of words, but images have gotten me out of jams many times. Most of my books and stories have countless visual references. They might not have been formally assembled into a mood board, but the images function in a similar way.
If I’m unsure of where to go next or I feel like the work has lost its hold on the material world, I can steal an image from one of these books to ground it. Or I might feel like the text is becoming too one-note, and I’ll ask myself how it might grow and deepen the work to shift its tone by translating an image I have nearby into a paragraph or a short chapter. Many of my favorite artists, no doubt, influence my work, or at the very least overlap with my concerns more indirectly. Photographers like Nan Goldin, Tina Barney, Dawoud Bey, and Gillian Laub have a way of documenting people with an exacting, defining eye. Often they reveal aspects of these subjects’ personalities that are prone to be hidden or misinterpreted, oversimplified or underrepresented. This is something I am also interested in exploring in my work. I ask myself what assumptions I make about those around me. What are we told to value? What do we actually value? Why is it worth examining both more closely? Who deserves grace and who receives it?
I could open a book of photographs and tell you what pages of my novel The Grip of It it inspired. I could show you a series of poems thinking about the mistaken and intentional cultural exchanges of colonialist trade routes through the Indonesian/Dutch/African Wax print installations of Yinka Shonibare. Right now, in the new novel I’m working on, I have four books within reach: a book of paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler—often known only for the portrait he made of his mother sitting in profile, but far weirder and wider ranging in the rest of his work; a book on the practicalities of oil painting so I can think about and refer to various textures built up with palette knives and brushes; a book on antique framing techniques; and the catalog from a touring art exhibition called Supernatural America. These references might seem much more practical in the way I’m using them for this project, because the book has characters who are actually artists, but they also have a wider ranging effect on the work, in the way they help call me back to the language and visual motifs I’m trying to conjure with the eye viewing all of the action of the narrative.
The influence of visual art on my writing has been a constant from the very start and so I wouldn’t disagree that my work is, most often, ekphrastic in some way. Even beyond the workstation of my desk, if I am feeling disconnected from my practice, there is little that can get me working again better than a trip to an art museum or gallery.
It is so nice to feel like my security blanket as a writer is the creative work of others. Even in the many months, even years, where I am the only person reading my drafts, I feel as though I’m in conversation and community with work that I admire and appreciate. It is a lovely way to feel less alone when I am the only person in the room.
Jac Jemc is the author of three novels, most recently Empty Theatre (MCD x FSG), and two collections of stories. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of California San Diego, where she serves as Faculty Director of the Clarion Writers Workshop.