Interview with Jessie Jayne Smith
by Kelley Pounds
January 29, 2008
Today I have an interview with my longtime friend and fellow writer, Janine
Donoho, whose first book is out and published under the pseudonym Jessie
Jayne Smith. Janine and I met in New Orleans back in 1991 when she was the
co-coordinator of the RWA National Conference, and I was an attendee who had my
conference fee covered by doing calligraphy name tents for all the speakers.
We’ve been great friends ever since as we’ve shared the ups and downs of the
writing life and have tried to keep each other sane in the process.
Welcome!
Great picture, by the way. Très chic! Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit
about yourself and about your first published book, Wildfire.
 I live in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington state, which feels a lot like
coming home to my original stomping grounds of high desert Nevada. In both
places, wild fires proved to be forces of nature every bit as devastating as
tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and the like. Thus, the realities of wild fire
have resided within me since my early childhood. Since I’ve always written, the
richness of wild fire metaphors have grown with me.
WILDFIRE was the last of my three contemporary women’s fiction
novels. I finished it in the early 1990s, had some marketing success, then set
it aside when I began writing contemporary and high fantasy stories. When I
again revisited the story in 2000, it tied for first place in Stella Cameron’s
Pacific Northwest Writers’ Contest.
WILDFIRE explores the fictional community of Potshot, Nevada, in the
high Sierra Nevada Mountains due for a devastating hundred-year fire. Pitted
against each other are Thea MacTavish, a single mother of a teenaged son, and
Bramden Youngwolf Hayes, a scientist using his grant to fireproof the town.
Tensions flare when arson fires threaten Potshot and wild fires ignite both
internal and external landscapes.
You’ve had some of your short stories published, but
this is your first novel contract. Tell us about the day when you found out
Wildfire was going to be published by
CMP Publishing.
 In the summer of 2007,
CMP Publishing picked up WILDFIRE. I wish I could tell you the day
this occurred, but it came in phases with the publisher first letting me know
how much she enjoyed the proposal. Then I sent the full manuscript and later
learned that each person in the editorial cycle felt the same. Any writers who
have journeyed into the Black Hole of submitting work will understand what I’m
describing. The oh-my-goodness, this-is-really-happening moment arrived when I
actually viewed the completed cover with ISBN and all the trimmings. Helium had
nothing on me!
The name on the cover of your book is Jessie
Jayne Smith. What is the reason you chose to use a pseudonym for this book,
and does this name have any particular significance to you?
I weighed the use of a pseudonym, because the entire range of a writer’s
stories comprise her full work. However, I want my readers to know what they’re
buying—in this case, a literary contemporary women’s fiction novel. Since my
contemporary fantasy has first dibs on ‘Janine M. Donoho’ and my high fantasy
will be published under ‘J. M. Donoho’, I wanted to distinguish between very
different styles of writing. How often have you picked up a book by a favored
author only to find out it is not what you wanted to read after all? Say a
Barbara Hambly, who writes both fantasy and historical fiction. For me, that can
prove a big disappointment. However, many other authors successfully use
pseudonyms and I decided to do so. Jessie Jayne Smith comes to me
honestly and gives a respectful nod to my dad, Jesse Bushyhead Smith, a
one-legged Korean War vet from Oklahoma who knew something about plain-speaking
and making the best of what life deals you.
Looking back on your life, can you recall the moment
you decided you wanted to write? Were there any incidents or books that helped
form this decision/choice?
I’m one of those geeks who has always written stories. This includes
angst-ridden poetry in my teens. Then my college prep high school, where I was a
scholarship student, produced one of my plays. Since then, I’ve been a writer of
engineering text and tests along with a biologist columnist in a daily. I’ve
learned that short stories and essays give nearly instant gratification, but
many of my stories come to me as potential novels, which is where I put most of
my writing time. Besides, writing helps channel those voices in my head in
socially acceptable ways that have nothing to do with drug therapy.
The bookmobile saved my life. Yes, I was the weedy little girl teetering from
foot-to-foot as the box-on-wheels barreled down our primitive roads in a cloud
of alkaline dust. ‘Voracious reader’ doesn’t even begin to describe my reading
habits. Most novels I gulp down as fast and as carelessly as a non-nutritional
snack. Horse stories, myths, fables and legends started me on the journey, but I
read across lines. Then I stumbled across books that deserve a slower descent
and more leisurely pace: Alice Hoffman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Anne Quindlen and
Patricia McKillip have proven perennial favorites. However, the watershed books
of my youth fall to two writers. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern
series hooked my pre-adolescent mind on fantasy and the joys of world building,
while Sergeanne Golon’s Angelique series fired up my youthful hormonal
system and took me around the world for love. Yes, I’ve read uncounted numbers
of beautifully written, lofty novels considered classics, but these were the
ones that carried me into their worlds and helped me to see possibilities for my
own stories.
Wildfire is
definitely not the first book you’ve written, so based on your experience as a
longtime writer, how do you think what you’ve done in your life, as far as
careers and jobs are concerned, has fed into the writer you’ve become?
My science majors in college taught me how to play the game of what if
in a disciplined way. My early career as a technical writer forced me to weigh
each word for clarity and connotation versus denotation. When I wrote scientific
papers, I found that lyricism has its place in nonfiction, too. As a columnist,
I learned to play with my bent humor and still get the point across. Yes, even
those death spirals when life goes off center have fed into my writing, for how
else do you compare the great joys in life but to the times of cold ashes? You
come out the other side with more empathy along with a hardheaded view on
pulling up the proverbial bootstraps. I’ve written through both murky and
bright. The variations show in my work and deepen the final product.
How do the stories you want to tell come to you and
how do they evolve? Do they emerge from personal experiences, from the things
you read or see on a daily basis, from research, or from characters who just
come to you? If it’s all of the above, which would you say is the strongest
influence?
As the strongest influence, dreams often inform story. More recently, that
process has become known as lucid dreaming. I also gravitate toward the quirky
as I read a multitude of science mags and news sources. For instance, a
throwaway paragraph in the hometown paper about Harley Davison riders gathering
teddy bears for needy children went into my copious files…and the sense I gained
from that story surfaced as an incident in my contemporary fantasy novel,
Calling Down the Wind. Rambling walks in primitive areas with my hounds
clear my mind and allow my subconscious free rein, too. Of course, I enjoy the
research aspect—remember, I’m a geek. From the beginning, it never occurred to
me to use direct corollaries between real time life and friends in my stories.
Where’s the fun in that? Rather I prefer building entire worlds, including the
anthropological digging into the crux, then sifting for the story’s core—that
‘one true thing’ for me.
What have you found are the distinctive themes that
you seem to explore most often in your stories, and what do you think the
genesis of those themes are?
I’ve played with a multitude of themes, but the one I return to explore has
been what it is to be the outcast, the scapegoat, the outsider, the unknown.
Hasn’t everyone experienced this? Then, I’ve done the what-ifs to come up with
how this character or that group of characters assemble their own tribe, while
another set sinks into the pond scum, never to surface again.
Every story has a part of me in it—how could it not? How much the ensuing
themes come from growing up in rural communities with a mother who married and
divorced multiple times—who can say? I have close blood relatives who deal—or
don’t deal effectively—with addiction, too. My occasionally rampant habit you
ask? Comfort foods that include copious quantities of ice cream and dark
chocolate. Since I’ve primarily worked in male dominated fields, the girl/boy
dichotomy never worked for me either. Or perhaps my theme choices issue from
being a big-brained, blonde female with bodacious mammaries…in those
male-dominated fields. LOL
Do you think finding that theme or those themes has
led to the development of your unique voice as a writer?
It may seem strange, but I often don’t see the theme clearly until I’m well
into my novel or even finished. Most interesting to me is that my subconscious
totally gets it and hums along without conscious thought. Then, when I go back
and edit, one of the edits I do is to clarify theme in order to strengthen the
storyline. I don’t like to get too on-the-nose, but metaphors and similes can be
fun.
Since your interests are so wide-ranging in that you
also write short stories, high fantasy novels, and magical realism a la Alice
Hoffman, which of these subgenres would you say you most gravitate toward as a
storyteller and why?
Ever since my introduction into physics, I’ve been enthralled with chaos
theory and the vastness of assorted universes. We humans try to see everything,
then distill the hugeness into components that work for our finite brains. Thus,
when I write contemporary and high fantasy, I get to explore the vastness we
glimpse out of the corners of our eyes—like fractals. You know the pattern is
there, but perhaps it’s too big to grasp in entirety. With my high fantasy, my
passion for anthropology ignites in world building. Taboos become paramount,
including the cultural and biological basis for them. Fiction has to have
structure, after all.
In contemporary fantasy, when I write about a grieving mother who finds a
child on the shore after a storm, then takes the child into her heart and home,
that child becomes a lost Selkie whose father will do anything to recover his
daughter. We all know how tough the transition can be from child to young adult,
but why not mix into the hormonal brew a storm of genetic otherness, that also
springs into being during the hormonal surges. What about those homeless
Rastafarians? They look a lot like what we call ‘angels’.
When you are in the midst of writing a story, what
is a typical writing day like, and how has this schedule or practice changed
over time?
Before my husband retired, I wrote early in the morning until mid-afternoon,
losing myself in the process. Now, it’s more of a start-and-stop attempt to get
into that zone. Yes, I’ve snatched a few hairs from my head and burnt my sweet
guy’s ears with writerly wrath—I’m not bragging, only confessing. However, I’m
beginning the first draft of another novel and hope that within the week I’ll be
in the zone again. I’ve found physically closing the door helps immensely, even
when I have to open it for the scratching greyhound puppy, love-starved cat (her
words, not mine) or two curious whippet hounds. That and a pot of tea with my
daily square of extremely dark chocolate keep me on track. Rigorous daily
exercise keeps the blood flowing and allows me to enjoy my chocolate habit, too.
Do you have any parting advice to writers who may be
struggling with the negative emotions that go along with rejection?
Use the responses as part of the learning curve, then eat moderate amounts of dark
chocolate and keep writing. When you receive a positive-negative response,
follow-up immediately. I have three fat files of ‘thanks, but no thanks’—one for
novels, one for short stories and one for essays. When I’m feeling maudlin, I
take them out and realize how positive many of the earliest ones were. Not the
‘dear sir or madam’ ones, of course. Those should be consigned to the black hole
from which they came.
Thanks so much for letting me ask you so many
questions, Janine. I’ve certainly enjoyed your responses. Even though we’ve been
friends for years, I even feel like I’ve learned a few things I didn’t know, and
that has been great fun. Last but not least, remind us where we can buy
Wildfire.
WILDFIRE by Jessie Jayne Smith, is available from
Amazon.com and Borders,
in bookstores local to
eastern central Washington state, and at local libraries, if patrons request it.
Reprinted with permission from
Kelley Pounds of Kell’s Creations
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