Sep 5, 2024
Jeannine Ouellette’s lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. She is also the author of the picture book, Mama Moon. Her literary essays and short fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Masters Review, Calyx, and many others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a Millay Colony for the Arts fellow and past juror. Her bestselling Substack, Writing in the Dark, is a passionate creative community for people who “do language,” where writing is part of a deeper, vaster conversation about how attention, curiosity, playfulness, and surprise provide a portal to the profound on the path to becoming, because talking about “how to write better” without that larger context is kind of boring. Ouellette teaches writing at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the University of Minnesota, where she also facilitates narrative health writing workshops for healthcare professionals and the public. She is working on a novel.
In this episode:
Finding her way into literary writing later in life [4:15]
Creating art that blurs boundaries [7:20]
Making magic with metaphor and the language of nature [9:34]
Dealing with difficult childhood experiences through writing [9:51]
Traversing the intersection of fiction and memoir [8:18]
Using writing rules and constraints to build a world on the page [12:15]
The workshop that broke Jeannine wide open [15:50]
The risk of writing from the perspective of a child narrator [22:52]
Writing about motherhood and being in one’s body [27:22]
Jeannine’s story of the growth of her substack and advice for building a profitable digital newsletter [41:13]
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