Jenny Shank‘s story collection Mixed Company won the George Garrett Fiction prize and the Colorado Book Award in General Fiction, and her novel The Ringer won the High Plains Book Award. Her stories, essays, satire, and book reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Prairie Schooner, Missouri Review, The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals and Dear McSweeney’s. Her work has been honorably mentioned by The Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and her mother. She teaches in the Mile High MFA program at Regis University and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
What advice would you share to writers?
I have two pieces of advice that I carry with me I’m writing. I once saw Richard Bausch speaking on a panel, and he said, “When I’m writing, I’m just trying to be as clear as possible.” I repeat this to myself when I don’t know how to begin the next sentence.
The second is an idea that comes from my friend and mentor, Lucia Berlin, who was my teacher when I got my master’s in creative writing at CU Boulder. She said all writing needs to have emotional truth, and in order to achieve that, she advocated a kind of method writing, akin to method acting, in which the writer works themselves into a state of intensely feeling what the characters are feeling, and then writing it. As I’ve worked with this technique, I learned that you don’t have to write every paragraph like this—just the emotional linchpin ones. And you might only create one paragraph for the day when you’re working in this zone, but these will be stepping stones for the rest of work.
Tell us about your Colorado writing community.
I have been building community in Colorado for a long time. It started with my work as a book reviewer for the Rocky Mountain News (R.I.P.) and as the Books Editor for NewWest (also R.I.P.), for which I reviewed a book a week by a regional author and shared a roundup of local author news once a week for several years. Through reviewing, I met people who cared about the literature of the American West as much as I do. Then when I started teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Regis’s Mile High MFA, I met even more writers, who I mentor, befriend, and root for. I think there’s a similarity to the community here with other literary communities I’ve been involved with in the West, particularly in Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona, in their friendly, egalitarian nature. This is another lesson I learned from Lucia Berlin–if you’re a writer, you’re an equal to any other writer, whether you publish with a large press or a small one or haven’t published yet at all. I think Colorado’s literary community does a better job of replicating Lucia’s principal of mutual respect than I imagine some other places do.
What else do you love about living in Colorado?
I grew up in Denver, but left for college. I spent a little time in London and D.C., but I’ve mostly been here, because Colorado is my muse. It’s a place of tremendous beauty, and has a fascinating, complicated history that gets elided in a lot of the popular narratives about this place. I suppose someday I might write something that isn’t set in Colorado, but it hasn’t happened much yet!
Any current reads to share with us?
I’ve been reading some great books this year. I adored “The Mornigside” by Téa Obreht, and I’ve long been inspired by her incorporation of myth and folklore, which is something I want to try in my next novel. I loved Miranda July’s “All Fours”—she is such a funny and surprising writer, addressing real meaning-of-life questions in an offbeat way. I’m a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and for the last five years I’ve been volunteering as a part of the John Leonard Committee for best first book. I was blown away by several of those books this year, particularly our winner, “Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” by Tahir Hamut Izgil, and two of our finalists, “Black Pastoral: Poems” by Ariana Benson and “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era” by Donovan X. Ramsey.
Ramsey’s book is informing the nonfiction I’m working on now, about my years growing up attending Denver Public Schools during the era of court-ordered busing for racial integration. I went to school in the neighborhood most heavily impacted by the crack epidemic in our city. Reading Ramsey’s book, I realized I retained some misperceptions from that time. From an aesthetic standpoint, I think Ramsey’s book is brilliant example of how a writer can go deep on a subject while also telling individual, personal stories in a way that is moving and engaging.
Will you read to us from that project?
I will! It’s a section about when the breakdancing craze hit Denver–a bit later than it arrived on the coasts, because in its early days, we didn’t have a radio station that played hip-hop/rap. My classmates’ acuity with breakdancing, which I had no idea how to do, inspired me to try out for the talent show with my own dubious talent. That led to my first artistic rejection, which set me on my life path of seeking more rejections–and occasionally finding an acceptance along the way!
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