One of my favorite reads this year has been Cipher by Jeremy B. Jones. I first heard Jeremy speak about his work on this project more than five years ago, and when I finally got my hands on the finished book, I devoured it. I often feel a sense of pleasure from the books I read, but some books actively call for some kind of engagement with the text or the writer. Cipher spoke to many of my interests, notably place, history, genealogy and genetics. As quickly as I read Cipher, I found myself laying the book aside, over and over, for just long enough to make notes and jot down questions. I’m fortunate that Jeremy was willing to answer those questions, and the result of our conversation is available for you to read at Electric Literature.
I said that I had a lot (a lot!) of questions, and they didn’t all make it into the final publication. So I thought this would be a good place to share Jeremy’s responses when I asked him about editing nonfiction books and teaching nonfiction to his students at Western Carolina University.
Denton Loving: You’re also an editor for In Place, the nonfiction book series published by WVU Press. What makes an essay or a memoir resonate with you?
Jeremy B. Jones: I read and write a lot about place. When I was presented with the opportunity to pitch a book series to WVU Press, I thought immediately of books that had shaped me in my younger days, books like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House. It’s hard to imagine those books being released by a big publisher today and getting the press and attention they deserve in the process. The publishing landscape (pun alert) has changed, so my hope with In Place was to create a space for thoughtful books about place to find a home.
Serving as series co-editor (alongside Elena Passarello) can be pretty catalytic for my writing, as I’m getting to see manuscripts that are engaging with the physical world in exciting (often formally exciting) ways. Even if the manuscripts aren’t quite right for the series or quite ready for publication, just getting access to drafts of these projects spurs on my own work and my own thinking.
DL: What about as a teacher? How do you teach students to shape their work, particularly nonfiction?
JBJ: Nonfiction is especially fun to teach at the undergraduate level because few of the students know exactly what they’ve gotten into. “Nonfiction” isn’t an especially helpful term—it only tells us what the form isn’t. That means I get to open up lots of possibilities for young writers, and that’s a gift. That opening of possibilities was my experience in college. I wrote a short essay in a first-year writing course in college that I now recognize was a memoir, even though I don’t think that was a term I knew then. My professor, Dr. Jane Stephens, pushed me deeper into that form and encouraged my explorations of memory and place that semester, and it was life-changing. I recognize that not every student who shows up in my classroom is going to have their life changed by literary nonfiction, but it’s a privilege to be able to show them what they can do with the world around them, especially if their default nonfiction form is the academic essay. Because of that, I tend to offer students tons of models and encourage lots of experimentation. I want them leaving with a lit spark more than I care about a perfect, polished essay.
Thanks to Jeremy B. Jones for taking the time to talk with me about Cipher. I hope you’ll read the book as well as my full conversation with Jeremy over at Electric Literature.
In case you missed it… Last week’s guest post featured a conversation between Ruth Mukwana and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and I recently was a guest on Ben Tanzer’s podcast with the wonderfully apt name, This Podcast Will Save Your Life.
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Denton Loving 