Q&A with Breakout 8 Winner Jennifer Ahlquist
Jennifer Ahlquist is an East Coast transplant to California, currently writing her MFA thesis at UC Davis. Her fiction has appeared in issue 4.2 of The Maine Review, and online in The Eunoia Review and Storychord. She has supported her writing by serving sushi, tweeting about designer furniture, booking events in a basement bowling alley, and copy writing Dutch press releases.
Jenni is one of eight winners of the 2019 Breakout 8 Prize, co-sponsored by Epiphany and The Authors Guild. Read her prizewinning story “Ruthie at the End of It All,” the first paragraph of which is excerpted below, in the Fall/Winter 2019 Issue of Epiphany.
From our Fall/Winter 2019 print issue.
How did you first come up with your winning piece?
The story began with the image of Bilbo Baggins helping a lonely eight-year-old bake a birthday cake.
I was the TA for a fantasy literature course, and The Fellowship of the Ring and N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (genius) were both on the syllabus, which inspired an obsession with apocalypse and how it unfolds on both the personal and epic scales.
Around the same time, the podcast and radio program Radiolab did an episode on what would go down, hour-by-hour, if the big meteor finally hit. The images coalesced, Bilbo Baggins exited the scene, and Ruthie started to tell me more about what the end of the world would mean to her.
What do you hope to gain from the year ahead?
I'm in my thesis year at UC Davis, so if all goes according to plan, I'll have a book-length manuscript by May. I'm hoping to finish my MFA energized and excited to continue the work.
What, for you, is the most exciting development in contemporary literature?
I am thrilled about the blurring of the distinction between "literary" and "genre" writing, as seen through writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado, Kazuo Ishiguro and, of course, Kelly Link.
I love genre fiction. I get very itchy when people say things like, "It's sci-fi/fantasy, but it's actually a good book!" Maybe that's because stories with supernatural elements often feel more emotionally accurate to me. We have these feelings that are too big and weird for us to reconcile with our daily routine, sometimes, and fiction gives us the possibility to examine them in all their big weirdness. It's like that painting, The Nightmare, where the bad dream really is a demon sitting on your chest. Why not? Memory is time travel! Love is hypnosis!
I think we can see some things more clearly by looking at them sideways, or upside-down.
What resources are most valuable for writers just breaking into publication territory?
Other writers. Mentorship and community have been invaluable to me in navigating the publication landscape, especially when the sheer volume of opportunity and information on the internet feels intimidating.
I've been so lucky to have a community of writers to commiserate about rejections with and share calls for submissions we think are great for each other's work. Doubly lucky to have professors who are actively publishing and able to offer guidance and encouragement to keep putting myself out there.
Who is your favorite underappreciated author we should all be reading?
It's perhaps strange to describe someone with several Pushcarts and a Guggenheim as underappreciated, but Deb Olin Unferth's stories Wait Till You See Me Dance and Voltaire Night should be required reading on every creative writing syllabus.
Do you have a memorable experience of an influential teacher you’d like to share?
We had a potluck on the last day of Katie Peterson's poetics seminar, and I brought in an enormous blueberry cardamom pie that I was very proud of.
"Imagine the book a person who can make that pie could make," Katie said, and I got very red and said something self- deprecating like "If only I spent less time baking and more time writing."
Katie frowned and told me, "You know that's not how that works. Women have known it for centuries." And that was the first thing anybody said to me that made me really feel like I could do it, could make a whole book. Because she was right! If you can remember to rest your pie dough and take the care to layer a lattice crust, then you can write a book: be generous with the filling, balance the sugar and spice, consider the presentation, and be patient, because it's going to take way longer than you think it will to bake.
It’s been said we write what we obsess over. What themes do you find keep cropping up in your writing again and again?
Death. Dying. Grief. That existential fear that surprises you when the barista hands you your latte and you suddenly think, "Oh, wow, we're both going to die eventually and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it."
Family, too. They ways we take kinship for granted, or what happens when you feel isolated from the community you're supposed to belong to.
What was your favorite book growing up?
I imagine at this point you will be unsurprised to learn that I was capital-O-Obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. I had a special journal for practicing Elvish letters. It's grand and clever and warm, but also serious and scholarly in a way that made me feel very grown up.
I should also mention that The House of the Scorpion convinced 12-year-old me that Nancy Farmer could see the future. I loved that book so much I gave a copy to my 7th grade Language Arts teacher to try to convince her to teach it.
If the pursuit of writing is a quiet solo one, what are some ways you connect with other writers?
Being in a graduate writing program, I'm lucky enough to have a built-in writing community.
But, while workshop is wonderful, what's been most special to me is the time we spend outside of the seminar room, not talking about writing. I want to hear what everybody made for dinner, or which museum they went to over the weekend. I want to know what everybody thinks about celebrity Instagrams and, especially now, the news and what we can do about it! When you have a group of people who are all practicing the art of observing the world more carefully, more specifically, even your friendships make you a better writer.
What’s one bit of advice you wish you’d have gotten early on?
A piece of Lucy Corin wisdom that's been extremely helpful to me: once you feel like you've solved the puzzle of the story, stop writing it.
Meaning, your stories are going to be their most exciting when you write your way into them, making discoveries as you go, and once you start to plan ahead, you'll lose the energy. Don't commit the story to anything until you absolutely have to, and don't demand that a story be any longer than it absolutely needs to be.
