An Interview with Jenn Givhan

Jenn Givhan has an infectious, delightful personality. So much so, that sometimes I forget I’ve never actually met her in person! I feel like I have because she is such a force in her writing and in her online presence (and also because she helped me out and covered several of my classes when I left work to have a baby!). We are delighted to share some of Jenn’s singular voice with you, and here is your first taste. Enjoy the interview!

Plume: When did you know you were a writer?

Jenn Givhan: When I was a little girl, though, looking back, I probably wasn’t all that remarkable—I mean, a person might not have known I showed any promise. Even when I look at my poems and stories from when I was in my early twenties, truly, they weren’t technically different than other college-student writing. Growing up though, I lied quite a bit, partly as survival skill through a traumatic girlhood, and partly because, I realize now, I was becoming a writer. Back then, when I was maybe seven, I said I was going to be a writer, and my mom looked up from her textbook because she was studying to be a nurse and said I absolutely would be, and my dad looked up from his science textbook because he was a high school teacher, and said I would write the elusive great American novel, though I didn’t know anything then about the patriarchy and the male-dominated cannon and the problematic ideology underpinning the idea of a great American novel in the first place. I just said I was going to do something, and my parents said, yes you will, though in our tiny, rural, desert community on the Mexicali border, there were no creative writing workshops or poetry slams or any kind of networking that I knew how to access or that my parents encouraged me toward. So I wrote in my public school classes, in my journals and diaries, and in the survival stories I told to get me through. It was just the unshakeable belief that I had stories to tell that kept me going with very little encouragement on any practical level until I met a teacher in my grad program where I was earning my master’s in English at Cal State Fullerton, and she saw the spark in me and helped usher me into the writing world, nominating me for a grant that changed my life and made me see what was possible—the PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, which I earned when I was 25 and a mother, pregnant with a daughter, and with an energetic two-year-old son. This was the point my writing education and career truly began—though it was that unshakeable belief that I would write something as wide as the space in my heart, something important, something magical, that led me there at all, and a few adults along the way who said, Yes, you absolutely will, and then one who showed me how. Now, as a writer, I get to lie—because now I see that those lies, those stories, that magic, that survival —these all get me closer to the truth. 

P: Where do you get your ideas?

JG: A flash of emotion or a strange uncanny light that comes through in a conversation or experience, most often when I’m with my family—sleeping in an airport when we’ve missed a plane connection or up in a plane above a lightning storm that looks like creation might have, on a long road trip through the desert at night with my babies asleep in the back seat, hiking in the mountains above our city, in the shower washing my children’s hair, digging a grave in the backyard for an insect the children named. These connect with news articles or documentaries, scientific or social experiments, myths or ancient wisdom that I’ve encountered, and that nexus between personal experience and wider cultural truths is where my poems and stories begin, where they open their branches, where they beckon into the dark forests and say, Follow. 

P: Where do you write?

JG: As a mother of youngish children, anywhere and everywhere I can steal time. In my bed, at the kitchen table, at a coffee shop, in the car waiting for my kids outside of their school. I’ve been known to cry during particularly difficult scenes, and you might pass me in the passenger seat of my car to find me, hands clicking away at the keyboard to my laptop, absolutely sobbing my eyes out, mascara running down my cheeks, in the half hour I’ve stolen to finish a scene between ferrying my children to appointments. 

P: Do you have any writing rituals?

JG: I try. I fail. A candle or incense lit with intention, a crystal held in my palm, a prayer said to the Ancestors. These help. But not always. More than anything, the ritual is going back to the page, failure after failure, and believing, with all my heart, that this time magic will happen. That I’ll bring the magic. That I carry it within myself. That the writing itself is the ritual. And on these days, no matter what else, I have succeeded. 

P: How supportive is your local community for writers?

JG: This is a tough question because as a mama writer with never enough time or energy or health or money, sometimes it’s just hard to feel supported or supportive. Sometimes it’s hard to drag myself out of the house. But the community here is wonderful, and if I were mentally and physically able to contribute in the way that I’d love to, I know that it would be here for me, with open arms. Recently, I couldn’t afford to pay my health insurance premiums, much less groceries for my family, and the writing community here in Albuquerque sent me gift cards for our local grocery store, and the wider community sent me enough to pay my insurance. Sometimes I know I am still here, quite literally, because of the beautiful community that uplifts me. And no matter how exhausted or ill or emotionally drained I am, I am thankful. 

P: What are some of your self-care practices?

JG: Baths. Reading whatever I want and not caring what anyone thinks I should be reading (I love psychological thrillers in particular). Going out into nature such as the bosque here along the río and spending time with my feet in the dirt or the grass, my hands against the trees, remembering how fleeting this all is and how lucky I am to be a part of this whole strange and wonderful Universe. Spending time with my family. Watching funny movies. Eating tacos. 

P: What is your favorite book about writing?

JG: Poetry—Kim Addonizio’s ORDINARY GENIUS. 

Fiction—Stephen King’s ON WRITING. 

P: What are you currently working on?

JG: Too many projects to count! But I’m making the most headway on my third novel, a psychological thriller that highlights the protection magick of people of color here in New Mexico. Think Girl on _____, but instead of well-to-do, white women living in NYC or London, my book, like much of my other work, centers women of color. I wrote my first novel Trinity Sight because I wanted to see a strong Latina at the center of an apocalypse, and I’m writing this third book to see a strong Latina at the center of a thriller.

Sign up for Plume for January and you’ll receive a letter of encouragement from Jenn, as well as some of her creative work! (And if you order Plume Plus, you’ll actually get a copy of her new novel Trinity Sight in your subscription).

Jenn Givhan, a National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow, is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of four full-length collections: Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series edited by Billy Collins), Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize chosen by Ross Gay), and Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, 2019), and two chapbooks: Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press) and The Daughter’s Curse (Yellow Flag Press). Her novels are Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Press, 2019 and 2020). Her honors include the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a National Latinx Writers’ Conference Scholarship, The Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize chosen by Tyehimba Jess, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, the Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize 2nd place chosen by Patricia Spears Jones, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, The New Republic, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. Givhan holds a Master’s degree in English from California State University Fullerton and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and she can be found discussing feminist motherhood at jennifergivhan.com, as well as on Facebook & Twitter @JennGivhan.