About Jackson Bliss:
I'm the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). My writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, and the Columbia Journal, among others. I'm the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and live in LA with my wife and our two fashionably dressed dogs. Follow me on Twitter & IG: @jacksonbliss.
What inspires you to write?
I find inspiration in love, imagination, counterfactual narratives, immigrant stories, cultural intersectionality, and the limitations of memory. I find inspiration in play, specifically the experimentation of form, genre, and voice, which is why I always work on multiple manuscripts at the same time so I’ll always have a bunch of projects I can jump into, which helps demystify the singular artifact.
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
In no particular order:
1. Haruki Murakami
2. Joan Didion
3. Zadie Smith
4. Karen Tei Yamashita
5. Jhumpa Lahiri
6. JD Salinger
7. Banana Yoshimoto
8. Junot Díaz
9. Octavia Butler
10. Yiyun Li
Tell us about your writing process.
I give myself permission to revise, cut, and delete text whenever I’m not feeling creative or ready to write, which is still a form of writing no matter what people say. I also give myself permission to not write. For me, so much of writing is feeling, thinking, researching, flirting with ideas, and building new homes with language. I tend to revise my drafts compulsively. I'll know when they're ready.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
All the time. I think about my characters a lot like they're friends of mine. I imagine conversations they might have or should have. I might jot down something I imagine them saying when it comes to me. And sometimes, I even pretend to chat with them in the shower.
What advice would you give other writers?
Don’t look for shortcuts, don’t disappear when your writing friends need you, don’t ignore literary journals along the way, and don’t stop writing if you're having a hard time publishing your manuscripts because all of us have that. Also, you can always find a publisher but you can't get back the years you weren't writing because of disappointment and heartache. Also, try to be generous, intrepid, and always take risks in your writing. Read other books as a form of nourishment, study the industry. Learn about comparable titles in your particular genre. Learn how to write a query letter. Construct complex characters whose humanity has been fully developed. Don’t simply confirm reality in your books, don't reinforce stereotypes, and always remember the joy of writing. If there's no joy at any stage in the writing process, then why the hell are you writing?
How did you decide how to publish your books?
After my last agent and I broke up, I decided at a certain point that I wasn't going to let the publishing industry stop me from publishing my books. I realized that if I waited for an agent to discover me, I might be waiting for the rest of my life because agents are risk adverse trend followers who are always looking for the last great thing, not the next great thing. Literary fiction authors, in particular, have such a romanticized but formulaic notion of how to "make it" that always involves a big-name literary agent, a huge advance, a short story in the New Yorker, and book tour. But none of that dream corresponds to what literary capitalism has become in 2022. So, I decided that trying to publish my books in small, prestigious presses that champion great writing, was my bet. I was a 100% correct.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think we've reached critical mass. With all of the self-publishing websites and print-on-demand services available now along with the big-5 imprints and all of the many excellent small presses, we are literally drowning in books, which is why I think book curation has become so important. Every book list, book review, and recommended book listed in an article or social media post is now content curation that we have become so desperate for because there's just too many books and not enough time. Other thing, I think that ¼ of all big-5 editors and agents are worth their weight in gold, representing some of the best and most important voices of this generation. I think the other 3/4 are destroying the publishing industry by trying to co-opt trends, memes, movements, and ingratiate themselves with celebrities, tiktok stars, and influencers who don't know how to write and have nothing original to say instead of publishing the best, most important, and most original books they can. It's all about the numbers now, not the books.
What genres do you write?: Fiction, CNF (Creative Nonfiction), Memoir, Autobiography, Literary Fiction, Urban Realism, Experimental Writing
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Jackson Bliss Home Page Link
Link To Jackson Bliss Page On Amazon
Your Social Media Links
Goodreads
Facebook
Twitter
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
