Jess Wells

This is the third book you've written that is set in the Middle Ages. What do you find so interesting about that era?

The Medieval Period was a watershed time. The Age of Discovery was opening the Americas, trade was more global than ever before, the monarchy was giving way to mercantilism which grew into the middle class.

I personally don't care about the lives of royalty: their stories are overtold. Tradespeople and craft workers make interesting characters because we recognize the products they make, but the processes are very surprising and so, I hope, interesting to readers. The characters are enough like us for readers to identify with them but enough unlike us to surprise the reader as well.

There are also advantages as an author to writing about the Middle Ages: communication was very slow which makes it easier to work with characters who don't have access to information or each other at the speed with which we communicate. It took a long time to travel during that period; there was almost no postal system. It's a time that is less primitive than the early post-Roman era but less well trodden than the Elizabethan era.

What are some of the disadvantages of writing historical fiction?

Historical fiction based in the Middle Ages is going to be inaccurate on a number of levels. While women certainly had power and agency, the majority of them did not and it gets very boring writing about powerless women for the sake of accuracy. Having more than one comment from a man about the oddity of a powerful woman is just jarring to the story. The Medieval Period was also a violent time which is unpleasant to read about, as well as a time when people were very religious which I have no interest in. That means that you are writing about independent, non-religious women who are able to escape much of the endemic violence. You strive for accuracy in so many aspects of the work, but that core conceit is necessary.

  Read More 

So thrilled to be part of the podcast series run by Anita Kelly. Here we chat about historical fiction, my own love of research, feminist fiction and the writer's life. 

Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGdJHeHmJt8

In inventing the world in Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar, I wanted the names of the hometowns of women to recall the drudgery and limitations they left behind. Here's a map of the world surrounding Tartatenango:

• To the south, Montemadre: Mother's Mountain, and El Cuadrillo: the bolt or lock.
• Near Tartatenango: Caketown, is Escoba: broom and Hilado: yarn, as well as El Dolor: the pain
• also, La Ceiba Grande refers to a common tree in Colombia
• Villahermosa: Beautiful village
• the Magdelana River, the Cienaga Grande de Santa Marta marsh, and the Cienaga del Tigre are all actual places in Colombia

In fiction, people are driven by motivations that have to be carefully explained and that are required to make more logical sense than happens in reality. So, when you're writing magical realism, how do you introduce magic? In my new novel, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar, animals fit the bill. Without too many spoiler alerts, here are some of my favorite animals:

• Crows are harbingers of guilt and entrap a key character
• Insects descend on the village and carry away chicks
• Monkeys steal the wigs from brides and carry them like babies in the jungle
• Goats being driven to market won't leave Paloma's side, with dire consequences
• Ducks react to Paloma and stockpile eggs like the opposite of cannon balls.

There are many more examples and I hope you'll enjoy discovering them in Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar.

Though Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar is set in the jungles of Colombia, it's an intensely personal story of my actual life.

For example: I am a single-mother-by-choice and so have experienced firsthand the ridiculous stigma put on single mothers. I've been assaulted nine times in my life, though never raped, and so am part of the global community of assault survivors, like the women of Tartatenango. I live in California and have experienced firsthand the anxiety that's caused by drought and extreme weather. That's also why this book is set in Calexicobia: an entirely fictional place, but one in which my personal location – California – can be part of the story, not exclusively someone else's country. And the intense love between women, sexual or otherwise, is one of the cornerstones of my life as a bisexual and a radical feminist.

Here are some other key ideas from a recent "Interview with the Author": Read More 

My novel Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar has been inspired by the Colombian classic.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the finest books ever written, in my opinion. I have read it five times and the last time through, the relationships and positions of the women started to jump to the foreground. Here's where it took me, and how some of my new novel, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar, has been inspired by it:

Legitimacy's Paper and Cake

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (Gabo's) novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in the town of Macondo. Pilar Tennara, the saloon keeper, and Ursula, the matriarch of the Buendia family, were among the founders of the town. They had walked through the swamp together before insisting that Ursula's husband stop their wandering and settle. Ursula gave birth on the way, so I had always assumed that the two women grew close as a result.  Read More 

Recently occurred to me that...

A few great things about having nuns as characters in historical fiction is that:

• It can be assumed that they are better educated than their neighbors and so capable of more. They could be one of the few in the story who could read a manuscript or a secret ledger. They can read edicts for the village, putting them in a position of power, and letters for the individual so they are privy to information that others won't possess.
• They have been brought up to be leaders. They organize things and investigate/snoop/assist so there's an excuse for them being the center of attention, or one of the key powers in the story.
• Nuns have more of their own agency and freedom to move about the village and surrounding area which makes it easier for her to move through the story, unencumbered.  They visit the sick and isolated, and so can be a conduit for information or communication from afar.
• They are also protected by a level of sanctity that can lessen the chance of assault, because no one wants to write about that.
• Nuns are excused from the typical social or sexual obligations women face with men and so can co-exist with men in a story without coupling up.
• It is reasonable for a nun to be an orphan or a cast-off from her family, or at the very least 'stationed' away from her family, so you can get away with a truncated backstory. They have fewer resources to call upon (no father/brother/sister to come to the rescue) which can increase tension in the story and keep this character focused on/dependent upon the protagonist.
• Her room and lodging can also be extremely sparse so there doesn't have to be a lot of description of decoration and dressing.

So, I think nuns are very handy.  However, the downside is that  Read More 

I've been struggling with the process of letting go of a newly finished novel, surprised at the hole it has left behind. I loved the characters so much that I grieved when they left the stage, so to speak. Their departure was part of a perfect storm of 1) the Covid quarantine that kept me from my gal-pals; 2) my son moving to NYC; and 3) finishing the novel that had consumed so much of my thinking, and that, additionally, pointed out to me that most of my friends are imaginary. But working through it, I've come to believe in these stages in writing:

1. In the Glorious Zone: This is the beginning, when the imaginary world is dense and thrilling, the condition all writers wish they could live in all the time.
2. Intimate Relationships: when the characters make demands and reveal themselves in return.
3. Leaving and Returning to the Stage: the book seems finished, but characters keep coming back on stage and you are commanded by the characters and your own sense of duty to the craft to record what they're doing.
4. Grieving the End: celebration over the completion of the book but it soon feels like a wake, grieving for the loss of the imaginary friends your characters have become.
5. Facing the Void: so much in your life has been sacrificed for your art, which you have justified as 'it's not really important anyway' but now that the art has quieted, you have nothing left other than things that "aren't important." It's like the empty nest pheon. Additionally, filling the void is hampered by...
6. Honoring the Empty Well: you can't read other people's work and are too tired to start research on something else, not even to blog. The void is terrifying but it's what happens when you give it everything you've got.
7. Harnessing the Energy Somehow: taking on other projects or creative expressions to burn off the creative energy that's been building but won't take the shape of words.
8. Surviving the Disappointment: now you get to weather the process of taking your art to market.

#writersbetweenbooks #writinglife

I am seeking representation for my sixth book, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar, a novel of magical realism set in 1865 in the riverside shanty town of Tartatenango, known as Caketown to raucous miscreants and cast-off mothers, muleteers and forgers, drunken monks and bridesmaids, Romany and bastard children who flout the borders between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The mayor of the city on-the-right-side-of-the-tracks is bent on their destruction, but they are led by Jaguar Paloma, a woman with an ability to control weather and water, the fecundity of animals, and the blooming of flowers. She is co-founder with her estranged best friend, a shrouded woman of extraordinary but unseen beauty, Orietta Becerra. 

An entirely original work, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar is inspired by the cast-off women of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo who lived one hundred years of servitude.

If you can recommend a great agent, please post their name and number in comments. Thanks!

I'm convinced that solitude and silence are the first two ingredients in art. They're essential for getting into and staying in The Zone, that elusive flow where the words spill out and time spins away. So I asked 20 writers how they get there and how they return. Here's the secret sauce from five of them:

Trebor Healey

I get in that zone by having an empty day, free from obligations, or at least a few empty hours. It starts with coffee and reading the New York Times, but only a little...headlines, maybe two articles that make me feel my passion, so I curate what I read...and some carefully selected emotional music after that to open my heart if you will...usually '70s soul, like "Me and Mrs. Jones", something like that. Then I open up a story or two and go to work.

If I fall out of zone, a walk is always good...nature...sometimes a swim. The sauna afterwards will also get me inspired...something about the heat...then back to the desk, a few emo songs, and off I go.

Tinney Sue Heath

Regarding your first question, I wish I knew - I'm in between projects right now and current events are proving quite distracting.

Re: the second, when I am actively writing, I usually find that rereading the results of my last session or two is enough  Read More