10 Quick Questions with Jennifer Horne
Jennifer Horne on everything from gardening to Zelda Fitzgerald.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE NOVEL?
This seems like a simple question, and yet I am astonished to find that I do not have an answer to it! My favorite novel is the one I am immersed in at a given moment, that takes me beyond myself, into another world, and back to myself again, changed. I think novels become favorites by speaking to you at a particular time in your life, and therefore my favorite novel changes as I do, from A Wrinkle in Time to the Narnia books to The Brothers Karamazov to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Waves to Look Homeward, Angel to The Sun Also Rises to The Golden Bowl to Sophie’s Choice to Beloved to Everything is Illuminated to Ahab’s Wife to, most recently, Miss Jane, with lots of other stops along the way. (My five-words description below in question #6 should probably read “not easy to pin down.”)
2. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START WRITING?
From the time I could read I also enjoyed making up stories and poems, and my mother, a writer, encouraged me in this. I wish she were alive so that we could still call each other when we’d come up with a good line for a poem and wanted to share it with someone.
For me, that sharing has always been a part of the pleasure of writing — I loved the way that writing could corral emotions, sense impressions, questions, imaginings into a form that could communicate something of what it felt like to experience the world through my particular lens.
3. DO YOU HAVE (OR HAVE YOU EVER HAD) A MUSE? IF SO, EXPLAIN.
Entire books have been written about the nature of the (traditionally female) muse in relation to feminism — is a woman who writes her own muse? If there’s one thing that over time has inspired, instructed, and engaged me, it would be the natural world, a source of comfort, metaphor, and, since I like to garden, good physical labor that takes me out of my head and into my body, where poems arise.
4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE POEM?
So many beloveds! One of my very favorites that I’ve been memorizing recently is Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.” I love the images, the mystical elements, the repetition, the way it circles back on itself and gives me something new every time I read it. I find that the poems I want to memorize tend to be somewhat incantatory, reaching back in their rhythms to the beginnings of poetic history.
5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ALABAMA PLANT?
Although I’m partial to oak leaf hydrangea and wild magnolia, the one that makes me happiest is the surprise lily, showing up in unexpected places just when all the plants of summer have died out and gone brown, and there it is in its showy red exuberance.
6. FIVE WORDS WHICH DESCRIBE YOU.
Stubborn.
Curious.
Loyal.
Rebellious.
Orderly.
7. ONE WAY IN WHICH THE ALABAMA WRITER’S CONCLAVE IMPACTED YOUR LIFE.
I’ve been aware of the AWC for a number of years and had the opportunity to speak on an editors’ panel one time when the Conclave met in Tuscaloosa. This past summer I attended my first meeting as an AWC member and felt such a good sense of community and connection among the writers there. Writing is a notoriously solitary calling, and it helps to connect with other writers online and, especially, in person, to share ideas and questions and simply to be among others who “get” you and what you do.
8. WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON RIGHT NOW?
My main project right now is a memoir-influenced biography of Sara Mayfield, an Alabama writer who is best known for her biography of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. I’m in the “messy draft” stage, finishing up research, and excited about keeping moving toward a finished draft. With my husband, Don Noble, I’ve just finished co-editing a collection of short stories by Alabama women, titled Belles’ Letters II, due out in spring 2017, and, as a personal project, my sister and I are putting together a collection of our mother’s poems, something self-publishing platforms now make it easy to do.
9. YOUR FAVORITE PLACE IN ALABAMA.
My favorite place is the place I live, on a little lake in Cottondale that astonishes me every day with its natural beauty, in a house that has nurtured my life for more than twenty years. Apart from that, I’m always drawn to Alabama’s beaches, reveling in the moment you can open the car windows and smell the ocean, even though you can’t quite see it yet.
10. ONE THING YOU NEED RIGHT NOW TO HELP YOU AS A WRITER.
Perhaps this is something we all need: to renew my faith daily that what I am doing matters. I reach back to the writers from the past whose work I admire, outward into the present to the writers I connect to across the state and beyond, forward to readers who might encounter my work in the future and find something of value there. We live in a time of an abundance of tools for writers, but also an abundance of distractions, so most of all I need reminders to stay focused, keep the faith, and write what needs writing.
Learn more about AWC member Jennifer Horne from her wonderful blog.
Also, put her on your calendars for April of next year, where she will be at the Alabama Writer’s Symposium and the Alabama Book Festival reading from her new collection of poems, Little Wanderer (Salmon Press, 2016).
