It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel like I'm reading someone else's story, and I feel like I've lost something, too, in the writing of self, as if I'm standing and reading myself, as a stranger, to other strangers.
Jill TalbotI like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.
Jill TalbotHow long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?
Jill TalbotWhen I admire a writer, it's for the recognizable palette - Hemingway's minimalism, the dialogue, those isolated bar scenes. But with each story or novel, he shows me something different within the framework he's built - like noticing that there's a chair in the corner I didn't see in another story.
Jill TalbotThere's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come across lines like that - when the writer is not only making a meta-move, but one that troubles truth and fiction, the nature of genre itself.
Jill Talbot