AUTHOR INTERVIEW: JUSTIN JANNISE
by LILA MANKAD
May 2022
Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions, 2021), which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Recently a recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and a former Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast, Justin holds degrees from Yale University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Houston.
Lila Mankad
What did you want to do as a teenager? Did you always want to be a writer?
Justin Jannise
I might have secretly wanted to be one.
Lila Mankad
So, about your writing itself? Do you have a general writing process? Do you have a routine?
Justin Jannise
I’m personally very fascinated by where things start and how difficult it can be to look back after it’s been published or finished and think, you know, where did this come from? One of the things that’s going on usually is that I’m taking down notes… Sometimes it’s a notebook, I’ve always kept a journal, but usually, it’s my phone that goes everywhere I go, so that’s the easiest place to keep it and know I won’t lose it. It’s usually some bit of language, maybe something that I envision as a title or first line.
And in fact, I have, let’s see how many are on there right now…. 119 ideas for first lines or titles. You could double that easily just for the other things that haven’t been numbered yet. And then you could probably double that for the little scraps of paper that are lying around waiting to be rediscovered, so it usually starts with something like that.
I might take one of those [notes], and be like, alright, I would like to write a poem today. And I will ideally, get lost, kind of just feeling my way. …Should I break? Where should I break the line, or how long? You have to sort of make all of these decisions, and sometimes change your mind, I am often changing my mind in the middle of that, that’s what I mean by getting kind of lost in it. I look at the clock and a couple of hours have passed. I was just kind of immersed in language. Poems might end up essentially carved into stone, so I want to make sure everything, every word, every letter, every function, punctuation mark counts.
Lila Mankad
Can I ask? Can you describe what you feel like your job is?
Justin Jannise
I feel like there’s just like, all of this wisdom, that is sort of swimming around in my head because I’ve heard other people say it or and I may not even really remember where, or how long ago it was. … I hear in my head what so many other writers have said about work and writing.
Writers often end up taking on all sorts of jobs. The job may not be writing, but their willingness to do it, I think, does stem from writing because if you write stories, and let’s say you’re just sort of at a dry spell with inspiration, you might get your next inspiration, or your next setting, or your next main character from a job. There’s that.
But if you want to think of writing as a vocation, or as a calling, you know, that’s quite different from writing as a hobby. If writing is my vocation, then I take it more seriously than I take myself.
There’s this idea of the zeitgeist. In German, Zeit is time and Geist is ghost or spirit. So like, the spirit of the times, and it’s a difficult thing to define because it’s always shifting. But I think that part of the responsibility of a writer is [to be] willing, both to pursue the rewards and own the responsibility of being in conversation with the zeitgeist, with what’s happening in the world.
Somebody says something that you’ve never heard of. To listen and think, “Oh, I have never heard of that,” or, “I don’t know about that,” or “that’s a whole category of experience that just now came before me…” Then to feel a need to learn about it by reading about it, or by talking about it, by going there, you know, that’s one of the ways that there’s more to writing than just the writing. I think it’s about being kind of dialed in to the zeitgeist, or to have one’s antenna up about what matters enough to spend the energy writing about it.
Lila Mankad
At PVA we have a large LGBTQ population. How has queer writing and art changed over the last 20 years?
Justin Jannise
The first word that comes to mind is rapidly, in a way, before my very eyes… I think partly, that’s due to the fact that the discourse around queerness has changed so rapidly, the way people talk about these things generally, has changed.
When I was in middle school and high school, gay was something that meant bad. That’s literally how people used it. And, you know, I don’t think queer was really any word that people used in any kind of positive light except invery sort of select circles. Before that, I think there was a time when queer experiences were silenced. Once they were allowed to be vocalized, they were exoticized, or tokenized, so that if you were going to write a book, like the one that I wrote, [that] deals with a number of queer experiences, then that would immediately be labeled and shelved under “gay literature” and not just literature. One of the things that’s happened is that now there are just a lot of options, like some want to wear that label kind of proudly because that’s most meaningful to them. Others who are queer writers, and that might in some way inform their work, don’t feel pressure to sort of be defined by that. And then there are some that I think are still trying to push the boundaries of these very complicated, but so important issues of identity even further.
So many aspects of my identity are so fluid, including my gender identity and sexuality, and certainly my approach to literature and poetry in terms of what I want to read or what I feel like writing, what genre. Also, bringing back the other question of howI view my job as a writer, it’s to connect with the reader, which is not easy to do because you don’t really know them. That’s kind of the big experiment, how will I connect with the reader? Is there a way to kind of take all of those aspects of my lived experience and make something that somebody finds legible on the page without me there helping them? That’s the real challenge.
As overwhelmed as I get by all the different possibilities, I still want there to be more possibilities, not fewer, for myself and for everybody else.
Lila Mankad
So you touched on this a little bit, but do you ever run out of inspiration? Do you get burnt out? And what do you do if you do?
Justin Jannise
If anything, I have too much inspiration, and not enough time and energy. I do get burnt out of working, you know, of using my brain to do anything — and as much as I may enjoy it, writing is certainly work.
Usually, when I sit down and read something, it starts to get me excited about writing something of my own. So I don’t really ever run out of inspiration, but I do run out of everything else.
Lila Mankad
Thank you.