REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Spring 2024

Volume 19, Issue 1

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/spring_2024/kolosov.htm




JACQUELINE KOLOSOV

 

 

Conversations with Creative Writers: 

            Five Questions          

 

Born in Chicago, Jacqueline Kolosov spent the first thirty years of life in and around big northern cities, only to find herself in arid, windswept West Texas at the start of the twenty-first century. Thanks to her daughter, she soon fell in love with horses and the open expanse of a country defined by sky. A member of the creative writing faculty at Texas Tech University, she has published three collections of poetry including the ekphrastically-driven Modigliani's Muse. A fourth, Talons, Wings, is forthcoming from Salmon in 2025. Also an essayist and a practitioner of hybrid forms, her collection of lyric essays Motherhood, and the Places Between was selected by W. Ralph Eubanks for Stillhouse Press's annual prize. She has published several YA/crossover novels including two set in Elizabethan England: The Red Queen's Daughter and A Sweet Disorder (Hyperion/Disney). Jacqueline co-edited three anthologies of contemporary writing including Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Investigation of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres, 2015 Winner of Foreword's IndieFab Award for Nonfiction. She has been awarded a Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts along with residencies at the Banff Centre and an artist's house in Amagansett. Active in the field of Art in Community Health, she is an ad hoc cook, lifelong yogi, and passionate horsewoman. She can usually be found out in the elements with horses and her dog. 

We talked to Jacqueline about her story collection Exit, Pursued by a Bear (Hollywood Books International, 2024).


You chose Paul Bond's "On the Transmigration of Souls" for your cover art. Why did you think that artwork would be the perfect fit for your story collection?

The titular story, "Exit, Pursued by a Bear," takes its title from a wild and wonderful stage direction from Shakespeare's late romance, The Winter's Tale, a stage direction that happens to be incredibly difficult to stage. In Act III of the play, the king, wrongly believing his queen to have been unfaithful, banishes their baby girl, and charges his courtier to abandon her in a lonely place. Well, the sycophantic courtier attempts to do just that, and in the process "he exits, pursued by a bear." The bear – and the shipwreck that leads to the courtier abandoning the infant – is utterly bizarre and seems to come out of nowhere. Yes, this is a VERY roundabout way of approaching a direct question, but please bear with me. I love the stage direction, and I love the play because it is a romance, and in the late romances – unlike the tragedies, an element of magic reverses an otherwise terrible outcome. Let's just say that the courtier disappears (almost certainly having been eaten by the bear), but the baby is rescued, raised, grows up, and ultimately returns to Court, and so fulfills a prophecy whereby the kingdom is redeemed. Rather like a fairy tale, but not quite.

Paul Bond's painting, "On the Transmigration of Souls," is quite simply full of the energy that I find in Shakespeare's stage direction and in the magical energy of The Winter's Tale. What is tragedy is amended by "the art that doth mend nature, change it rather, and yet the art itself is nature," words that run through the title story. Of course, bears don't figure in the painting. Instead, we find deer – a buck and a doe – and a woman who is partly curled into herself. She seems to be falling or drifting – buoyed somehow or protected—through a body of water that is simultaneously sky. She wears only a semi-sheer white sheath, and a buck's antlers are tucked into the back of her sheath. Behind her is a bare tree, and she is surrounded or flanked or possibly guided – I like to believe that she is guided – by westward flying birds that seem to be a hybrid between a lark and a sparrow. The painting possesses immense, transformational energy – at least the potential for that – and it strongly suggests story.  

It's the scene that captivated me from the start, but the title speaks to the collection as a whole given that each character is on a kind of spiritual journey. Each character makes discoveries and, more often than not, the most powerful discovery involves the self – and yes, I would say, the soul, or the life force that emanates all beings. A profound shift takes place, not necessarily and most often not one that yields any kind of closure. Rather, there is a discovery.  


What is your favorite story in this collection?         

This is an immensely difficult question, though I am the kind of person – and teacher – who frequently asks people to name the three books or writers that they would take with them to an isolated place for a long period of time. So, I'm going to have to say "Solstice in the Jardin du Luxembourg," which is the earliest story in the collection, and it is one I wrote and revised over the course of two weeks – a huge rarity and likely a gift – in June 2006 after returning from Paris to definitively learn that I was more than two months pregnant. My daughter’s father and I had been in Paris as well as in Brittany working on individual writing projects prior to this confirmed discovery. Throughout this period, I found myself continually beckoned by the Luxembourg Gardens which occupy twenty-three hectares of public park and house the palace built by the seventeenth-century Marie de Medici. Beyond the palace is a pool where children sail toy boats and the occasional duck paddles through the shallow water. Statues of notable women from French history are surrounded by gardens. Strong women. Talismans of sorts. There is, of course, a playground, and several days a week a string of ponies enters and exits through one of the quieter gates, which has been gilded with gold. The Luxembourg is an enchanted place, and I have found immense inspiration there. On the night of the Solstice, our last night in Paris, we were in the gardens, and my daughter's father and I knew – though I'd not yet seen a doctor – that we would have a child. 

So, after returning to the States, I wrote the story, drawing upon Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" as a model. As in Woolf's story, the narrative moves or alights within several characters' consciousnesses. In "Solstice in the Jardin du Luxembourg" each of the characters is female, and each one's life – at this point – is focused on children, motherhood, or caregiving. With the exception of one woman, Kate, a painter who's set up her easel in the gardens on the longest day of the year. Each woman is navigating a challenge that is a significant life decision. Susan's daughter is a patient in a nearby hospital, and she will almost certainly not recover. Coquelicot is nanny to two small and very privileged children, both of whom she's devoted to, though Coquelicot's real dream is to open a bakery, a dream that has been sabotaged by her mother's death and her father’s remarriage. Amelie, who now works at an upscale Parisian boutique, is in the garden to speak to her mother, who is the keeper of one of the public toilets, about her brother who has been arrested on drug charges. Amelie is also pregnant, but she has no intention of telling the father that she is carrying their child. 

The story moves very organically from one consciousness to the other, and again I have to return to Woolf who has been a huge influence on my writing. In her autobiographical To the Lighthouse, the novel, she wrote, she said, to lay her mother's memory to rest, a painter – Lily Briscoe – is charged with "the composition" one might say – of seeing as well as of composition. And I see Kate, the American painter in my own story, in a similar role. Like Lily Briscoe, Kate herself is immensely invested in the questions the other women are asking or at least in the desire or lack thereof to bring another person into this life.


In workshop, we encourage writers to "say something true about what it means to be human." What truth or truths do you touch on in this short fiction? What do you hope readers take away or learn? 

Oh my goodness, this is another challenging question. I'm going to take "workshop" as my cue here, as I teach creative writing in several genres, and inevitably I am privileged or entrusted with portals into the writers' inner lives, which often if not inevitably speak to the challenges they face or have faced, as well as the obsessions or "truths" that they are continually holding up to the light and writing their way around or through and making discoveries that they – as well as anyone who writes – must recreate as discoveries for the reader. Often, the writers are very hard on themselves or at least on the writing even though each of us who writes learns that writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, and what we learn in writing and re-envisioning and then revising we often learn again in new ways in the next story or poem or essay, about craft, yes, absolutely, but also about the obsession – or "truth" – that preoccupies us.

The truth or truths in this collection center on intimate relationships whether they are between lovers, parents and children, friends, and sometimes even those chance encounters that transform our lives in ways we could not have imagined. My truth, then, is that life is a journey, and it's going to bring forth experiences that we may not always believe we can bear or find the way back into the light. In the title story, a forty-something widower and Shakespeare professor named Pete is still grieving the violent death of his wife who was killed in a random shooting. An older student in his class enables him to see or at least reach for the light beyond an inconceivable and yet increasingly common loss. And this student, Agnes, is herself searching, and her engagements with Peter, basically conversations in office hours, enable her to continue to move through challenges of her own.  

My truth, then, is to stay the course even when it's difficult, whether the difficulty is sudden and tragic, or more mundane or at least distant – because our experiences, our histories, our memories continue to shape us. And this truth involves compassion towards others as well as towards ourselves. Just because I love the lines so very much, I'll illustrate and close with words from Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here": "Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table." 

"Our poor falling-down selves" and the need to "put ourselves back together once again" at the kitchen table – or in a community – howsoever large or small – speaks to the truth I hope this collection imparts.


You've been writing from Texas for some time now. How has Texas influenced your creative writing?

Place has always played a central role in my writing, and Texas is the size of many countries. It is also radically different from the Chicago area where I grew up, attended college, and later completed my Masters at the University of Chicago. After that, I lived in New York City and later in Princeton, New Jersey, before spending nearly four years teaching at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. 

So, about place, and specifically West Texas, also known as the Llano Estacado. This landscape is semi-arid and all about the sky – at least the sky is an ever-present focus and a force. We're on the high plains, and there are very few native trees, though the neighborhoods in Lubbock where I live all possess live oaks, pecans, maples, and even the out-of-place magnolias that really require a great deal of humidity. During my time here, I have hiked in the canyons and wandered around the playa lakes that arise after heavy rains. In the process, I have tuned into the increasingly fragile ecosystems of this region. A good deal of my writing, then, particularly my poetry and nonfiction, is attuned to the wildlife here, particularly the varieties of birds – more birds migrate through Texas than through any other state in the US. I've also watched – and at times tried to act against – the destruction of habitat as more and more houses are built and, along with them, roads, many of them six to eight lanes wide. Prairie dogs and the burrowing owls that cohabit with them are in ever-increasing jeopardy, and the builders and the forces of progress and growth seem to always win. My writing frequently wrestles with this problem, as titles like "Bulldozing West Texas" suggest.

Animals and other living creatures have been central in grounding me in this place. One of the stories in the collection, "Strays," begins with a bereaved Paul finding a stray cat in a garbage can, a stray cat that he brings home, only to realize that she is pregnant, and within weeks, his home is burgeoning with kittens. And soon another kind of stray, an adolescent boy, takes up residence with Paul. Stray cats – or feral cats – are endemic in Lubbock, and there are more stray dogs – or abandoned dogs – than I can possibly explain, which has a great deal to do with the lax legislation and regulations that protect against animal abuse, including irresponsible breeding. Many people don't spay or neuter their animals, so the shelters are frequently deluged. 

More affirmatively, during the last eleven years, my daughter, Sophie, now seventeen, has been passionate about horses, which are not a mainstream part of the culture here, though they are much more present than in the more urban northern cities and towns in which I've lived. Sophie began riding at age six and within three months of her riding journey, I, too, fell in love with horses and soon that way of life, for horses are truly a way of life and not a "hobby" or a sport. They opened up, enveloped, and consumed me. Through connecting with horses then, within this place, I've come to experience and often judge as well as appreciate life through their eyes. "Intention," one of the pivotal stories in the collection, introduces the power of horses in the main character's life. They are a source of empowerment and renewal for a woman whose fiancι has left her and whose mentor, an artist, is in a care facility and suffers from Alzheimer's. 

Horses wander in and out of my poetry, and much of my nonfiction collection, "Motherhood, and the Places Between," centers on the healing as well as the transformative power of horses. Yes, sure, there have been horses in all of the other places I've lived – except for New York City though you can find boarding stables there. But to reiterate: horses have enabled me to connect more deeply to West Texas and to appreciate the geography – and particularly the sky – from their backs or while walking beside them, which I often do. 

Lastly, for I could go on and on, national and global politics are increasingly fraught as well as disturbing given the aggressively invasive legislation as well as the sanctioned violence. The politics in Texas speak to some of the most charged issues we are facing, and here I'd foreground the ban on abortion as well as the restrictive laws regarding transitioning. In terms of the environment, the careless and truly negligent approach to the environment and to ecosystems appalls and enrages me. Inevitably, then, these issues, experienced as a resident of Texas, impact my writing as well as my life. 


You work in multiple genres – YA, poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and so on – what's next? 

I rarely work on exclusively one project at a time. So "what's next" is probably "what's in the works." In the spring and summer of 2023, I undertook intensive research as well as field work – or travel – as part of my interest in the life of a Polish Jewish woman who ferried information in and out of Nazi-occupied Poland after 1939 and ultimately became involved in the SOE founded by Winston Churchill. I drafted about 100 pages of that novel during that same period, drawn in part to the story because of my parents', particularly my father's family's, experiences during World War II as well as the preceding wars. The project is waiting for me to return to it, and waiting, largely, because I realize now that the story I'm most invested in writing centers on the aftermath of the war during the early 1950s when this woman, who was incredibly courageous and immensely valued by her colleagues, found herself living in pretty dire circumstances in England, aware that the country she loved – Poland – the country she fought in order to restore to it a hard-won freedom, was gone. Instead of focusing on the adventures, then, though they will figure in the novel, my starting point is the disillusioned woman who has seen and experienced far too much including the deaths of her mother and her brother, the latter having fought for the Resistance. 

Additionally, I started a sequence of short-form nonfiction under the provisional title "Away." And I continue to work on poems. My fourth collection, Talons, Wings, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2025. Given my passion for the visual arts – I'd love to go back and get an MFA in painting though I'll probably just take courses and continue self-study – I continue to undertake work in ekphrastic writing, and I'd like to write a collection centered on artists and their dogs or cats. Michelangelo's Pomeranian, for example, a much larger dog than we know today, sat on a velvet cushion while he painted the Sistine Chapel. The possibilities there are enthralling. 

Meanwhile and last, I'm exploring the possibilities of integrating text and image on the page, as I’m deeply drawn to multi-media incorporating collage and a range of other techniques. Where my skill set needs to improve, and a goal I have for the near future, is in learning the Adobe programs that center on image. 


Readers interested in the short story collection Exit, Pursued by a Bear can read the press release here and buy the book here.



  

 

 

 


 

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