Mystery author Jessica Stilling is here to chat about her new literary fiction, Between Before and After.
Bio:
Jessica Stilling grew up In McHenry, Illinois, a small town nestle between endless cornfields and sprawling Wal-Mart Mini-Malls. Jessica Stilling is a feminist. She is Not a Capitalist. And She really has a thing for Vikings. Jessica would move to Iceland in a heartbeat if they would have. She moved to New York City to attend The New School University and stayed in said city for fifteen years. Stilling is a graduate of the City University of New York’s MFA program. She has worked at The Francis Goldin Literary Agency and the Global City Press, a small press out of City College. Stilling has taught Creative Writing at The State University of New York, City College, Queens College, The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and The New School. Her work has appeared in many publications including Ms. Magazine, Bust Magazine, The Writer Magazine, Wasifiri and The Warwick Review. She is the author of ten novels, five literary novels under the pen name Jessica Stilling and five young adult fantasy novels under the pen name JM Stephen. Her novels include The Weary God of Ancient Travelers, Betwixt and Between and The Beekeeper’s Daughter. She currently lives in rural Vermont with her two children, a dog, a cat, and something like 20 chickens, 7 of which are roosters.
Welcome, Jessica. Please tell us about your current release.
Between Before and After follows Indie film director Sebastian Foster, son of the famous author Regina Foster, as he embarks on a project to turn his mother’s award-winning novels into films. As he works on his third film in the project, a biographical novel that takes place in Paris and deals with the traumatic death of Sebastian’s five-year-old sister, the project and aspects of Sebastian’s personal and private life start to break down. Sebastian is confronted with a man from his past who holds the purse strings as far as funding for his films is concerned. He also learns that his mother has more secrets than he realized and as he dives deeper into this project, he learns that there was so much more to his sister’s tragic death than he realized. As the past starts to unravel before him, Sebastian must confront his issues with his mother and his desperate need to recreate a past that may not have been as idyllic as he remembered.
What inspired you to write this book?
I was sitting at the Orleans airport, ready to leave Paris, when the idea for this novel fell into my head. I had just brought my children, including my then five-year-old daughter, to Paris for the first time. She spent much of her time there chasing pigeons in city parks. My children fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the city again. And so, I started to think about a childhood spend in Paris and what it means to truly yearn for the past.
Excerpt from Between Before and After:
After a week in the city, where I spent my time engrossed in a book, or walking a couple of blocks around Saint Michel (I was terrified to venture further), my mother decided to visit her old friend, Pierre. “I don’t want to see that funny man,” Lucy said while I just shrugged.
“Oh, he’s not all that bad,” my mother said as we made our way out of the apartment and toward the Metro to La Marais. “Come on, I’ll buy you a balloon.”
The moment we entered the building where Pierre kept a pricy apartment in the 4th Arrondissement, I could tell that the money here was unnatural. The walls were polished until they shined, all the brass looked like gold, and leather and marble were the default state. This wasn’t the real world, but some sort of nether-space padded with off-shore investments and capital gains.
Once we reached the hallway Lucy ran ahead, her little feet pitter-pattering on the carpet as my mother called, “Wait up, honey, wait up.” The red balloon my mother had bought her on the way over angled after her as if it were trying to keep up. There were statues on pillars every few feet and mirrors with gold gilded frames. I flinched when my sister almost ran into one. “Lucy, come on,” my mother half-laughed as my little sister led us down the hall.
“This is a palace. I’m a princess,” Lucy proclaimed.
The 4th Arrondissement is nothing like the 6th, even if it is numerically close to it. This was an upscale neighborhood near the Eiffel Tower, though well out of the way of the tourist throng. The sidewalks were bigger here, and brighter, as if someone bleached them regularly. Posh little cafes with gold plaited script on their windows stood every few feet and up the block sat the home where Charles de Gaulle, famous general and celebrated president, once lived.
My mother stopped at apartment 18, one of only two apartments on the floor, knocking once before an older, gray-haired woman with a stern face answered. She wore a French maid’s uniform, but it was not sexy, just loose and black and white. “’Ello?” the woman said, and my mother smiled.
“Je suis ici pour vous Pierre,” she replied. I might have been self-conscious in this place, feeling the need to justify my presence by saying something like, ‘we’re old friends,’ but my mother offered none of that.
There was something about this place that scared me, though Lucy seemed right at home. Tension clenched my body as we looked at the immaculate hallway, the polished trinkets, and posh furniture. My mother had always lived close to the wealthy, but never right on top of them. There were many nights when she sat with a calculator trying to figure out how to pay Lucy’s nursery school tuition even when Philip was around to contribute. But we’d hung out in places as nice as this, or nearly so nice, before. She was used to faking it and she got us to go along.
Lucy ran to a long fainting couch, jumping up onto it. “I’m a princess!” she cried. “Mommy you’re a queen.”.
My mother looked over at her and laughed. She didn’t think for a second to scold her or tell Lucy not to fall dramatically onto other people’s antique couches. The French maid had already gone to get Pierre, one of my mother’s old friends from her days at the Sorbonne. They’d studied Art History together even though Pierre was destined to go into banking, just like his father before him and his father before him. “Pierre went through a three-year phase of being an interesting person before he sold out. That’s when I met him,” my mother had once told me. Apparently, this “interesting phase” included a brief stint of listening to punk rock and wanting to be a painter before falling in line at the family business.
What exciting story are you working on next?
I’m working on Book II of The Seidr Sagas, my young adult series that explores the lives of Viking witches. Book IV of my Hugo nominated young adult fantasy series, The Pan Chronicles will be coming out in February, it’s the conclusion of the series so it’s a bittersweet read. I’m also working on a literary novel called Beatrice and Persephone. This follows two women in different lifetimes, and it gets a little experimental. I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the characters embarks on a romantic relationship with the Ocean…yes THAT Ocean.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
The first time I truly felt like a writer was in the third grade, when I, and the rest of my grade, were writing stories for a program my school participated in called The Young Author’s Competition. Each student wrote a story, and it was judged by a large panel of people in and outside the school. I had done it in the second grade and nothing special happened then, but in the third grade I became truly inspired and wrote a story about a horse named Arabia who went on many adventures around the world. It wasn’t just that I became passionate about the story, it was that other kids started to like the story as well. They crowded around me as I wrote, they wanted to talk to me about the story and I loved talking about my writing. I was never a very popular kid, but I was for a couple of weeks, and after that, I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing. I still haven’t kicked the habit.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I have a day job, but I have time to write. I write for an hour in the morning and do about an hour of editing in the afternoon. I do a lot of writing, sometimes all day on the weekends. I used to write more, when I had more time, but this allows me tow work without getting burned out.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I walk the line between a planner and a pantser. I like to have a clear outline in my head, and I take it very seriously, but I also know that the writing is going to grow and change and the best thing to do is to let it happen. You don’t just write the story, you listen to the story and tell the story that the story wants, needs, you to tell. I believe these stories have their own lives and I’m only the conduit for them. Like Michelangelo believed that the statue was in the marble, and it was the sculpture’s job to release it from the marble, so the story is floating somewhere in the ether, and it is the writer’s job to find it, shave off all the excess, and tell it.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I remember in about the second grade I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Not because I liked the law, not because I thought lawyers made a lot of money and not even out of a sense of purpose or justice. I wanted to be a lawyer because I loved the clothes. I remember when I was in the second grade my mother brought me to the county courthouse in my small county to fight a speeding ticket. I had never seen a building so big, so fancy, so corporate and I liked it. Then, this woman rushed through the security line, put a very nice bag down and rushed out. I remember she was beautiful. She had long dark, early ‘90s hair and wore a black pencil skirt and white blouse. She looked so professional and so awesome. My mother said something about that woman being a lawyer and I thought…yeah, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. I want to look like that powerful woman who just ran through the security line like she just did not have time.
These days, I get annoyed when I have to wear anything other than wide leg pants to work.
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