Interview with National Bestselling Author: Joshilyn Jackson

As you know, I am all about "each one, help one" - this is what makes the world go 'round and this is something that is needed in the writing community. A few months back I reached out to Joshilyn and she happily obliged and now I am very happily returning the favor. Her latest novel: Backseat Saints will be released on June 8th, but already she has received 19 glowing reviews on Amazon.com!

Can you talk a little about the significance of your title and how you came up with it?

Backseat Saints begins when a gypsy tells Rose May Lolley that her beautiful, abusive husband is going to kill her...unless she kills him first. Rose is a minor character from my first novel, gods in Alabama, but I wouldn’t call this book a sequel. It is a companion book that runs on the same timeline. I wanted to the title to reflect that connection, so I used the word saints to hark back to the word god.

There are all kinds of Saints in this book---literal and figurative. The Saint Cecilias are a rescue group that helps women escape abusive marriages. Rose May’s friend, Mrs. Fancy is one of those every day saints who bless us with muffins and love and who we often undervalue. Rose is catholic, like Flannery O’Connor. In the rural south, this makes you an outsider, and so I wanted the title to speak to that. And as a Catholic, she prays to the proper saints depending on her circumstances. Another character, Mirabelle, practices a sort of hybrid New Age voodoo Catholicism, where Saints are used to invoke magic.
Also, to be honest, I just like the word combo. Backseat Saints----it sounds like the right kind of dirty for this book.

Thousands of women find themselves in situations much like your main character in 'Backseat Saints.' What led to your decision to focus on the important issue of domestic violence?

Honestly? I didn’t. Books, for me, come from characters and voices. I didn’t decide to write about an issue. I felt compelled to write about Rose Mae, and I knew Rose’s history from gods in Alabama. I knew that like many real women in this situation, she had been raised thinking, “This is what men are like, this is what marriage looks like.” So in order to write about her, I had to deal with Rose’s long standing and extremely self-destructive love affair with violence. I was, quite frankly, intimidated by the subject matter, but I loved her too much to back away. She was so compelling to me. We see a few flashbacks of her as young girl in my first novel, wafting about, bruised and lost, and yet somehow, when she appears ten years later, she has become God’s dirtiest messenger angel. She’s fierce, funny, pointy, and relentless. I wondered how she had managed to emerge from her own history with so much self and so much will and so much damnable, unbreakable hope. I wanted to live in her shoes and imagine her life and let her speak. I wanted to find the story behind the transformation we see but don’t understand in gods in Alabama. I am always, always, as a writer, interested in people who change---in people who try to live the end results of seeking redemption.

You blog, too, over at Faster Than Kudzu. Why do you blog and does it feed you or take energy from you? Is there a downside?

I love blogging because it gets my “writing brain” revved up and going, and because it’s fun. I don’t revise or craft the way I do with novels. It’s purely off the cuff. Also, it lets me connect with readers in a really personal, almost illicit way.

I’m a “reader response” girl; I think a novel is a conversation between a book itself and an individual reader. Whether or not a particular book speaks to a reader depends as much on what the reader brings to the conversation as it does on the book itself. That’s why books that leave us cold at one age can blow our minds ten years later, even though the book is static. The reader is the only moving part, and if reading is a conversation, then it is one where the author of the book has no place. The blog changes that dynamic in some ways----I can have conversations with people who have met my imaginary friends and who will gossip with me about them.

As D.H. Lawrence said, “Trust the art, not the artist,” and he’s dead right. So this contact with readers can feel a little naughty. Like eavesdropping on a conversation that interests me fiercely but is truly none of my business. There’s a downside to being so available sometimes. I’ve had some runs with The Big Crazy; there’s a woman in Florida who thinks to this day I know where her missing husband’s body is hidden because of one of my plot twists. Yikes. But this is the exception, not the rule.

New York Times Bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson lives in Georgia with her husband, their two children, and way too many feckless animals. Her debut, gods in Alabama, won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Jackson won Georgia Author of the Year for her second novel, Between, Georgia, which also a #1 BookSense pick, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to receive #1 status in back to back years. Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, was a Break Out book at Target and has been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. All three books were chosen for the Books-A-Million Book Club. 

Bernice L. McFadden