Lesley Jenike’s nonfiction has appeared recently or will appear soon in phoebe, Waxwing, the Account, and Diode. Her most recent collection is Punctum: Poems, a chapbook of poetry published by Kent State University Press in 2017. She teaches literature and creative writing courses at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two small children. An excerpt from her essay “I Love You. You Have Nice Hands” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “I Love You. You Have Nice Hands”?
My mom recently—long after I drafted this essay—said to me, “You should write about your life. It’s been pretty interesting.” I think my mom was trying to tell me that at forty, I should spend more time looking backward rather than forward because that’s just what middle-aged women do. In other words, the best is behind me now. But looking backward isn’t a natural activity for me. I’m not a particularly sentimental, nostalgic person, though I found that music, that thinking especially about voice, allowed me access to what was an incredibly chaotic, painful time in my life. I wanted to get to know the teenage and twenty-something me again, and to raise her up a little in the hope that in doing so, I might better understand who I am now.
There is a sense that voices can bring pain by seemingly innocuous association as well, do you feel that, in these detailed moments, the pain can exist at the level of the sound or in the perception of the hearer? This may be a “if a song falls in a forest, does it make a sound” sort of question, but these moments you’ve detailed seemed to be an interesting place to pose it.
It’s funny, I just caught a bit of a radio broadcast about the power of words to harm, arguing that a newfound interest in “trigger warnings” and political correctness on college campuses indicates a regressive view, an almost superstitious emphasis on the magic of spells and incantations. I was bullied as a kid and I’m here to tell you that words can hurt. If, as in Catholic mass, a priest’s words can turn a wafer into the body of Christ, then words can also break a body down. Yes, I think the pain can be transmitted orally and perceived aurally—the bully’s pain meeting the object’s pain. In fact, I think we’re caught now—as a nation—inside someone’s pain and we’re being forced to listen. I think I started singing both for pleasure and as an act of revenge; maybe these twin motivations still drive me to this day.
At times, voices and sounds are disembodied and impossible to source, in everything from announcements at Target to someone shouting about a gravestone out of sight, how do you feel voice operates when its source is not in sight? How might these disembodied voices operate further without any sound at all, i.e., how do you hope their mention echoes with the reader on a silent page?
I’m the kind of person who is very sensitive to the sounds around me. I zero in on whatever ambient music is playing and can easily get caught up in it or overwhelmed by it. All around our house are battery-powered toys that sing or talk or make weird engine or animal noises, and a heavy footfall can set them off. It can be scary for somebody like me. I hear my children calling for me inside the air conditioner’s white noise. When I’m in a different room, I listen for that particular cry that tells me our son got hurt wrestling with his sister. I’m constantly on edge. So yeah, disembodied voices seem to rule my life. Sometimes when I can’t listen to say, Erykah Badu because the kid shows are going on or our daughter has requested the Tangled soundtrack, I try to conjure Badu’s voice in my head; I try to think about what words I would use to describe it to someone who hasn’t heard it before. I try to play it for myself inside myself.
How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?
Well, I spent most of life in higher education as a poet, though the whole thing was pretty arbitrary. I started writing when I was in grade school and I wrote all sorts of things—stories, plays, academic essays. It just so happened that the last creative writing class I took as an undergraduate was a poetry workshop, so I sent a portfolio of poetry to MFA programs. I always intended to get back to other things, but our literary and academic culture wants us to specialize, categorize. Then, after having my second kid, I wondered what was holding me back. After all, I had little to lose; I work at an extremely supportive art and design college where the usual divisions between genres aren’t particularly useful. I also started to feel as though I needed to stretch out—that I had stuff to say about culture, motherhood, and how those two things intersect. I think I also needed to prove to myself that I could still grow and change—that my evolution as an artist isn’t over—not by a long-shot.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Oh, definitely the kids! They are with me even when they aren’t; when they’re at daycare and I have a chance to write, I take my responsibility to them incredibly seriously and I write—very little loafing around. Then when we’re together, sometimes I long to be writing. That particular conflict I would say is the engine that keeps the art coming. The stuff of motherhood also suddenly seems interesting to me—children’s books, children’s songs and games, the acquisition of language, the way my daughter, for example, draws people with big open mouths and sharp teeth. And of course, having kids sometimes makes me feel like I’m walking around with my nerves on the outside; everything hurts and everything is beautiful. I’m grateful to them for all of the above.