Wordsmith Interview – Jeni McFarland

Age: Old enough to know better

Location: Houston, TX

Currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Houston

How long have you been writing?  

Oh, God.  Forever.  I started out writing romance in middle school—that’s my dirty little secret though.  Don’t let the other writers in my department know that!

I would love to write as a career, although I’m really a short-story writer exclusively, and I’ve been told it’s extra difficult to get short story collections published if you don’t have a novel too.

I don’t.  I wish I did, but I’m in grad school.  And even before grad school, when I was unemployed for a year after undergrad, I didn’t write full-time.  I haven’t yet found the right balance of going out and engaging with the world enough to have something to write about, and still saving enough time for writing.

My story “Growth,” is about a guy who’s so lonely that he grows an ear on his side, so he has someone to talk to.  Damn, when I try and write it out briefly, it just sounds silly.

I’d been gainfully employed, mostly in restaurants, since I was fifteen, but I came to point where I didn’t want to cook anymore, and I went back to school full-time.  At my husband’s encouragement, I chose not to work while attending school.  And I felt really guilty about this; I felt like I was a parasite that was using up all his financial resources.  Then I started thinking about relationships, and connection, loneliness, isolation (because commuting to a residential school, and being an older student was especially isolating, and I’m not the most outgoing person.)  I don’t know, it just kind of went from there.

About two years, three if you count my thinking about it and not writing.

I have a piece out called “No-Man’s Land.”  It’s about the last restaurant I worked in—oh, I mean, it’s a fiction piece about a girl working in a restaurant.

I really don’t want to answer this.  What if my professors see it?  I’ve kind of become a binge writer, but I’m working on writing daily.  It really is a better way to work.

Late morning.  I’m not a morning person, which is kind of good, to write before I’m fully awake, after I’ve had only one espresso and some breakfast.

I think there are some fantastic self-published books out there, like “One out of Five Items that Adeline Stein Left on the Bus on the Way to the Zoo,” by Heather Pedoto.  (Yes, I’m shamelessly plugging my friend’s book, but I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t a good book!)  I know a lot of people are opposed to self-publishing, but it’s also a great way to get work out there when you’re just starting out and you’ve got a great book that’s hard to classify for a publisher.  

My work is almost always image driven.

I always submit simultaneously, because I expect a lot of rejections.  That’s how it works.  And since I became a reader for a journal, I’ve come to realize how not personal rejections are.  There’s just so many submissions that, even a good piece, if it’s not as good as the last submission I forwarded for a second read, I’ll probably reject it.

Just one?  How about the best book I read last year?  That would be Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story.”  Tied with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Purple Hibiscus.”  I’m terrible at following directions. 

Margaret Attwood, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders.  Tied.  So it counts as one, right?  They’re all in first place.

Molly Weasley.  I think we’d have fabulous girl time, plus she’d magic up some really delicious British food.

Coffee stains, and probably cat hair.  It’s spring here in Houston, and there’s cat hair everywhere in my house and on my clothes and in my lungs…

All the sunshine

Why not both?

Mountains