David James Poissant, or Jamie, was one of the most prolific writers in grad school. It seemed like he was always churning out stories, and not just stories, but stories that were winning national awards. So, I’m not going to lie, it was kind of a relief to hear that his life can be as chaotic and busy as the rest of us, and that things were not always coming to him as easily as it appeared.
Jamie is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2014), a collection of short stories that are empathic, strange, funny, and totally original. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in several textbooks and anthologies including Best New American Voices and Best American Experimental Writing. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.
Jamie has some fantastic writing advice to offer, and he says something about not watching television but I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. I just love the joy with which he speaks of his family, and it sounds like he and Marla have a true partnership that allows them both to pursue their own passions. Here’s Jamie:
How old is your child/are your children?
My wife, Marla, and I have two daughters, Ellie and Izzy. They’re twins, age eight (and eight).
Have you found you’ve been able to balance teaching and writing?
For sure, it’s a challenge. The larger challenge, I’d say, was finishing grad school while the girls were infants. Our daughters were born in the summer between my second and third years in the PhD program at the University of Cincinnati. Luckily, I’d finished most of my course work. Still, I was studying for exams, which involved reading and taking notes on 180 books in a year. In addition to reading and studying, I was teaching a course every quarter and working on my dissertation. Marla worked fulltime teaching second grade. It was kind of a nightmare. I mean, it was a beautiful nightmare, full of joy and first steps and first words, but also fevers and exhaustion and poop. So much poop.
Basically, I was a fulltime stay at home dad and writer and PhD candidate. I don’t remember a lot of that year, or the next. I was sleep-deprived, always getting sick, as was Marla, who would work all day, then come home and have to take over so that I could study or write or apply for jobs. Somehow I passed my exams and defended the dissertation, a very different version of which would become my first book. After all of that, I managed to land a tenure track job on the MFA faculty of the University of Central Florida, where I’m now an Associate Professor. The job is a lot of work, but it’s nothing compared to the grad school/stay at home dad combo. Honestly, I have nothing but reverence for single parents. I don’t know how they do it. Marla and I leaned on each other hard those first two year, then the following four while she took off from work to care for the girls. Now, the kids are in school, and Marla and I are both working, which is just what we always wanted. It’s the best of both worlds for our situation and inclinations. But it took six years for everything to fall into place—careers, children, and a book deal.
As for writing during the school year, yes, I do. That’s a must, for me. If I go even a few days without writing, I’m a different person. First, I get grumpy, then sullen, then despondent. Teaching could never be enough for me, emotionally and professionally, without writing. Similarly, writing could never be enough for me without teaching. I can only write for about four hours a day before my eyes get blurry and the words dance on the screen. I don’t know what I’d do with the rest of the hours of the day if I didn’t have a teaching position. Plus, writing is isolating. Frankly, it gets lonely. I like the camaraderie of colleagues. I like working with smart, motivated students. My students, with their dreams and buoyant hopes, keep me optimistic and positive.
What is a typical day like, schedule wise?
Most mornings, I’m up by 7:30AM, then it’s a race to get the girls to school before 8:30AM. If all goes according to plan, by 9:00AM, I can enjoy my first cup of coffee and get to work writing. I’ll write until noon or 1:00PM or 2:00PM, depending on how well it’s going. I usually teach classes in the afternoon and/or evening. Marla and I enjoy dinner together and an hour or two of playtime with the girls at night. And, once everyone’s gone to bed, I settle in to school work like grading and rec letters and course planning, as well as all of the auxiliary work that comes along with being a writer, like interviews and grant applications and submissions and answering emails.
I used to write at night, but, entering my mid-thirties, I started getting tired in the evenings. Even if I can’t sleep, I don’t tend to write well at night. No, I prefer to give my fiction and nonfiction the first and best part of my day. (Plus, if I saved my writing for last, I’d never do it. There are so many ways to put off writing. The lawn needs mowing. The fish tank needs cleaning. And when was the last time I really scrubbed the toilets?) While I love writing, I sometimes dread starting. Once I’m in the midst of a story or novel, I enjoy it, but I used to want to put writing off because I knew it would be hard work. After I committed to writing first thing in the morning, I found that everything else somehow squeezed into place. Usually. Sometimes, there are sacrifices. Maybe the bills get paid late. Maybe the house isn’t as clean as it should be. Maybe you eat a few too many meals from the microwave or miss too many days at the gym. But I’d trade all of that for the sake of the writing. I’m happiest when there’s a balance, in this life, of family, friends, writing, reading, and teaching well. Things like hobbies and health sometimes take a backseat. That’s obviously not the ideal choice for everyone, but it has been for me, at least lately.
So I knew your writing way back in grad school (we’re so old!) and since then you’ve had children. Has your writing changed since having children?
I feel like I’m always writing one step ahead of where I’m at in my life. What I mean by that is that my fears and anxieties allow me to predict the worst possible futures for my fiction. Newly married, I wrote stories about divorce. Contemplating fatherhood, I wrote stories about babies dying. Now that my marriage remains intact and my girls are safely eight, I keep writing stories about young adults and their strained relationships with their parents. I definitely use fiction to face my biggest fears. But, I would say that my staple interests in fiction—family, faith, and the South—have remained fairly consistent over the years. I’m still interested in the grotesque, and in humor, particularly where those two intersect. (This project is not new. It was Flannery O’Connor’s before it was mine, and it’s been the domain of many other writers, before and since O’Connor.)
I probably read more widely than I used to. I’ll read almost anything these days, so long as there’s a voice there and the work is careful at the sentence level. If I had to choose between reading a novel I liked for its sentences and reading a novel I liked for the story, I’d choose the sentences every time. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course. My favorite writers—Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, to name just a few—do both exceedingly well.
After I committed to writing first thing in the morning, I found that everything else somehow squeezed into place. Usually. Sometimes, there are sacrifices. Maybe the bills get paid late. Maybe the house isn’t as clean as it should be. Maybe you eat a few too many meals from the microwave or miss too many days at the gym. But I’d trade all of that for the sake of the writing.
And how do you find the energy and time to make space for your own endeavors? How do you protect your time?
In terms of protecting my time, it’s a team effort. Marla protects my time so that I can write. I protect her time so that she can scrapbook (her hobby) and see her friends. We both have lives and interests beyond the cult of family, and we do our best to make time for each other’s time. However, in part because my writing overlaps so much with my work, I concede that Marla makes more time for my work than I’m able to make for her. This was harder before the girls went to school, and it can be tough during the summer. While summer offers the most so-called “time to write,” counterintuitively, summer can tough on writing. In the summer, every time I leave the house, I know I’m leaving Marla with the girls for hours on end. When they’re all at school, writing time feels like my time. When they’re stuck at home in the summer, those hours feel stolen from time I should be spending with my family. Marla is 100% supportive, even when I’m writing every day, but any good father is still going to feel guilty.
I aim to look unflinchingly in my fiction at the world as it is. And the world is just as much the home of love and generosity and empathy as it is the home of violence and cruelty and death. My daughters aren’t developmentally ready to face the fears I face in my fiction. One day, they will be, but who knows how they’ll feel reading what Daddy wrote about the world as he sees it? Most days, I write best if I pretend that my daughters will never read what I write. Anne Lamott famously advises new writers to write as though their parents are dead. I agree. And I’d add: Write as if you’ll never have to answer to your children for your work.
What does your “space” look like, physically, emotionally?
I’m a hermit crab. I’ll write anywhere I can find a shell. If no one is home, I’ll write at my desk. Our house isn’t big enough for me to have a personal office, so my desk shares a workspace with Marla’s desk and our girls’ craft table. Still, if the house is empty, it’s a nice place to work. My desk overlooks the front yard. To my left are bookshelves. To my right is a fish tank. I’m not big on material possessions. Our furniture was inherited. I shop at Goodwill. But, after I sold my first book in 2013, I treated myself to a really nice, new 29-gallon fish tank. It took a couple years to get the tank just right, with plants and ornamentation and the kind of fish that don’t eat or maim each other. Now, though, the water’s stabilized with a pair of angelfish that I’ve had for years, along with an assortment of other fish. I love fish. I can seriously get lost in that tank and watch them for an hour. It’s a good place to look when the writing’s not going well.
Still, plenty of days are spent at my local Starbucks. I wear noise-cancelling headphones and face a corner where no one will bother me.
Sometimes I write at school. Writing at school is difficult, though. If people figure out you’re in your office, they’ll knock on the door regardless of posted office hours. And I don’t do well with interruptions when the writing’s going well. That’s not pretention talking. I mean that I truly have a very hard time getting back into the dream space of a great writing session if I’m interrupted. It’s why I go offline when I write. I turn my phone’s ringer off. I know some writers who can toggle back and forth between writing and Facebook and email, but that’s not me. Once I get sucked into the bellow of Facebook, there’s no going back to the fiction for me.
Anne Lamott famously advises new writers to write as though their parents are dead. I agree. And I’d add: Write as if you’ll never have to answer to your children for your work.
What kind of supports do you have that make it possible for you to write?
Marla. She’s my everything.
Also, our parents. Five or six times a year, my mother or Marla’s mother come to Florida to watch the girls so that I can go to a conference or travel for book tours. Readings and conferences aren’t the same as writing, exactly, but they’re the jobs that support the business of future writing…Scheduling can be a challenge, but we tend to find balance. I don’t say yes to everything, and I don’t apply to some things that I could.
For example, I’ll probably never do a residency. I mean, I’d love to apply to Yaddo or MacDowell, but, assuming I even got in (they’re extremely competitive), most residencies, from what I understand, aren’t terribly family-friendly. I can justify, to Marla and to myself, leaving town for a week for a conference at which I’ll get plenty of writing done, in addition to professional work. But, I can’t justify leaving my family behind for a month just to write when I can write just as easily at home. I can do my own Starbucks residency in Orlando any week I want and still come home in the afternoons, play with my kids, cook dinner for the family, and help out with chores.
In terms of division of labor, we’re fairly equitable. I cook and clean the kitchen. Marla manages what we affectionately refer to as Mount Laundry. (Before becoming a parent, I never would have imagined how much money we’d spend on food, or how much dirty laundry we’d produce in a week.) I handle the lawn and yard and garbage and vacuuming. Marla handles homework and the evening battles of toy-putting away. I pack lunches. Marla makes snacks. I wake up with the girls during the week. Marla wakes up with the girls on the weekend. What I’m getting at is that maintaining a family and a household involves numerous moving parts. As we’re both working parents, keeping all of those parts oiled and spinning is a challenge, but we do our best. I know, only because Marla tells me, that getting through a week without me around is pretty rough on her and the girls. Things will get easier as the girls grow older and more self-sufficient. But, for now, I can’t imagine leaving all of that housework and childcare to Marla so that I can write for weeks at a time out of state. That would feel selfish. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying that residencies are selfish. I’m just saying that they’re not right for me, given my writing habits and the particulars of my partnership, at this point in my life. Like I said, I can only write for four or five hours on a good day. At a residency, I’d write, then spend my remaining ten or twelve waking hours just missing my family.
I understand you’re working on a novel! Has being deadline-driven helped you/forced you to set aside time for yourself as a writer?
The novel has been a huge undertaking. I didn’t realize how big a book I was writing until I finished the first draft. It’s about 450 Microsoft Word pages, which isn’t huge in terms of novels, but it’s a lot of book for someone who wrote nothing but short stories for a decade. It’s been an adventure, but, yes, I’m on deadline to turn in this latest draft by year’s end. Having a deadline definitely helps. I will take as much time as you give me, so I work best with deadlines.
What is your book about?
The novels takes as its subject the Starling family, parents Richard and Lisa and their sons, Michael and Thad. I’ve written about them before. Two of their stories appear in my collection, The Heaven of Animals. I thought I was done with them, but I couldn’t help wondering and worrying over what might have become of the family twenty or thirty years after the last story left off. About the time I was wondering if there was more to the Starlings than short stories, I took a boat ride with my parents. They own a small house (okay, it’s a doublewide trailer) on a lake in South Georgia. On the boat ride, I saw something that scared me, that straight up took my breath away. The book begins with a fictionalized account of what I saw and what I imagined could have come after. The novel then unfolds over the course of three days as six characters, the Starlings, along with Michael’s wife Diane and Thad’s partner Jake, decide, in the wake of this tragedy, how to spend what was supposed to be a celebratory long weekend at a lake house. And, of course, once you stick six people together in a house for three days, there are going to be fireworks, especially when one is an alcoholic, one is clinically depressed, one is having an affair, one is keeping a pregnancy a secret, and one is considering saying goodbye to the family forever. In short, the novel is a big Southern (hopefully not melodramatic) drama about one big (un)happy family. It’s also the story of three marriages, one traditional, one open, and one strained by infidelity. Also, there are birds. And physics. And art. And sex. And drugs. And violence. And love. But, anyway, that’s what the novel’s kind of about.
What are you reading now?
Once the novel is finished, I really, really want to try writing a play. It’s a form that I’ve loved for a long time. Over the past year, I’ve read dozens of plays. Recently, I’ve been on an Edward Albee kick. But I’ve especially enjoyed just about everything by Annie Baker, Itamar Moses, and Orlando-native Lucas Hnath. Those are my three favorite living playwrights at the moment. This summer, Marla and I left the girls with her parents for a few days and traveled to NYC. We saw three Broadway shows in two days, including Hnath’s latest, A Doll’s House Part 2, starring Laurie Metcalf and Chris Cooper. I can’t tell you what a joy that experience was for me. I’d been to New York before. I’d been to Broadway, but I’d never seen a writer’s Broadway debut, or a fresh show starring the original Broadway cast. It was a gift, and, since then, I can’t get enough theater.
What’s the funniest/cutest/weirdest thing your kid has ever done?
Oh, wow. My kids are hilarious. They make me laugh all the time. They also freak me out. Currently, Izzy is obsessed with ideas of mortality. She told me that she believes in God, but she’s not so sure about heaven. She also likes to create disturbing what-if type scenarios that cause me endless grief. Here’s a recent one:
Izzy: Dad, who do you love more, me or Ellie?
Me: I love you both the same. You know that.
Izzy: What if you had to choose one, or else both of us would die?
Me: I’d die for you.
Izzy: That’s cheating. Choose now, or me and Ellie are both dead!
Me: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Horrifying, right? She’s eight. I don’t know where she gets this stuff. Last Halloween, when most of the girls her age were dressed as Disney princesses, Izzy insisted on buying the creepiest skeleton costume I’ve ever seen. She’s recently filled her bedroom with plastic skulls. Maybe it’s a phase, or maybe I should save up for mortuary school.
Any advice you think you could offer writers in terms of process, schedule, creativity? What really works for you?
Don’t be afraid to put your family first.
Don’t stop reading. Reading fills the well from which you draw your inspiration when you write. I really believe that.
You might have to give up a few years of fun and comfort, the way we did, to get to a point where you’re able to prioritize your work.
Give up sleep when you can, but don’t make yourself sick.
Finally: TV. Unless it’s your medium, TV can be a hazard to your time. I say this as someone who loves TV and watches too much of it. But I can’t tell you how often I watch a show and forget it by the next week. Even given this so-called Golden Age of modern television, much of it isn’t as great as everyone’s making it out to be. My guess is that a lot of it isn’t going to hold up. Plenty of it is forgettable. But, I rarely forget a great story or novel or play that I’ve read. I’m just saying, you only have so many hours in a day. If you can fit a solid Netflix regimen into your schedule of family and friends and reading and writing and work, be my guest. But, as I say to my students, don’t tell me about all of the TV series you follow, then, in the same breath, tell me you can’t find time to write. At some point, you have to be honest with yourself about how you prioritize your time.
Soooo, you’re saying not to binge watch the first eight seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm…Thanks, Jamie! I really enjoyed hearing about your family life as it both supports and overlaps with your writing life. It’s so helpful to hear that as difficult as it can be, it’s all about prioritizing that which brings the most joy to your life. Your family sound like a pretty great team!