New Voices: Jess Row

Jess Row was born in 1974 in Washington, DC. His first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Five Chapters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. He has also received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship in fiction, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He is currently at work on a new collection of short stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War. Jess is an assistant professor of English at the College of New Jersey, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Sonya Posmentier, and daughter Mina. A longtime student in the Kwam Um School of Zen, he was ordained a dharma teacher in 2004.

Your story, Lives of the Saints, recently appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Eleanor Wilner. Can you talk a little about where the idea for this story came from?

In this case I had a kind of a vision of these two young people on the subway, the girl lying on the boy's lap, and I wanted to know what brought them there. At the time I was writing the story there was a lot of talk about artists and hipsters moving into the South Bronx—this may still be happening, though there's been less discussion of it recently—and I suppose I wanted to take that idea of urban "pioneering" (a disgraceful term, but people use it) to its furthest possible extreme. Which, in the case of New York, would be Hunts Point. And then overlapping that was the timeframe, a few years after September 11th, just far enough away from the event that it begins to be stylized and made a point of reference, an image-commodity.

Was there a particular aspect of writing Lives of the Saints that proved especially challenging?

I had a lot of fun writing this story, actually. It didn't feel like work. I love New York, but because I'm not from the city, I don't take the setting for granted, as some writers do (by necessity). And these two young people are very close to my heart, misguided as they are. They have a great deal of courage; in some ways I wish I had that kind of courage. But not the naïvete that goes along with it. Working on this story was really a refuge from other things I was supposed to be doing; not that it wasn't hard—writing any story is hard—but I didn't notice it at the time.

What is your favorite first line from a work of fiction?

I don't have an all-time favorite, but a great one that comes to mind is the beginning of Melanie Rae Thon's story Xmas, Jamaica Plain: "I'm your worst fear. But I'm not the worst thing that could happen."

Last line?

That would be from F. Scott Fitzgerald's story Babylon Revisited: "She would never have wanted him to be so alone."

I’ve read that you're currently working on a novel and a new story collection. Are you working on those manuscripts simultaneously? Can you talk a little about how the two projects are co-existing?

The collection is now finished; the novel is in its last stages, and I'm actually at work on a new collection (and thinking about a new novel too). There's really no good answer to that question other than to say that I have a short attention span and a lot of stories I want to write. It's not an approach I would recommend to anyone else, but at least it keeps life interesting.

Who are some of your all-time favorite writers? Some emerging writers that are catching your attention?

My all-time favorites list: John Banville, Nadine Gordimer, John Berger, Michael Ondaatje, Gina Berriault, Charles Baxter, John Edgar Wideman, Robert Stone, J.M. Coetzee, Paul West. As far as young writers go in this country, I think there's a real impatience, across the board, with strict distinctions between "realism" and "avant-garde"; you see that in the new fabulists, like Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Judy Budnitz, for example. There's also a lot of new interest in regional particularity and in rural or at least non-urban life, sometimes with a gothic or fantastic edge: David Means, Ander Monson, Peter Markus, Jason Brown, Lewis Robinson, Charles D'Ambrosio. And then there's the enormous ongoing globalization of American fiction, as the definition of who is American and what constitutes "American experience" changes. A novel like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would not have been possible ten years ago, and yet now to many of my undergraduate students it has defined the possibilities of fiction for the future. The distinction between "immigrant" fiction or "multicultural" fiction and the normative, white-male, canonical tradition is beginning to disappear. There's a huge amount of vitality in contemporary fiction, and I think mainstream publishing is just barely keeping up with it.