PtoP Ep 38 Townsend edit 1 === Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Jacinda Townsend. Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning, which will be out from Greywolf in 2025, and Mother Country, winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, was an honor book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former broadcast journalist and elected official, Townsend has written nonfiction for Al [00:01:00] Jazeera and The White Review. Welcome, Jacinda, and thanks so much for joining us. Jacinda: Well, thank you, Carrie. It's such a pleasure to be here. Carrie: I think I might have seen you at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, maybe when your first book came out? Jacinda: Okay, yes, that was when the earth was young. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I always just love so much to come home to Kentucky. And I remember that particular conference has been so phenomenal. There were some great, great people there. The Carnegie Center is like, just so dear to me. So, yeah, I always love to come back. Carrie: Well, we're glad you could be here with us virtually today. Jacinda: Absolutely. Carrie: I read in an interview where you talked about your typical writing routine and it sounded, um, like it follows some pretty specific steps. [00:02:00] Jacinda: I, it's, um, it's funny. Like I, I have a hard time. I used to have a hard time telling people about it. And then I guess I kind of got over myself. But, yeah, so I, I get up and I write, there's a book called The Artist's Way that I'm sure you're familiar with. And she talks about how you should write the daily pages, and I do that every day. I write like a couple of pages of just kind of free form, just stream of consciousness, whatever. And it's a way of sort of like decluttering, you know, so that I can sort of write what I really need to write and not write some character who's angry because I'm angry, you know that kind of thing. And then I always meditate for a while and then I have tea and read. It's a good way of sort of just getting myself down into the words every morning and you know, I am I also have a I [00:03:00] have a long document. It's about 10 minutes 200 pages at this point of my favorite, favorite passages. And I'll retype one or two of those before I start writing. And, so yeah, I always feel like by the time I start writing, I am so deeply in the world as it were, you know, the world of, of language. So, Carrie: yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's great. I try to do morning pages myself, but not, not every morning, but I do, I like that idea of retyping passages that you love. Jacinda: Yes. Are there other practices you've borrowed from Julia Cameron's book? Carrie: You know, it's been a long time since I read, since I did it, you know, I did go through the whole workbook, and I remember doing the artist states and, you know, I guess with the pandemic and, you know, everything that is kind of gone [00:04:00] on in the world, it's been tricky to sort of get myself back into doing that, but I have found it to be really when I do it. It is, it does remind you about how important that is. Jacinda: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Carrie: Are there other things that you do from it? Jacinda: That's pretty much the one thing that really stuck with me. I should reread it. I'm sure there are other things I probably should have been carrying with me all these years. Carrie: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I, I remember seeing here at the library. She has like an updated version that kind of like is for people who have already done the original one. Um, so, but I haven't, I haven't, you know, I just kind of flipped through it one, one day in the stacks, but we should definitely go back and check that out. So your first novel, draws on your own musical background, [00:05:00] I believe. Is that something that kind of prepared you to be a writer? Jacinda: I think so in a lot of different ways. First of all, you know, I started, like the character in the book, I played piano initially, but then, um, in, um, you know, elementary, junior high moved on, I played the clarinet, the saxophone, and I think like being part of band kind of made me understand the nature of perfectionism and how sometimes good is better than perfect, you know? Because I think of the, I think being, being a musician, especially part in part of a larger group kind of teaches you that, you know, you need to nail that passage. You need to practice one passage over and over and over and over again. But what's interesting is our, our band teacher in high school [00:06:00] once had us, there was this really difficult passage that we had practiced over and over again. And then he had us play it at like half the speed. Carrie: Oh, wow. Jacinda: And nobody could get it at that point. And it was interesting to me because it was almost like, well, no, what you've done is you're, you're just, you've gotten to be on autopilot with it. Yeah. You know, and, and in that way, like, it's good. You can't go back and make it perfect. And I think writing is, is kind of the same. Like, you know, I often have, and I used to do this too, but I see students who those 1st, 2 or 3 paragraphs have been written and written and rewritten and rewritten and overwritten to the point where they're, they're no longer powerful. They're no longer. In some cases, they've been overwritten to the point where they don't quite make sense. You know what I mean? And then the rest of the piece will be [00:07:00] like, terrific, you know, because it's just good. It's not perfect. Yeah, music has helped a lot. And then I think of course, too, just with plain old lyricism, you know. Understanding language as sort of the same type of, yeah, the same type of gooey substance as music is, right, is, has been very helpful. Carrie: Yeah. Yeah, I think as a poet, that idea of language being good rather than perfect is something that I struggle with, you know, wrapping my head around, too. Jacinda: Well, that's a whole different enterprise, I think, poetry, you know. Carrie: Yeah, but I have said, I've heard poets, certain poets say similar things, and I think you can sort of maybe edit the heat out of your writing. [00:08:00] Yeah. Anyway, so what about, writing prompts? Do they play a role in your writing process? Jacinda: Absolutely. I always tell my students this, that like, I, I use them regularly, you know? I, I, I'm the one I'm, I want to talk about in depth is not a character prompt, but I use character prompts all the time, because I think anytime you're facing the blank page and characters have gotten a little, flat, you know, it always pays to go back and resketch and and I, I do some that are, you know, around their desires and fears. I have character sketches that ask certain questions of the characters. So I, I use them every day. I think some people just assign them in class and, and don't, uh, necessarily use them themselves, but I, I do all the time, use them for myself. Carrie: So do you just kind [00:09:00] of pull from prompts that you've experienced or, Jacinda: Yes. At this point, I have sort of a, a whole bag of them, particularly around character that I like to use for myself. Every once in a while, I'll see one, like someone will post one, you know, on social media or something that I, I particularly, enjoy stealing a little bit from, so I love that and I love that you have this podcast because the, the conversation in the literary ballroom, I think very much involves trading prompts with each other. Um, so I am, I mean, I know because I have, it's particularly, it's interesting, undergraduates love writing prompts. I have some grad students that seem like prompt resistant, and I'm like, why? Like, it's what we all do. I think in [00:10:00] some sense every time you sit down to write, or every time you come up with an idea or a premise, your brain has just kind of given itself a writing prompt. You know? Carrie: Right. Yeah, exactly. Even if you think you don't use them, you are using them. Jacinda: Absolutely. Carrie: So what is the prompt you would like to share? Jacinda: So this prompt I just I came up with it completely by accident, and I have used it over and over and over again. And, it always turns out the most brilliant writing that I get in a semester or a summer. So it's a prompt about pacing, and I give people no more than 15 minutes. No more than a page and a half, which when I tell you the prompt, you'll be, you'll think I'm a little bit mean, but, [00:11:00] 15 minutes, no more than a page and a half to write 30 years of a character's life. They have to make one geographic move, and I think there, there are a number of reasons this prompt just works so well. The reason I, I give it is that when I talk about pacing, I always tell my students, you know, when you set about writing a story or a novel, What you're really doing is you're sending your reader up the mountain with the backpack and, and every detail you put in is sort of filling that backpack. If your reader gets to the top of the mountain and there's not enough in the back pack, they're going to be ticked off. But then a lot of times there's too much in the backpack. So this is an exercise that sort of forces people to think about what are the most salient details in a story. And, and almost always without without [00:12:00] exception, people have come up with, like, just instantly out of the gate, I think the limitations force you to make a dramatic turn, you know, and that dramatic turn is the inciting incident for the 30 years. I've also noticed pretty much again, without exception, people write it in past tense, and they use a lot of, like, past perfect, which they don't normally in their writing. And I think that also kind of raises the stakes because you're setting the reader up to understand that there is a present state, but it, it was departed from like, almost immediately in the story, you know, so it works really well. I think my favorite, 1 of my favorites that I ever got was this woman wrote a story about a guy who went to the, what do you call it? The international space station. [00:13:00] So he went, and he went, like, right after his kid was born. So he goes up and he's there for 30 years and he, he talks to them via video monitor and he watches all this stuff happen on earth from the International Space Station. And when he lands 30 years later, and he sees that his kid has grown up, and he sees, you know, there are lines on his wife's face. She has gray hair. And he starts vomiting, and it's in part because gravity has finally hit him, but it's also the reader understands that it's because he realized he really missed 30 years that you, it's not a thing you can do on video, you know, but I've had people write them that the person just moved upstairs. Um, which is also fun, you know, um, I love this prompt. I love the work I get from it. [00:14:00] Carrie: So do people, or maybe you yourself, do you typically, like, use the work, you know, in something that's already in progress, or maybe does it start a new piece? Jacinda: It's interesting, because I think both. So some people have used a character they were already working on. What an equal number of people just pick a new thing, which is what's in my classes. I always, you know, I always tell them they're free to do either. Mostly they use the 1 character all semester, but this exercise, a lot of them pick a new character and a lot of them, because this, this, it yields a very complete story that's also extremely short. A lot of them have published these pieces, you know, they've worked on them and publish them. So it's, it's like this, this exercise that just makes you do a lot of things that that, like, short fiction should do, you [00:15:00] know, but I always tell them too, I'm like, people think that that, because I only write novels now, I, I just, like, I used to write short stories in grad school and people would be like, this really isn't a short story, you know, and I was like, I give up, so I write exclusively in the long form and I think that, A lot of times people think of novels as like, these sloppy, sprawling opportunities for you to just throw in everything and no, they need to be as tightly paced as this page and a half short story, you know? Carrie: Yeah. Jacinda: So. Carrie: Yeah, I like that metaphor of the backpack too, because I can definitely think of books, like you said, that either give you too little or that give you too much, so getting it just right is, is definitely one of the challenges. Jacinda: Mm hmm. Yes. Carrie: So, you have a new novel coming out [00:16:00] next year, I believe. Jacinda: Yes. Carrie: Is there anything you can tell us about it? Jacinda: Sure! So it is called Trigger Warning, and it is about a woman who, a woman whose father was killed by the police in the early 90s. In response to that, because she was unable to sort of wrap herself around that trauma and grief, she changes her identity and moves to Kentucky. So when the novel opens, she's filing for divorce. and her husband, who also, he, he in part tells the story, her husband has this divorce filing with her old name. And he's like, who, who is this woman? And so the novel, it takes place chronologically speaking, just over the course of five days, because she absconds with her transgender teenager and they start heading West. She doesn't even know where she's going, but she ends up in her old hometown of California. And, what it's about, it's [00:17:00] about a lot of things. It's about sort of grappling with grief, because I don't think people generally do a good job of it, but it's also about, because all my novels kind of have a political and a personal to them. This one grew out of interviews I did. I was working on an Al Jazeera piece about, the survivors of police brutality, and I interviewed like Tamir Rice's mother. I interviewed five different sort of survivors, but one thing Tamir Rice's mother told me that his sister didn't eat for a long time, because the sister had witnessed this police shooting, there was a woman who her, her, her brother's name was Marshall Miles and he was shot in Sacramento and the police just kind of stalked them for a long time. They'd be like, cruising around outside their house. And, and she said, she talked about how, you know, they could no longer sleep [00:18:00] and, and sort of the trauma around that. So I wanted to write about the, something that I don't think we often think about, which is that it goes beyond the victim themselves, you know, that is the ultimate tragedy is to be killed. But the families of these victims suffer tremendously. And their communities suffer tremendously. And that's kind of almost the point of the violence. You know, I talked to Philando Castile, the people at, a woman who worked at his school with him, and she talked about, you know, how that trauma had sort of rippled out through the, the children who had loved him so much at school. So it's, it's about a lot of things, but, yeah. Carrie: Wow. Yeah. Well, it sounds like a really, important book for our time. Yeah. Thank you for writing it. Jacinda: Thank you. It's also kind of funny because it's about midlife crisis, which is nothing but funny, so there is that too. Carrie: It's good to have a balance. Jacinda: [00:19:00] Yes, yes. Carrie: And do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? Jacinda: Writing is a habit and the imagination begets the imagination. And what I mean by that is that if you carve out a certain time of day to write, if you carve out a certain time of day to write, it makes the rest so much easier because what you've done is you've kind of. I think the hardest part is the creation part, but the imagination is kind of a muscle, you know, and so, like, my mind just knows, okay, look it's 630 in the morning. We gotta we gotta wake up and make up these people and whatever they're saying. And that makes the rest of it easier. Carrie: Mm hmm. Yeah. And all those rituals that you have set up, I think, [00:20:00] probably triggers your mind to do that. Well, thank you so much for all your great advice and your great prompt. Jacinda: Thank you, Carrie. It was so nice to speak with you. Carrie: Yeah, you too.