11 minute read
MONDAYNIGHTDINNER
JENNIFER STEIL
Craigardan’s executive director Michele Drozd caught up with writer and residency alumni Jennifer Steil during her visit to the states this summer.
Michele Drozd: Jennifer, you and I first met in 2017 through Kate Moses, an incredible author who introduced you to Craigardan when she was helping us pilot the new writers’ program. Remind me, where were you living at the time?
Jennifer Steil: I was in France. I remember I was really depressed because a panel that I proposed for a conference had just been rejected and I thought “well, what do I have to look forward to?” And then Kate suggested that I try out this residency, and I thought it sounded idyllic. Sign me up! MD: And you were at Craigardan for a month with a great group of writers from all over the country. JS: I was! I had an incredibly productive time. I think I was doing the final rewrite of The Ambassador’s Wife. It was a really efficient, exciting residency, with fresh vegetables and wonderful company and the most inspirational environment I could imagine, looking out at the mountains. MD: And then you came back to Craigardan the following year for a second residency. You brought your daughter, Theodora, and that was fantastic for all of us.
JS: Yeah I think Theodora was eight years old at the time and you secured a grant to get her into two different day camps. She climbed a mountain everyday while I wrote Exile Music. MD: Which is your latest book that came out during the pandemic. JS: Exile Music is my newest book. It is also my first historical novel. I had no intention of writing a historical novel. Novels always happen to me, I never get to pick them. They just accost me partly as a side effect of our life which requires us to switch countries every four years. MD: Talk a little bit about your first adventure, which set you off on this nomadic lifestyle. JS: I left the US in 2006 to take a job as editor -in-chief at a newspaper in Yemen. It was the most exciting, challenging, difficult, and thrilling year of my life. I learned an incredible amount from my Yemen reporters. At the end of my first year I met Tim, my husband, on Bastille Day in the garden of the French ambassadors house. I was about 38 when I met him, and I never really aspired towards marriage or becoming a parent, but somehow meeting Tim changed my mind. We ended up together and I spent another three years there. That year at the Yemen Observer inspired my first book, which is a memoir, called The Women Who Fell From the Sky. It tells the story of running the newspaper, all the mistakes that I made, the hilarity, the things I learned from my reporters, and the few things they perhaps learned from me. I wanted my readership back in the US to know the Yemenis that I knew. I wanted them to see what the Yemenis were really like. My Yemeni
reporters were the most welcoming, ambitious, excited, and open-to-learning group of people that I had ever been around, and those relationships continue today. MD: And that really comes through in the book. You really make us care about these characters. And it’s really great to get that deep perspective on the Yemeni culture and your ability to work within the culture. And then the life that you fell into by meeting Tim inspired your second book. JS: It did! Tim was the British ambassador to Yemen. So when I first moved in with him I was suddenly thrown into an unfamiliar and strange world. It took me awhile to navigate, I was so uncomfortable. I was an ordinary person living in the old city of Sanaa, living a simple life in a house with other people that I took in. And then I was suddenly living in this massive ambassadorial residence where there were staff members and a constant flow of very interesting guests. We always had guests from the UK – ministers, hostage negotiators, military people, all kinds of visitors. The conversations we had over dinner or drinks were so fascinating and involved so much information that I could never share with another human being. It occurred to me that I had to stop writing memoir, and switch to fiction. It was around that time, when I was six months pregnant with my daughter, that I was kidnapped outside of Sanaa in the mountains with four other women. I survived, spoiler! The British government asked me to write a detailed account of it just so they were aware of everything that happened. For me writing is a way to process trauma, grief, happiness, anything. So I had a draft of that, and I wondered if I could use that fictionally, this traumatic thing that happened to me. What could I do with it to make something good out of it? I didn’t want it to be about my experience. So the book is based on the answer to a series of what-if questions. The ultimate result is a literary thriller that is triggered by a kidnapping but not ultimately about it. It is about a lot of other things: freedom of expression, white savior complex, and my character’s fatal flaw which is her failure to consider context. You can’t take a very western, American feminism and transplant it into another culture and expect people not to die. So, with the best of intentions, she thought she was helping people. But she wasn’t helping them in a way that perhaps they most needed to be helped. MD: It’s interesting to see how she ended up being the one helped by those same people. JS: Right, exactly! Don’t give anything away! MD: You made it through that experience, you wrote a thought-provoking book with all these what-if questions; so where do you go from there? As a writer who processes life through literature, did you already have a number of different ideas you wanted to work on? Or was the next experience with Tim the inspiration for your next book? JS: Well, I’m not a planner or an outliner. I never have a shortage of ideas, that is never
MD: You don’t believe in writer’s block?
JS: No because sometimes I think you just need to sit down and put words on a page. If they don’t make sense or are not good, so what! Just keep writing until they do. In my early twenties I thought I had to wait until I was inspired. Then when I was inspired, I could sit down and write. And that didn’t happen all that often. Inspiration usually hits when you’re already doing the work. I didn’t become a writer until I realized the hardest part is just getting to the chair. You got to show up. And once I’m there, sure, I might write total crap. My first drafts are completely useless, but that’s my process. My first draft is how I figure out the story I’m telling. There’s a magic in the storytelling. Things come out when I’m writing dialogue, whole conversations happen that I don’t plan out. They just happen the way regular conversations happen. They are just different parts of me talking to each other. And that has to happen naturally. MD: Then what was the adventure that lead to Exile Music?
JS: In 2012 I moved to Bolivia with my husband and daughter. Tim was working for the European Union at the time when the UK was a part of the EU and he had a position in La Paz. Tim came home from work one day and said, “Did you know there were about 20,000 Jewish refugees living in Bolivia during WW2, and some beyond?” I had not been aware of this particular group of refugees in La Paz and other parts of Bolivia. I had read plenty about the Jewish diaspora in other parts of South America but I didn’t know anything about Bolivia so I first looked around to see if there are any novels that I could read about this population and I could not find any. I started by interviewing survivors and hearing their interesting stories about how they came to Bolivia and how they adapted. I discovered that by 1938 there were only three countries in the world granting visas to Jews and Bolivia was one of those three. When I first started thinking that these stories need to be written I thought “well, whose story would I tell?” “who would be my main character?” and at the time I was also watching my daughter adapt to Bolivia. She was almost three when we moved there and she picked up Spanish in about a month.
MD: So in some ways you were having a similar experience to those refugees, adapting to an unfamiliar culture and language as quickly as possible. JS: Right, the concept of arriving in a culture that is completely foreign was familiar to me, but I am also doing it from quite a privileged position and I’m doing it not having lost everyone I know and love. So I thought if I were a child growing up in Vienna in the 1930s with the adults around me getting increasingly stressed out and with the menace of Hitler approaching closer and closer every single day, I would need an imaginary world. I would need somewhere to retreat to, so I kind of started from that imaginary world. That was the start of the narrative.
MD: Since I’ve read your previous books I know that this is going to be a very interesting cultural work as well. And while your readers learn something in your books about other cultures, what does it mean to actually be the person traveling and living in that place. JS: I think that is the area that I’m most interested in exploring as a writer: the inbetween spaces; between cultures and between countries. Who are you when you don’t belong to one place? There are more and more people who are like this - either by choice, or by necessity if they’re refugees.
These people aren’t sure who they are, and I feel unclear who I am. I have never felt less American than I do now, but I don’t feel like anything else, so I don’t know how I would define myself. Clearly the US shaped me and made me the person I am but, the other countries I’ve since lived in have also shaped me. It wasn’t until I moved to Yemen that I actually realized how America had shaped my assumptions about the world. There were certain assumptions - that drinking water would be safe, or that a toilet would work - and I just discovered all of these different assumptions that I didn’t realize I had, and that other people, other cultures, other religions don’t share. It was really important for me to be in a process where I could try to shrink my own assumptions. I’m not saying that I’ve been successful but it’s a workin-progress. MD: As a writer you're really able to explore that space, and perhaps there aren’t any clear answers, there is only finding your way forward. Through grief, trauma, through lack of belonging, all of that. JS: I just finished writing my next book which takes place underground in a country much like Bolivia, and it’s an almost entirely queer female community. It’s about gay women: revolutionaries, but not through violence; through art. There is a trope of underground literature that seems to be men with guns plotting violent revolutions and I’m so tired with men with guns and violent revolutions. So I wanted to explore what the opposite of that looks like. And again, there is no one answer to that question and my exploration is only one exploration, and the weird things that happen in my book aren’t necessarily the things that would happen, but it was something that I was interested in exploring. MD: It is great timing for both of these books. I’m thinking about how Americans can have more empathy for refugees and how important it is to shift that narrative in this country. We need to take the time to explore what it means to be underground literally and figuratively. JS: That’s exactly what I’m
I’m most exploring! And its interested interesting, talking about people being open and exploring… the in- empathetic, driving around in the US since I’ve been between spaces; on this trip has felt really stressful for me because I between cultures, feel like I’m driving between through a country that’s in the middle of a civil war, countries. and its so sad and scary to me. And I feel like people Who are you when have stopped being willing to learn anything, there is you don’t belong this absolute resistance to to one place? learning and to admitting that somebody else’s viewpoint might be valid. MD: So perhaps we need the ability to shift our perspective more than ever. Final word for everyone? JS: Be NICE!
