Jen Conley’s
Amazon bio says she “lives in New Jersey.” Weak gruel. Jen Conley is of New Jersey. She captures the essence
of her natural setting as well as anyone writing today. Her new collection, Cannibals:
Stories from the Edge of the Pine Barrens, gives everyone else a chance
to figure out what those who have read her, or heard her read at any number of
Noirs at the Bar, already knew: this is a girl who don’t pump gas.
Jen's short
stories have appeared in Thuglit, Needle:
A Magazine of Noir, Crime Factory, Beat to a Pulp, Protectors, Pulp Modern,
Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Bruce
Springsteen and many others. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Review
of Books and is one of editors of Shotgun
Honey.
With all that
going on she still found time to visit with OBAAT to talk about Cannibals. As with everything else she
writes or says, it’s worth your time.
One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Cannibals: Stories from the Edge of the Pine Barrens
Jen Conley: It’s a collection of fifteen linked
(loosely linked, actually) short crime stories that take place in Ocean County,
New Jersey, the northern end of the Pine Barrens. It’s a large area of
protected pine forest that encompasses several central and southern Jersey
counties. It’s pretty desolate, for New Jersey anyway, and it makes for great
crime stories.
OBAAT: Readers love to ask where authors get their ideas and
most authors reply with something along the lines of “we’re tripping over them.
The trick is to find the idea that works best for me.” What made this idea
worth developing, and how much development from the original germ was required?
JC: I’d been playing
around with horror and literary for a few years until I wrote “Home Invasion,”
the first story in the collection and originally published by Thuglit. It was a real turning point for
me because I realized that crime was the better genre for me. I’m a pretty raw
and gritty writer so it makes sense that I would feel at home in this neck of
the woods. Soon I began setting most of my stories in Ocean County/The Pine
Barrens with the distant goal of putting a collection together.
OBAAT: How long did it take to write Cannibals, start to finish?
JC: A few years. I wanted to make sure I was happy with each
and every story rather than push myself and write mediocre tales just to create
a collection.
OBAAT: Among the reasons I write so few short stories is how
hard it is to keep coming up with characters that can carry a story. You knock
them out snowflakes: in plentiful supply, yet always different. How do you do
it?
JC: I have no idea. I could always do it—I was making up
horror stories as a kid—but it does take me time. I wish the snowflake analogy
was true. Usually, in order for me to write a decent story there has to be
something floating around my head that bothers me—something I read or an image
I saw, an old memory that pops up in my brain. From there, if it’s worthy, if I
keep thinking about it without forcing too much, I’ve got a story.
OBAAT: In what time and place is Cannibals set and why was this time and place chosen?
JC: It spans from the early 1960s to the present. I have a
tiny universe in my head with all these characters and they’re all somewhat
related to each other. Not so much by blood but by place. For example, Janine
Finn briefly shows up my story “Pipe” but in my other story, “Finn’s Missing
Sister,” she is the missing sister. As for the place, I grew up in the same
area I’m writing about—Ocean County, New Jersey. I think I’m one of those
people who has a strong tie to home, which is probably why I write about it.
OBAAT: How did Cannibals
come to be published?
JC: I was at BoucherCon in North Carolina and I read at Eryk
Pruitt’s Noir at the Bar in Raleigh.
Eric Campbell heard me read and he approached me, introducing himself. But it
wasn’t until the next day, when Ron Earl Phillips, the head editor of Shotgun Honey told me that Down and Out might be the way to go and
he re-introduced me to Eric. When I returned to New Jersey, I emailed Eric
about my story collection and he liked it and that was it. Working with Eric
Campbell has been a breeze. A great, wonderful experience. Truly.
OBAAT: What kinds of stories do you like to read? Who are your
favorite authors, in or out of that area?
JC: I tend to go for gritty fiction with a strong connection
to place. I like stories about people who are working class and having a hard
time going through life. I love Annie Proulx, Edward P. Jones, and Ron Rash. But
I’m also partial to writers like Tessa Hadley, who writes about women living in
England. (I’m an Anglophile.) I think I like certain books more than writers.
For example, I loved Sue Miller’s Lost in
the Forest and While I Was Gone
but her other novels didn’t grab me. Overall, I do love mystery but not so much
cozies. I suppose I’m one of those readers who is drawn to “women’s fiction”
but the darker section of this area, like Eileen
by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Winter Girl:
A Novel by Matt Marinovich, which both came out pretty recently.
OBAAT: What made you decide to be an author?
JC: I
don’t remember not wanting to be a writer. I just didn’t tell many people
because, honestly, I didn’t want to get laughed at. Still, I was writing
stories when I was a kid, as a teenager, in college. I stopped in my twenties
because I didn’t think I had what it would take to write. I didn’t think I was
smart enough, clever enough. I hadn’t been a stand-out student. I wasn’t in the
honors classes and so on, so I think when I was young, self-doubt plagued me
for a few years. But the stories kept coming and after I settled down—got my
teaching job, had my son and figured out motherhood—my desire to write came
back like a bear. And although it took years of self-training by reading a
heavy dose of literary fiction and participating in good NYC writing group run
by writer Karen Heuler, I started to gain some confidence. By my late thirties,
my stories were being published.
OBAAT: How do you think your life experiences have prepared you
for writing crime fiction?
JC: There are probably so many answers to that but I’ll give
you one: from about 1993-2000 I worked at this really rough bar in Howell, NJ,
on Route 9. (“Highway Nine” for Springsteen fans.) But this place was nothing
out of a song. It was just…just rough and crappy, a broken down sports bar with
an attached liquor store set in a brown strip mall. I remember my bar manager’s
boyfriend came in one night and said to me, “I don’t know how you work here. I
can’t even drink here.” I think that sums it up. I can go on for hours about
the people I served but I’ll just say this: a few were good people but most
were just absolutely either extremely creepy, downright frightening or just so
terribly heartbreaking. I’m still mining ideas from my tour of duty there.
OBAAT: What do you like best about being a writer?
JC: I absolutely love
when I complete a story and I can feel in my gut that it’s a contender.
OBAAT: Who are your greatest influences? (Not necessarily
writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on
your writing.)
JC: I’m a big classic rock fan, music fan in general, so I
think music has influenced tone and atmosphere for me. I also love film and
great television, anything that tells a great story with style. I was obsessed
with Mad Men for a while, especially
the DVDs where Matthew Weiner explains the choices in scenes, etc. Every
episode of Mad Men is a fantastic
short story and I really listened to pretty much every single thing Matthew
Weiner had to say. But mostly, I read and read and read over the years and I
found that The New Yorker usually can
be counted on for a good, high end story that can help with technique. Still, Thuglit has published some fantastic
stories over the years. With the grittiness and strong endings—it really showed
me where I could go. After reading several issues of Thuglit, I realized exactly what I wanted to do, what I could do,
and what I needed to do.
OBAAT: Do you outline or fly by the seat of you pants?
JC: Never by the seat
of my pants. I outline loosely. I wait until an idea grows in my head and when
I have the arc—the beginning and ending especially—I scribble it down in this
little black book I have. I need to have the arc before I write. I used to
write by the seat of my pants but I found that I wasn’t finishing or if I did
finish, it was forced and no good.
OBAAT: Give us an idea of your process. Do you edit as you go?
Throw anything into a first draft knowing the hard work is in the revisions?
Something in between?
JC: I blow through the first draft and then I go back and
“decorate” as I call it. But, I need that arc in my head, solid or vague. I
found that if I sort of know what I’m doing in my head, I can save myself a lot
of time and headache later on. I learned from Matthew Weiner that it’s
important to lie down, rest the head, and think. I follow this advice often. As
you can tell, I’m one of Matthew Weiner’s superfans.
OBAAT: Endings are hard and can make or break a book. Americans
as a whole tend to like happy endings, and those are the books that tend to
sell best. What do you look for in an ending?
JC: The best endings leave a sense of hope. Or, a life
justified—good or bad. But in my work, I tend to write sad endings so when you
do that, you have to justify it. There has to be an observation that something
was learned—whether the character learned it or the reader learned it about the
character.
OBAAT: Who is your intended audience?
JC: It depends what I’m writing. I mean, if I’ve been asked to
write something for an anthology or a specific publication, then I’m going to
try my hardest to impress the editor. They have a specific audience in mind so
if I can impress the editor, I’ll impress the audience. When I’m on my own,
though, with no publication in mind, I guess it goes back to what I’m writing.
My short stories would be more for the crime fiction audience. The novel I’m
working on is probably more towards women who like dark “women’s fiction.” I
probably write the stories I would want to read, or maybe I write the
characters I would want to read about.
OBAAT: If you could give a novice writer a single piece of
advice, what would it be?
JC: I love Annie
Proulx’s advice—no one should write until they’re 50. Of course what she means
is live your life, get experience, understand the cycle of life, how it all
works. Take your time. Ambition is important but you still have to learn to
write a good story. I’m ambitious but I’ve learned to accept that my path is
the slow, long, steady one. And I might not get to where I want to be but not
without trying. And trying. And trying. If I were a musician, I’d probably
being playing the small bars clubs right now. But that’s okay because the small
bars and clubs are cool.
OBAAT: Generally speaking the components of a novel are
story/plot, character, setting, narrative, and tone. How would you rank these
in order of their importance in your own writing, and can you add a few
sentences to tell us more about how you approach each and why you rank them as
you do?
JC: I’m not sure. I think I usually get a spark for a story
idea, but then I quickly find the character. Character development is a big
component of my writing. I love backstory so I’m willing to spend a lot of time
on my character, even if it never makes it to the pages. I did a little acting
when I was in college and I learned from an excellent drama teacher that an
actor should always have character backstory in their heads, even though the
audience will never hear or see it. I’ve always gone with that idea. As for the
rest, eventually the setting develops with the story, narrative pops up—first
or third person—and tone sneaks in after that. But truthfully, this is me
analyzing myself. It’s more like a swirl of ideas and me moving them into
place. My brain is a circus.
OBAAT: If you could have written any book of the past hundred
years, what would it be, and what is it about that book you admire most?
JC: Wow. That’s tough. If I’m being serious and writerly, I’d
say The Road or Sophie’s Choice because both books hit me hard—both deal with
depravity and humanity. But honestly,
I wish I wrote High Fidelity. It’s
just such a crackup of a novel, especially for me. Like Rob, I used to be a
music snob with relationship problems that were on a consecutive loop. I’m good
now, involved with a terrific, sweet, normal dude, but I was a disaster in the
old days. High Fidelity is so close
to my psyche, if I were a guy, I’d be Rob.
OBAAT: Favorite activity when you’re not reading or writing.
JC:
I like going to
NYC with my son. He loves the city, doesn’t complain if we walk too much, and
enjoys exploring new streets, etc. It’s very rare to go to the city with
someone who loves meandering around like I do. I also like hanging out with my
fiancé. And I like to garden, even if half of my plants die.
OBAAT: What are you working on now?
JC: A very dark women’s thriller novel. A little bit of horror
thrown in but I’ll see if I’m going to keep that. Bad man stuff. I said to one
of my oldest friends that I was writing a novel and I could use a reader. She
asked me what it was about and I said, “It’s dark, about a women who meets up
with an old classmate, gets involved with him, he’s good-looking but he’s not
who she thinks he is, he’s bad—”
She cut me off
and said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll read that.”
So here’s
hoping I can pull this off.
Much as it pains me
to agree with a large publisher, they were right to think so. The Second Girl is a hell of a book.
