Introducing Contributing Editor of Creative Nonfiction Jax Connelly
Welcome! We’re excited to have you as the Volume 29 Contributing Editor for Creative Nonfiction. Your essay “Not So Soft” appeared in Vol. 26 of Water~Stone Review back in 2023. Since then you have had a ton of publishing success including winning the Red Hen Press Quill Prose Prize. Congratulations! Can you share a little about the forthcoming book?
Thank you, I’m so excited too! This is my first book, and I’m calling it a “memoir in essays and experiments.” I think “Not So Soft” is a good touchpoint for what to expect from it—that essay interrogates a difficult family relationship alongside a shared history of eating disorders, and the whole thing takes place while the narrator is on a run. The “container” creates a sense of almost false momentum and doomful circling that mimics the feeling of being trapped in a cycle, either with your own body or with someone you love.
A lot of the essays in my book are like that, too. Unstable bodies and the limitations of love/connection are thematic “wells” I return to in a lot of my writing, and I’m always interested in playing with form and structure in ways that either elevate mundane daily experiences (going on a run, turning thirty, adopting a rescue dog), or capture in language something that usually feels ineffable (an eating disorder, liminal queer intimacies, trauma of any kind).
Most of the essays in the book first appeared in literary magazines and journals like Water~Stone Review, so just a reminder to everyone to keep submitting. It matters, and it can lead to other opportunities later down the line.
There is a certain vulnerability in writing Creative Nonfiction. What attracts you to the genre?
I think readers tend to have more solidified expectations for fiction and poetry than they do for creative nonfiction. Those other categories have been around longer than creative nonfiction, which, in my opinion, is kind of a Trojan Horse of a genre. That starts with its name—people hear “creative nonfiction” and they think it’s a paradox. If it’s nonfiction, then how can it be creative? But that “contradiction” is exactly why creative nonfiction can be anything you want it to be. It takes what most people associate with the word “essay,” which is a piece of writing that argues for or against something, and it breaks it apart and then drops all the pieces outside where there are no boundaries or rules anymore.
In creative nonfiction, an essay can be an argument, but it can also be a prose poem, or a story, or a collage of scenes or dreams. It can hide in the form of a worksheet or an intake form or the footnotes. It can move around on the page in unexpected ways, and it can use erasure and white space and run-on sentences to make a point without actually making it, or to make a point and then un-make it, and it can jump and circle around something to force the reader to engage with the text on a different level than what they’re used to, to find a different way in.
I agree there’s a certain vulnerability in writing creative nonfiction, but I’m not sure it’s any more vulnerable than writing poetry or fiction. Across genres, writers put themselves in their work. Essayists need to be as rigorous about craft and technique as any other writer. Sure, I’m writing about “real life,” and I may be putting more of myself onto the page than a novelist, even someone who’s writing autofiction. But I’m still making decisions about exactly how to write it, what to leave in, what to leave out, what to layer on top of and underneath it, how to organize everything, what ideas and emotions and philosophies these “facts” and truths relate to, where I’m asking the reader to follow me and how far.
Creative nonfiction is vulnerable, but it’s not raw material. It’s not a diary entry. I think the best creative nonfiction is vulnerable and voice-y enough that it invites the reader in, but intentional and crafted enough that it also leaves space for the reader and the unknown experiences and ideas and wounds they might be bringing to the page.
What are the themes and topics you find yourself returning to in your own writing?
I was drawn to Quill because it’s an award specifically for queer writers. My work is inherently queer, and not just because I am queer and I write about queer themes and experiences. I think of queerness as a disruptive/disrupting force that is alive in more than just the literal content of a piece of writing. I’m often working in experimental prose forms and calling attention to the artifice of craft in an attempt to push back against the kind of narrative “truth” we believe we are owed when we’re reading genres like nonfiction and memoir.
As an editor, what draws you to a piece of writing? Is there a particular lens you read through? What makes a piece stand out?
I’m a sucker for a braided essay that contains several threads which maybe don’t seem all that related to each other on the surface, but which interrogate and complicate each other more deeply as you keep reading, and then the author drops you in an ending where it’s suddenly so clear why every single one of those threads was necessary to making the essay what it is (the classic example here is “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard, but I recently came across “Habibi” by MM Gindi and it knocked me over in the same way). Cascading variables, echoes, recurring image systems—all of that really makes my brain light up, when reading an essay almost feels like a puzzle you’re solving alongside the writer in real time (Jenny Boully is really good at echoes and image systems, unsurprising since she’s a poet at heart).
On that note, I love flash that feels like prose poetry (River Teeth’s Beautiful Things series has some really good examples, like this one by Jo Rzepiejewski), and I love anything collagey and nonlinear, and I LOVE a hermit crab or anything formally experimental, where the container of the essay is as important to what it’s saying and doing as its contents (“5 Variations on Submissions to the Texas Right to Life Heartbeat Act Anonymous Tip Form” by Coyote Shook is a great example, and so is this incredible series by Daniel Uncapher where every line is foraged from a work in the public domain).
What will you be looking for in the CNF submitted to Volume 29 of Water~Stone Review?
Dark humor, repetition, obsession, rhythm and momentum. Anything about embodiment, loss of all kinds, big irrational feelings alongside big rational ideas, mundane experiences that feel important for a reason only you can explain. Anything only you can explain! And break it up, break it apart. Don’t give it to me straight. I know a lot of people say that with essays you’re allowed to show AND tell, but I find that most of my favorite essays trust the reader to make up their own minds, and leave space for them to do so. Make us work a little bit. It’s scary to trust your reader, but I’ve found it’s usually worth the risk.
Current favorite books?
I try to read a book a week so I have a lot of favorites lately! Here are my top 10 so far this year:
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
- Not A River by Selva Almada
- Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga
- Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel
- Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior
- Mega Milk by Megan Milks
- Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson
- All Fours by Miranda July
- Three by Ann Quin
What writing project are you currently working on?
I have a few projects in the works, including a family memoir and a second essay collection, and I recently started a monthly Substack where I’m writing about the intersections of “creative nonfiction” with whatever thing I’m obsessed with lately (so far that’s included Love Island USA s8 and the new Phoebe Bridgers album). But the project I’m most excited about is one that has been eluding me for five years. It’s about the dissolution of a relationship between two gender-nonconforming people with eating disorder and addiction issues. I’ve rewritten it and rewritten it and rewritten it, pulled it into two separate projects and then braided it all back together again, added and subtracted and expanded. The current version contains nonfiction vignettes along with some fictional elements and poetry. I’m about to dive back into it after a bit of a hiatus, so we’ll see if it’s as done as I remember it being.
