Jacqueline Vogtman on A Mother’s Magic

by: Jacqueline Vogtman

In an episode of True Blood, a guilty-pleasure HBO show I watched religiously in my 20s, the vampire Bill Compton says something I always found profound (particularly for TV): “You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just because you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle…which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie.”

I’ve been writing magical realist short stories now for about 18 years, since my final year of undergrad, and all throughout my MFA program and beyond I’ve returned to magical realism and its sisters, fabulism and speculative fiction, though I’ve tried out other types of writing. For me, though, magic doesn’t conjure (get it?) wizards and Harry Potter, or witches or Tarot cards or vampires. I find magic in our real world, particularly our natural world, and yes, also in being a mother. 

When I was pregnant back in 2013-2014, I marveled at the miraculous changes in my body, that first kick, that first heartbeat, and the sheer fact that we created something—a whole being, soul included—out of nothing. (Well, I know it’s not really out of nothing; I wasn’t absent during sex-ed class.) And even after my daughter was born, the magic didn’t stop, and still hasn’t stopped eight years later. 

I was particularly fascinated by breast milk, how a newly-born infant will sometimes squirm its own way up a mother’s body to get at it, how the first drops of colostrum carry protective benefits, how the composition of breast milk will change over time to adapt to the baby’s age and health, how my body would let milk down at the mere thought of my child or her cry in another room. All of this is not to say breastfeeding wasn’t very hard—it was, let me tell you, and I almost didn’t make it through—and I know that some parents are not able to or choose not to breastfeed, and that does not make their nourishment of their children any less magical. But for me, the idea of breast milk was a profound mixture of science and magic, biology and spirituality.

For a long time after my daughter was born, I didn’t write. When I finally did, the first story I wrote featured the magic of breast milk (though this was capitalized on by the patriarchal-capitalist system in a near-future semi-dystopia). The story was titled “Girl Country,” and it became the title story of my first published book, coming out from Dzanc Books in May 2023. Many of the stories in my collection focus on mothers and children because I find magic every day in raising my daughter. From watching her grow taller overnight, to that first tooth that fell out and then miraculously grew back, to creating imaginary worlds with her toys, to exploring the budding plants in our backyard, to watching deer dance in a field, to that first word read and that first story and poem written: all of it is magic, and I hope she grows up knowing this too. 

Jacqueline Vogtman won the 2021 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, and her book Girl Country will be published by Dzanc Books in May 2023. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, and her fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Permafrost, The Literary Review, Third Coast, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey and resides in a small town surrounded by nature, which she explores with her husband, daughter, and dog. Find her on Instagram @jacquelinevogtman and online at jacquelinevogtman.com.

Madison Davis on Following Interesting Threads

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Madison Davis, author of The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead which is the winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I had a few! The Loved Ones first existed as a number of different projects. The real “idea” was to weave these disparate threads together into a non-traditional memoir. 

There is a section in the book that follows my research into the death of my great uncle who was killed in action in WWII. This storyline began with something like a “bolt of lightning” moment. I had always been fascinated by the story surrounding my great uncle, but I was driving one day—mind wandering in stop-and-go traffic—when I first thought has anyone in the family really looked into this? I realized that the story had been loosely filtered down from my grandmother in the form of scattered details and questions, but no one had tried in earnest to track down answers in the age of the internet. What followed was years of research culminating in a trip abroad to visit the place he died. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I tried a few different ways to weave the content together. There are a lot of moving pieces—names, places, dates, and familial relationships over generations—so I needed to find a structure that a reader could follow. Ultimately, I decided to dedicate a section of the book to each of the central figures. Then, after all my main characters had been defined and the details of their lives and deaths had been told, the final section revisits each through the lens of the funerals and physical remains. Once the reader is well-situated in the narrative, I found I could take more leaps in that last section, draw more connections. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

For the most part, my writing evolves on the page over many (many, many) iterations. There is rarely clarity in my mind before it’s on paper (and not for quite a while after that). I find a lot of enjoyment in editing the raw material. I love taking a piece apart and putting it back together in different ways until I see something new in it. Of course, there have been times that I believe something will work but it just falls apart on the page and requires total reimagining.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m always writing. Most of the little threads go nowhere. Other pieces combine into a project or grow into a whole piece of their own. At some point in my life, I began to see everything as writing material, for better or worse. I never know which seeds will grow, but I rarely experience a lack of ideas; a lack of time is the more common problem!

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I tend to have various projects percolating. I try very hard to follow my interest. If I’ve lost interest in a piece, it probably won’t become interesting if I force it. If there is something to it, I’ll find myself pulled back to it again down the road. It helps to have 2-3 projects in a rotation. If I’m stuck or struggling with one, I can pivot to another. 

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I write alongside my dog, Stevie. She’s an excellent writing partner. She reminds me to take walks every so often but is otherwise content to just snuggle up and listen to the typing. When I’m struggling to focus, I like to enlist a human writer friend to work near me. It’s great to feel the productive energy in the room for a specified amount of time (set a timer!) and then have a fun, rewarding break with a friend. 

Madison Davis is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. She is the author of the books Disaster (Timeless Infinite Light; Nightboat 2016) and The Loved Ones (Dzanc 2023).

Jacqueline Friedland on What Makes a Female Character “Strong”? Then v. Now

By: Jacqueline Friedland

If you are a regular reader of women’s fiction, you’ve probably heard the phrase “strong female character” thrown around with increasing frequency these days. Many of us are in favor of reading books that feature strong female leads, but most bookstore or library patrons don’t stop to consider what it actually means to be a “strong woman” within a story or elsewhere. Once we begin to examine this phrasing, it becomes apparent that as a society, our collective modern-day definition of a “strong woman” has evolved over time and is currently very different from what it once was. 

There have long been multiple definitions of “strength.” For starters, we must acknowledge the fact that strength can refer to superior physical prowess or to a hearty metaphorical backbone, meaning how someone behaves. Let’s start with the easy one: physical strength. Back in the day, (think Victorian times or even earlier), a woman could be considered strong for obvious reasons, like being able to carry multiple heavy buckets of water uphill from the well or heave large piles of laundered clothing along with herself while climbing a ladder up from a cellar. These domestic skills, as well as capability with tasks like sewing, laundering, cooking, and cleaning, were the ones that led a woman to be respected. Even better was if the woman had a body strong enough to birth multiple healthy children, providing her husband with offspring to help work the land or heirs to carry on the family legacy. These were the accomplishments that society applauded, and so a woman who could achieve them with ease was valued for her strength. Today, many women are still engaged in physical labor that requires great strength, but the activities which society values have changed. Now, if asked about females with physical strength, many people would look to professional athletes as the pinnacles of success. Where a useful and industrious homemaker would once have been considered a great asset, domestic work is less valued today than it was in centuries past. With more women working outside the home, new metrics are being used to evaluate female strength.

Long ago, a woman was admired if she had moral virtue, religious piety, modesty, and a strong work ethic. Most of all, self-sacrifice was the utmost commendable trait. Women were believed to be the moral touchstones and influencers for their families. Thanks to restrictive gender roles and pre-set expectations, there wasn’t much a woman could do to impact those around herself in ways that would be considered positive, other than keeping a tidy home, instructing her children in manners, and performing other wifely duties with grace and skill. 

Luckily, there were women who broke the mold, even during those restrictive eras long ago, and acted in ways that those of us with more modern sensibilities would consider to be deserving of the highest praise. We are all aware that women are conspicuously absent from the historical record. It’s not because they weren’t participating in the major events of their day. They just had to do it behind closed doors. Becoming involved in matters outside the domestic sphere required a level of creativity and bravery well beyond what most of us can imagine. 

One woman who challenged her times by participating in activist activities in the form of abolitionist endeavors, is Ann Phillips, who was an American hero born in the early 1800s. Physically, Ann was the opposite of strong. She suffered from a mysterious illness that was never diagnosed and which left her bedridden for days at a time. It is widely conjectured now that the condition she had was rheumatoid arthritis, but that autoimmune condition had not yet been discovered during Ann’s day. Because of her symptoms, poor Ann was often prevented from leaving her house for weeks on end. Even so, she managed to find ways to continue spreading the abolitionist message. Whether by writing speeches for her husband, the great orator Wendell Phillips, to deliver in public or by sending letters that helped create and solidify clandestine abolitionist plans, Ann did not give up. She was a pinnacle of what people in modern times would consider a “strong woman.” 

Now, in 2023, the definition of “strength” continues to evolve. We live in time where women no longer aspire to beauty and domestic bliss as the be-all-end-all. Women aspire to this amorphous concept of strength, which is now associated with resilience, empathy, vulnerability (all of which were qualities that Ann displayed in spades during the antebellum era). A person need only scroll through a social media site to see mothers wishing daughters happy birthday with messages like: “to my strong, resilient, brave, empathetic daughter.” This is vastly different from the wishes sent to women in greeting cards of generations past, that read: “to my beautiful daughter,” or “to the prettiest girl in town.” Similarly, when “influencers” first appeared on social media, advertisers tried to show us all the beautiful people as a way to convince us to buy whatever they were selling. Now, the advertisers have wised up, and they are showing us “real” people instead, people who look like us, women who aren’t wearing makeup, or who didn’t have time for a salon blowout before the photo shoot. We are moving away from images of perfection toward a more realistic approach because society has come to appreciate that a woman cannot be strong without being her authentic self. 

A strong woman seeks happiness actively. She challenges herself and those around her. Strength is no longer about heavy lifting or individual achievement so much as it is about collective empowerment. No longer is a strong woman the one who can make the floor shine brightest with her mop. It is the women who engage, create, resist, persist, and who lift the rest of us up along with them who are ultimately the strongest women of all.

Jacqueline Friedland is the USA Today best-selling and multi-award-winning author of He Gets That From Me, That's Not a Thing, and Trouble the Water. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Law School, she practiced briefly as a commercial litigator in Manhattan and taught Legal Writing and Lawyering Skills at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. She returned to school after not too long in the legal world, earning her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Jacqueline regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears as a guest lecturer. When not writing, she loves to exercise, watch movies with her family, listen to music, make lists, and dream about exotic vacations. She lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband, four children, and two very lovable dogs.