In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jennifer Bowen
There are so many facets of your nonfiction piece “Just the Song.” Where did the spark for this piece come from?
The pressure to write it came while watching my kid perform in Cabaret on the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration. It was haunting to watch my son’s character, Cliff, grapple with the world as the Nazi Party and fascism were on the rise—history, but with foreboding. E was getting ready to go to college and I was a big fucking mess about it. For the first time in my life, I wondered whether art was the protective force I’d imagined it to be. Art can be life changing, for sure. But my kids, it seemed, were going to launch into a darkening world. If all essays arise out of a question, mine was something like, can art stop a bullet? And in the face of that question, are they prepared for the world that awaits?
When writing this work, what was it like to go back through and remember the plays E had performed? What was the impetus for this work to span nearly two decades? How did you decide on the organization for it?
It was bittersweet to watch the reel of his creative life tick through my mind’s eye. On the one hand, E brought so much joy and vibrance to the stage. As he got older, of course, the plays he acted in grew weightier and that was a different experience to relive. Reading it years after I wrote it, which was written years after I’d lived it, I see now where my perceptions about his experiences were flawed, which is always humbling. Writing is good at revealing your own misconceptions to you.
When I realized the structure of the essay would be a tour through my son’s theatre performances alongside his aging, it naturally took up most of his life, which was a few decades. My brain hops around in ways this essay illustrates. I don’t think I have ADHD. I think I have what I’d call Consistently Digressive Disorder (CDD). I sometimes think our writing is more an illustration of our limitations than our strengths, or maybe that, harnessed well, our limitations can be made into strengths? Cue every structure I’ve ever landed on, for better or worse.
There’s such a tenderness throughout the text. You talk about how it was strange to watch your child become someone else. Can you say more about that?
Thank you for saying that. It did feel tender to write. It feels tender to talk about now. When our kids are young, we (perhaps mistakenly) think we know them entirely. And so when you see them acting someone completely different from themselves—a slapstick cowboy for example—it’s funny and a little startling.
And of course it’s hard to see them acting pain. In Cabaret, again, my son was a man named Cliff—but with E’s very dimples, his very walk. When he got kneed in the gut by Nazis, it was my son’s voice I heard expressing pain. I didn’t have to imagine him in a fascist world, because I was watching it live. And watching your child act can really be a metaphor for watching them grow into their future selves. There are layers and complexities we can miss when they’re right under our nose, because we’re so used to seeing them as this one person we’ve always known. But humans are dynamic and layered and play, as the bard tells us, many parts.
Because of the way it’s structured, is this ever a piece that you’d ever want to write a part two of, as time progresses?
That’s interesting. I’ve never considered it. I could imagine writing something new or deeper about the way art functions or fails as both sanctuary and weapon in the end times, but I’m not sure I have the stomach to put either of my kids in it right now. I’d rather imagine them into a speculative world with free healthcare.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
I write about connection: how humans (and systems and cows and chickens) seek it, thwart it, imagine it, falter from the lack of it, and thrive when we find it. Themes that grow from that central concern are abandonment, magical thinking, mutual care. That all sounds heavy: I love being playful—with structure and language—across all themes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pleasure and the impulse to give. That’d feel like a nice space to explore.
What are some of your favorite books? What authors do you return to?
Oh gosh, so many. Some of the most brilliant contemporary writers alive today happen to live in our own backyard and I love and admire their books: Lesley Nneka Arimah (What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky), VV Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night), Danez Smith (Bluff). I also love Marilynne Robinson’s novels and essays. Ali Smith, always. Wislawa Szymborska. Kristin Collier has a new book or memoir/reportage coming out called, What Debt Demands. It’s about student loan debt, but really also about family and class divide and caring for each other; it’s a beautiful, important book that’s fresh in my mind. Frog and Toad will forever hold a place in my heart and so will E.B. White, who probably shaped and parented more of me than I realize through Charlotte’s Web.
What are you working on now?
I’m not an everyday writer. My day job and my extra gigs take up a chunk of time and emotional energy. My brain seems to be scheming a novel, which I think is a very cheeky thing for it to do. We’ll see if it gets bashful when I actually sit in front of a blank page again. If past is precedent, it’ll change its mind about a novel and lead me to another chicken essay.
Jennifer Bowen is a writer, editor, and educator whose work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Orion, The Sun, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She’s a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us, Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket). Her debut essay collection, Lightworthy, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press (2025).
