Tag Archives: Adroit Journal

An Interview with Joe Jiménez

21 Sep

Joe Jiménez is the author of the books The Possibilities of Mud and Bloodline and, most recently, the essay, “Cotton.”

Joe Jiménez is the author of The Possibilities of Mud (Korima 2014) and Bloodline (Arte Público 2016) and is the recipient of the 2016 Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Press Poetry Prize.  Jimenez’s essays and poems have recently appeared in Iron Horse, RHINO, Gulf Steam, Waxwing, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and on the PBS NewsHour and Lambda Literary sites.  Jimenez was recently awarded a Lucas Artists Literary Artists Fellowship from 2017-2020. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshops.  For more information, visit joejimenez.net.

To read an exercise on using misdirection and indirectness, inspired by Jiménez’s essay “Cotton,” click here.

Michael Noll

This essay moves back and forth between first and third person, between “I” and “The man.” I once sat in on a talk with the war correspondent Scott Anderson, and he said that no matter the country he was in or the language the people spoke, as soon as someone switched into second person (you’re walking down the road and…), he knew he was about to hear something bad. The POV shift was a distancing device. Is the shift in this essay is something similar? What was the experience of seeing yourself as an almost fictional character?

Joe Jiménez

Anderson shares an interesting view of the You as a conduit to sharing something “bad.”  I wrote an entire novel in the second-person, Bloodline, a YA retelling of Hamlet, and I agree with Anderson that POV is so much about moving a speaker or narrator closer to or farther away from a reader. In Bloodline, I played with the You as a direct address, an embrace, a reaching out to hold another’s hand.  I’m thinking right now that I really was distancing myself, the writer, from “the man” in the essay “Cotton”—I am not entirely ashamed of that person I was all those years ago, and yet, I’d be lying if I said I don’t cringe every now and again when I consider how I was, not the who, necessarily, but the how of me.  Telling the story of the man, then, for me, in this essay, was all about telling a story of who I used to be, but there’s also a musicality to how “the man” sounds, which I love, and which drives me, perhaps more so than any logical reasoning or thought process that extends beyond the fact that I really just liked how it felt to write about “the man,” how it sounded when I read those lines aloud, or when I put the words inside me and let them do what they did in my mouth and my ears.

Michael Noll

The essay seems to be built upon the story, the one it ends on, the man leaving his old life to start a new one. That story leads to other stories, and I can imagine looking at this in a rough draft and wondering how to juggle and connect these different stories. The cotton seems to be the glue that holds them together. Was it always in the essay, or did it show up later as a way to connect these different parts?

Joe Jiménez

Joe Jiménez’s essay, “Cotton,” appears in the most recent issue of The Adroit Journal.

I started with the idea of cotton.  It’s something I jotted down on a papelito, a scrap paper, I kept in a notebook.  I started the essay when I was in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, and having just read Joan Didion’s essay “Keeping a Notebook,” and while I was trying to do over my life, I collected these papelitos, and later, I laid out a few of them on a table and said, what can I make?  I was staying in my hometown, then, with my mother and brother, when I recalled my visits to the cotton fields, and I remembered growing up, watching my mother looking in the cupboard some nights, which was frequently empty, and looking at what she would cook, which was a treat for us, since she often did not cook, laying out the cans of beans and maybe a can of corn and tomato sauce, a few weenies from the fridge, a potato, and saying, what can I make out of this?  I did the same with my papelitos one day, spreading them out, saying, what can I make out of this?  Rasquache is the word I would use to describe what I made.  Maybe it’s pastiche, maybe it’s lyrical—when I hold it close to me, the word I hear is mestizaje.

Michael Noll

At one point, you write, “My aunts, my grandmother, people I don’t know can sing of how picking cotton can break the back or the spirit or both—how forced labor and low-wage work demolishes a body. These are not my stories. And so, I pause now to know who I am in relation to other people’s grief.” I was really struck by this line, the way you place your own story within a context of place and people. Writers sometimes get asked who they write for–who they imagine their audience to be–and I wonder, if in that moment, if you were asking yourself that same thing. Did you have an imagined audience for this as you wrote it?

Joe Jiménez

Although I didn’t think of audience at that exact moment, I like the idea and perhaps I should ask this of myself more when I write.  What I wrote with that line was fueled by the question of power—I mean, really, how can a brown man in Texas write about cotton without recognizing its legacy?  The story of cotton in the place I am from cannot be divorced from the pain inflicted by people and institutions who have controlled cotton.  The scholar Dr. Larissa Mercado-Lopez from Fresno State University has written about the role of cotton in the area of South Texas she and I are from—we’re from the same hometown, in fact, Gregory, Texas, and have both published books with Arte Publico Press.  So I can’t write entirely unconsciously about cotton.  I think the history matters, to me it does. And I’ve learned from writing fiction to ask, when writing characters who wield power differently than me:  Am I being fair? What does this portrayal ask of the truth?

Michael Noll

There’s a great passage that begins,”If you have never seen a water tower glimmering with sunrise…” It’s one of a couple of moments where you seem to be explaining the context for your story to people who might lack firsthand experience with it. In part, I ask this because I grew up in  the country, outside a small town a ways from any big city, and so I sometimes find myself feeling the need to say to people, “No, look, here’s what it’s like.” I was talking a while back with another South Texas writer, Rene Perez, and he said that writing about South Texas is like writing science fiction; you’ve got to do a lot of worldbuilding. I thought about this when reading this passage. Do you recall at all what your thinking was as you wrote it?

Joe Jiménez

Perez drives a marvelous point.  Worldbuilding is part of what we do.  I also, and perhaps more immediately to this section of the essay, wanted to speak directly to perils of romanticizing small towns.  As a cisgender man, as a brown man who wears boots and old baseball caps and drives a red truck, my body is often read as straight, heteronormative, and so I am, for the most part, given safety in many small towns in South Texas.  This isn’t the case for everyone.  People I know and love, people I don’t know, have had to leave their hometowns for safer places, for opportunity, for people like them, for a chance at real sustainable joy.  I believe there is power in writing about our blindspots, and to see only the wonder of water towers without acknowledging that small towns, while awesome to me, also echo pain for others.  And like many of us, I’ve become especially aware of the divide between big cities and small towns, of urbanity and rurality, during and after last year’s election.  My partner and I visited Huntington, West Virginia last fall, where I talked about race and class and my YA novel at Marshall University, and while I will never fully understand why poor and working class people vote against our own interests, I do understand what it means to be living without things you need, necessities like jobs and food and health care, and for that reason, to put all your hopes in one basket, one basket that may subvert you, but still, it feels like hope when nothing else feels like hope, and what’s life without hope?  Driving the streets of Huntington, so many of the houses, like several on each street, were for sale, entire neighborhoods, it seemed, were being sold. I saw that despair, and having lived despair of my own, I understood some of it.  Coming from a small town, I have also felt defensive when I’ve listened to others disparage small-town America—like you, I often feel the need to say, “No, look, here’s what it’s like” or “But there’s so much more to it” or “More people from big cities should be interacting with people from small towns.”

September 2017

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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How to Use a Light Touch in Heavy Moments

19 Sep

Joe Jiménez’s essay, “Cotton,” appears in the most recent issue of The Adroit Journal.

One of the most difficult things to learn in prose, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is how much certain passages ought to weigh. There will be moments that feel heavy, and so we write them heavy: longer, more drawn out, with more forceful words and images. These are the sentences, we tell ourselves, that people are going to quote. And yet when we return to those passages in the revision process, they don’t read right. They feel like they’re trying too hard—or not hard enough. We’re often not sure which, only certain that something is not working.

It’s often the case that less is more in prose, and sometimes the most important moments in a story need the lightest touch. A terrific example of this can be found in Joe Jiménez’s essay, “Cotton.” It was published in The Adroit Journal, where you can read it now.

How the Essay Works

The essay moves back and forth between passages about the cotton fields that dominated the landscape where Jiménez grew up and personal stories that lead up to, and away from, a moment where he realized that his life needed to change. Obviously, those personal stories will be doing a lot of narrative work, and yet they occupy a surprisingly small amount of space in the essay—because Jiménez exercises a light touch in some devastatingly effective ways. Here’s one example:

A story: I fell in love with a man with one ear. I was 29. We bought a house. We got dogs. We drove to Missouri. We drove to the coast. We lay on the beach, and we ate green peppers and Roma tomatoes, small sour limes, which we grew in red clay pots in the backyard.  When one of the dogs gave birth, one of the pups died, and we wrapped her in a white cotton towel and buried her beneath a papaya tree. Citlali, we named her. Little star. The papaya tree grew—we liked to believe that little star was growing into a strong tree, into those seeds.  But one winter, that papaya tree froze. It never grew back. Every year, including that one, the man told me he wanted to die.

There are a lot of ways this passage could have been written more directly, dealing with the events and the emotions of the relationship head on. But it doesn’t do that. Instead, it states the premise and a noteworthy detail (“I fell in love with a man with one ear”), sums up some noteworthy points on the timeline of the relationship (“I was 29. We bought a house. We got dogs. We drove to Missouri…”), and then focuses on two things: what they ate on the beach and what happened to one of their puppies.

In part, the focus on things that are not the thing itself (the relationship) is a perfect example of what John Gardner was talking about in his famous barn exercise (describe a barn from the point of view of a farmer whose son has just died in a war, but don’t state what he feels or what happened to his son). Jiménez is moving tangentially, getting at the emotionally heart of a scene through an unexpected entry.

But Jiménez is also doing something else: he’s juxtaposing a short, tangential-seeming story with a statement of absolute clarity and directness (“Every year, including that one, the man told me he wanted to die”). It’s a statement that would get our attention regardless of where it is placed in the essay. But it’s particularly breathtaking because it comes at us from outside our line of vision. We’ve been looking at food and puppies. It’s all connected, of course, but we’ve been temporarily distracted. To go back to the theoretical giants, it’s an example of what Kenneth Burke wrote about the scene in Hamlet where Hamlet is waiting on a platform for his father’s ghost; while he waits he and the audience get distracted by his drunken uncle, and so the thing we suspect is coming arrives out of nowhere.

Jiménez manages this in one short paragraph, and that brevity makes the passage even more effective.

The Writing Exercise 

Let’s use misdirection and indirectness, using “Cotton” by Joe Jiménez as a model:

  1. State the premise and a noteworthy detail. In general, premises are simple: somebody loves somebody, somebody hates somebody, somebody wants something and can’t quite get it. They’re built on universal experience and emotion. The noteworthy detail is what makes your universal moment less universal. Not everyone has just one ear. It’s a fairly small detail and not the hinge upon which the entire story turns, but it gets our attention so that we’ll read onto the more important details. So, what is your universal premise and what is a detail that can particularize it?
  2. Sum up some noteworthy points on the story’s timeline. In short, write a montage. This happened, this happened, and this. It can move that fast in your passage. Use short sentences. Be direct. You’re setting the stage for the bigger moment.
  3. Focus on one or two details. Jiménez focuses on food and a puppy. The food is not generic. He and his lover grew it themselves, so it had meaning to them. That’s really the best filter to use when figuring out which details to focus on: what has the most meaning to the characters. It’s often small things that they’re most proud of or most moved by in the moment. The puppy is a great detail because it’s personal to the characters but also because there’s a narrative arc attached to it. That arc creates a story within the story. So, what details are meaningful to you or your characters and which details have narratives attached to them? Describe those details and tell their stories as quickly as possible.
  4. Jump back to the premise. Jiménez jumps to “Every year, including that one, the man told me he wanted to die.” That sentence is one of the big reasons he tells this story in the first place. It’s the next part of the premise: I fell in love with a guy, and every year he said… Write a sentence or two that states, as directly as possible, a fact that makes the story significant to your or your characters.

The goal is to juxtapose that direct statement with the less direct details that precede it, and perhaps you can plan that juxtaposition, but it’s more likely that you’ll come at it from a couple of angles before one feels right. Give yourself the space to keep trying until it all clicks into place.

Good luck.

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