What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Jordan E. Rosenfeld

writer and broadcaster

Jordan E. Rosenfeld (website) hosts Word by Word, Conversations with Writers on NPR-Affiliate KRCB radio in Rohnert Park, a suburb north of San Francisco. Her work appears or is forthcoming in: Writer's Digest, Spoiled Ink, Night Train Magazine, Opium, Flashquake, The Pedastal Magazine, InkPot, The St. Petersburg Times and more. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

I'm writing about people, the nature of being, fate and all the same stuff novelists have tackled for centuries, only I'm playing with possibilities, with known laws. What little I can say about the content is that it is exploring the relationship between humans, the unharnassed physical energy of the universe, and music. I'm about 100 pages into the first draft.

For lack of a generic term, I'd call it a literary novel of future speculation -- which is my way of avoiding the phrase "science-fiction" or "speculative fiction," the definitions of which all too easily call to mind aliens speaking Klingon, high tech gadgets and people named Xenon. Those genres are marginalized in the landscape of literature, a practice with which I disagree with as a rule. Reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlen, or the series by Phillip Pullman titled "His Dark Materials," I think, would shake anyone's prejudices against science fiction as a genre.

When I read Audrey Niffenegger's book "The Time Traveler's Wife," I felt I'd met a kindred spirit. Here was a love story that got away with invoking time travel, yet didn't seem clichéd and was considered literary.

 
What led you to this project?

Most of my novels have been a convergence of ideas and this one is no exception. I actually drafted the first four chapters of this novel over three years ago. At the time two things were affecting my writing. One, I had just seen a bunch of movies with female action heroes, all very poorly done -- like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider and Charlie's Angels -- and I felt a need to write about a powerful female "superhero" who was skilled in her innate abilities rather than by her fast cars or expensive toys, and who wasn't this buxom babe, but a normal woman on many levels. I was also bored with male heroes.

Second, I was working at a documentary film company as a proposal writer/researcher and was doing research on projects the CIA had begun back in the sixties on "remote viewing." Their object at the time was to develop psychic spies who could see what our enemies were up to. They had few results, and overall the program was unsuccessful.

Still, I thought, what if they had been successful? And what if they could have gone further, harnassing greater powers of the human brain -- those parts that we supposedly don't use? Thus my character Bella was born. She wakes up with almost complete amnesia and slowly discovers who she is/was, and what she is capable of -- something quite diabolical (I probably have Kafka to thank for the essential plot).

 
What are you trying to do with this project that you haven't done before? What challenges are you overcoming?

First and foremost I'm trying to please myself. You have to understand I've written four novels (two of which were rewritten so completely they became totally different books), and a bunch of "halfsies" in which I got about 150 pages in and stalled out. Of those four complete novels, two were agented but didn't sell (though I still feel a bit gypped, I admit, because my former agent sent them to fewer than 10 publishers before giving up); one is "the starter novel" that will never leave my desktop; and the most recent one is in the hands of a small publisher as I write this (fingers crossed!). And as yet another side note, I amused myself by noticing that three of my four novels have titles beginning with the letter "S."

I finally realized this year that I had to come back to emphasizing process over product, because the publishing industry can be wearying and ego-destroying. I write because I love to write, it's how I understand myself and the world, and seek meaning. For a while there, somewhere between the last rejection from a publisher and graduating with my MFA in creative writing, I started to get obsessed by ambition while at the same time feeling convinced I'd never succeed. It made me want to give up writing for awhile.

But, back to the novel I'm working on now, the new thing I'm doing is using circumstances that one can call fantastic to emphasize beliefs I have on the one hand about how we create reality, and on the other hand theories I want to explore. I am a child of former hippies, which means that rather than a foundation of Judeo-Christian religion, I got astrology/Eastern mysticism/psychic phenomena as my seedbed. I think it gave me freedom to be an amateur-theologian-quantum-physicist who uses fiction as an intuitive, non-scientific tool to test out my own hypotheses. Right now what interests me is nothing less than the very nature of existence. I've got everything I need in my "laboratory" and all experiments yield interesting results.

 
What has been rewarding about this particular project?

I feel very powerful and curious writing this project. I take my character into situations I personally will never have the chance to encounter in my life. For instance, Bella can interact with matter, both inanimate and animate. She can hurt/heal/move and manipulate matter -- though it takes her a long time to learn to control her power -- when she listens to music (there will be good reasons for this). The goal for her is ultimately to become her own instrument, so to speak.

I love how I can make anything happen! I can play with the very fabric of time and reality. How great is that?

 
How do you balance work on your book and your radio work?

I think balance is the life-long issue of any artist. How do you fit in time for the thing you love, while doing the things that bring money? First, you have a lot of odd jobs (for me, massage therapist, vitamin buyer for a local health food store, outreach coordinator). I've actually been successfully self-employed as freelance writer/editor for a little over a year now. In this year I've had a lot more freedom to play with my schedule than ever before in my life, though it probably requires more discipline than when I had day jobs. Balancing my radio show, which is only twice monthly, was a lot harder a year or so ago when I had a 30 hour-a-week job, freelanced, wrote fiction, was doing a Master's program and produced my radio show. I had no free time. I rose at 5:30 a.m. to write fiction -- either for myself or for my grad program -- I went to work from nine until about four, then worked on freelance projects for a couple hours. Fridays were my radio days.

Now my life is much more fluid, and I can thank that tough schedule for it. I still rise early to write fiction first, then move to whatever work projects I have to do, and then depending on how soon the next show is, get busy reading and researching the author. But honestly if I spent too much time thinking about what I allocate to the radio vs. my own writing, it would drive me batty. For me, balance as an artist involves seeing all parts of my day as important. I can't allow myself to squander time, but this also means changing my definition of what is "squander-able" time. I have to factor in time to prepare meals and exercise too, or else my body falls apart. So I have to see those activities as part of writing, if that makes sense. The actual writing of fiction takes place in a two-hour window each morning, and sometimes more on the weekends if I allow myself not to work on the "money" projects.

The radio show has been an amazing venture for me; I get to regularly pick the brains of my favorite authors, find out that they had as many starts, stops and pitfalls as I've had, and that there's no reason to ever give up. Occasionally I've had an interview in which we discussed an old subject, say the nature of creativity, in such a meaningful way that it changed how I thought about the subject (my interview with Aimee Bender was particularly memorable of late). There's nothing more stimulating to me than discuss literature -- analyzing it, or creating it, and my radio show has given me ample opportunity to do so.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what happens next?

It looks like I'm about to move to a fairly rural location where I envision having more focused time to write. I'm guessing I'll have a draft done in six months or less. Depending on how it shapes up, and what happens with my other book, I hope it becomes something I can publish, but right now I'm content to write it for me.

Links

Short story The Nub in SmokeLong Quarterly

Short story Self-Defense in Void Magazine

Feature on Jordan and her radio broadcast Word by Word in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Word by Word show archives and blog with program notes. You can listen to the show streamed live on the internet or by podcast.

Read more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 15 Jan 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco