Jody Hobbs Hesler
(1985)
How would you characterize the influence of your YWW experience in your life?
The YWW was one of my first experiences with an actual workshop setting. I still remember when my instructor told us to expect 100 rejections for every acceptance. His frankness helped me begin to understand the nature of this world. If only he had been wrong!
The YWW was also a mini-immersion in the artistic life and an early chance to self-identify as a writer. I think most of us (writers, artists, etc) feel like square pegs in round holes, so having a community and owning this aspect of our identities help fuel our energy for the work.
What’s the best advice you can give a Young Writer (in general or in your specific genre)?
If you love it, keep at it. Don’t do it for the money. (Hardly any of us can.) Don’t do it for the glory. (There’s a lot of finely crafted but mediocre literature out there. We really don’t need more of that.) Do it for the passion of it.
If you’re serious, then read and write as much as you can. And, don’t forget, live your life, too. Where else will your ideas come from?
What do you find yourself most often reading or listening to lately and why?
Part of my job as a writer is to be a reader. I try to read a book a week and keep a journal of my reactions to each one. Much of what I read is contemporary, but I also read yesterday’s and yesteryear’s work, to give me the widest possible scope as a reader and writer.
Recent favorites: everything by William Gay; most of Larry Brown, especially his short story collection Big Bad Love; Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping; Mavis Gallant’s work, especially her novella Green Water, Green Sky. For most of these works, it’s the narrative voice that thrills me. In Gallant, it’s sheer beauty of language.
Formative books: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway; Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker; everything by Dawn Powell, especially her memoir; Mary McCarthy’s The Group and The Charmed Life, among others; everything by Edith Wharton; Anais Nin’s earliest diaries; and more. Always more.