Tiny Interview #2 - Jacqueline Doyle
Here we ask authors we admire to share their musings on art and writing, spill their current reading obsessions, and give us a tiny wedge into their creative life. In this Tiny Interview, meet Jacqueline Doyle, whose "Three Stories" were published in Issue Eight of Tiny Molecules, and “Still Lives” was published in Observations.
(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)
Q: What book(s) are you reading right now?
A: I’m excited about my latest book mail from Split/Lip Press, Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essay collection Halfway from Home. I just finished Maud Casey’s portraits of the nineteenth-century “hysterics” at La Salpêtrière mental hospital in Paris, City of Incurable Women. Some other recent reads I’ve loved: Crystal Wilkinson’s The Birds of Opulence, Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, Bud Smith’s Teenager, Sara Lippman’s Jerks, Mike Nagel’s Duplex, Jill Talbot’s A Distant Town, and Ingrid Rojas-Contreras’s new memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds. I’m looking forward to the interview I’ll be doing with Ingrid for CRAFT, where I’m the Creative Nonfiction Editor. She’ll be judging our Creative Nonfiction Contest, which opens November 1.
Q: What are your current writing projects?
A: I’ve been working for a few years on a genre-bending essay collection called The Lunatics’ Ball that combines research into women locked up in mental asylums with memoir about my family’s own history with bipolar disorder. The title flash, a dream sequence about a lunatics’ ball at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital, was published in F(r)iction. Originally I planned to include fiction as well as hybrid nonfiction, and the three flash I published in Tiny Molecules are among those. I’ve since changed my mind, but the collection still encompasses very different kinds of writing: memoir like these flash in matchbook and Sweet, memoir about my bipolar aunt’s suicide like this short essay in The Sunlight Press, memoir braided with accounts of other women’s lives like my longform essay in the print journal Passages North. There are straightforward profiles of “lunatics” like this one in The Collagist, lyric riffs like this one in Ethel, research-based hybrid essays that alternate facts with fictional riffs like this one in Permafrost. The more I read about the tragic lives of these women and the history of the treatment of mental illness, the more urgent communicating their stories feels to me. But finding the right forms to convey them is difficult. The project has become more challenging the longer I work on it. I’m grateful to have a very supportive writers’ group and beta reader.
Q: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
A: One of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic restrictions is going to San Francisco art museums. “Still Lives,” the segmented essay I published in Tiny Molecules, was inspired by a great Edvard Munch exhibit at SFMOMA, and a Rene Magritte exhibit at SFMOMA made its way into my flash fiction “The Lost Umbrella” in Pithead Chapel. I’m particularly drawn to dark or surrealist art, and I enjoyed inhabiting Dorothea Tanning’s ominous painting in my ekphrastic flash “Head of the Household” in Cotton Xenomorph. I recently published a lyric essay on Joseph Cornell, “The Dream Lives of Objects,” in Superstition Review. Cornell has always fascinated me and this particular shadow box of keys and bric-a-brac unlocked memories as well as reflections on how Cornell’s boxes work.
Sometimes film. I probably wouldn’t have written my lyric essay “Haunting Houses” in New Ohio Review if I hadn’t seen David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story.” I also have a short story looking for a home that references Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” heavily. When the movie emerged as part of the plot, I watched it again, along with the version with the director’s commentary, and loved it. Both are haunting films.
Q: Where is your favorite place to write, and do you have any writing rituals?
A: Almost always in my small, cluttered study. I have a view of the lemon tree in our back yard and of assorted wild life—lots of birds and squirrels and neighborhood cats, sometimes deer, three turkeys last week (ungainly but also surprisingly graceful and stately). I’m lucky to have a room of my own.
Q: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading?
A: Are people still reading Dorothy Allison? Lucia Berlin’s short stories? Tillie Olsen’s? James Baldwin’s essays? I hope so. My answer will probably change tomorrow, but today I’ll say Shirley Jackson. A couple of recent movies revived interest in her, but you really have to read The Haunting of Hill House to appreciate how brilliant her take on the unreliable narrator is. And I’d love to see more people reading her early novel Hangsaman.
