Before becoming a full-time writer, Jackie worked as a management consultant in the Bay Area with her husband, who worked in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world. She received her MBA from UC Berkeley. Her exciting career, fuel Jackie’s novels and essays, as does her travel and exposure to foreign cultures. She is currently living in New York City with her husband. Riding High in April is her fourth novel.
Welcome Author Jackie Townsend
Thank you for being a part of my meet the author series! I enjoyed reading Riding High in April, a fast paced and meticulous read. Could you tell us a little more about yourself like what made you choose to become a writer and author?
Thank you so much, Alison, for having me as a guest on your blog. Meticulous it is!! Not like my other three novels, but when the calling comes, I’m not going to fight it. And calling this story did, from somewhere deep inside, going back to my consulting roots. My first career, where a lot of my stories stem from, those that accompanied me on my journey here, to this strange place and time of being a writer, dare I say some form of maturity in my craft, and it goes like this:
I wrote some terrible poetry as a child. For my mother, a searcher, and for my father, a big teddy bear of a man stuffed with a deep-seeded unhappiness. It took me a long time to come to writing as a career, a long, fraught road, but the words, even in their crudest form, before all the editing, have always soothed the melancholia when it comes, something I’ve felt since before feeling began. And yet I didn’t start writing seriously until I was in my thirties, after quitting my management consulting career, and even then, it was long road to considering myself a writer, let alone an author.
At what point do you allow yourself to let writing be the thing that defines you? At what point do you consider the three novels you have published—to limited success, depending on your version of success—and now this fourth one, take precedent over your MBA and the salary that came with it? Internal change is slow, a metamorphosis. It took ten years of writing before I started believing in myself as a writer. The moment eclipsed not long after my third novel sold a descent amount of copies but still left me, personally, in debt. My husband’s company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and I polished up my management consulting resume and sent it to the HR department at my old firm. It was a blind query, submitted to their online HR system, and they summarily rejected me. I know throwing your resume into a slush pile is not how you get a job, but still, I was mortified. I never told anyone. I simply kept writing. The crossover had already occurred without me knowing it. Writing was what defined me now. There was no going back.
What do you do when you are not writing?
I think about writing, and why I’m not writing. Whether I should be writing, whether I am contributing to the world with my writing. I walk the streets of Manhattan, where I live near the Flatiron building. Down Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park and then back up University past the Strand Book Store. I stare at all those books on the tables wondering why mine isn’t among them, but knowing, now, that it’s okay. There is the work, and there will always be the work. Then I’ll slip out of the store and onto 12th Street, where there is the tiniest movie theatre next to the Gotham Bar and Grill. I love being one of three people in a twelve-person theatre watching an old black and white, preferably Bergman.
Could you tell us something about you that people don’t know?
I’m kind of an open book. It’s all right there in my writing, everything you need to know about me. Or in my blog. I tend to spill my guts. I guess If I had to answer the question, I’d say the thing you might not know about me is that all you have to do is ask me and I’ll tell you. Intimacy is the only way I can connect with people anymore, and this doesn’t always come in the form of words. It can also be a moment, an exchange between me and another person, a stranger, someone walking across the street. Eye contact. When something passes through and between us.
Inspiration for writing Riding High in April
Your story brought me back to my hometown in Singapore and the Asia Pacific Region where I have fond memories. For me it felt like you encouraged the idea of following your dreams. You must travel a lot. How did you come up with the ideas for Riding High in April?
Yes, I have had the great privilege of a lot of foreign travel, the result of being married to a foreign national, but also from some deep calling within myself. Whether in search of escape, love, meaning, or redemption, my characters tend to cross seas to find it. Displacement is part of my psyche, and thus a theme in all my writing. To lose oneself in another language, culture, and geography, is to open oneself up to not only great possibility but great vulnerability, and, as Goethe said, it is difficult to walk away from that experience unaltered.
But in my new novel I’ve taken displacement to a deeper level, from dislocation to a place called virtualization. A techie term that I’ve come to learn being married to a techie. “That which makes real what is not.”
For twenty years now I’ve watched from the sidelines my husband continue the tech pursuit, working in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world before starting and running his own tech company. At one point, he had a number of large clients in Asia, and I often followed him to these places—lest I go without seeing him for months. I was on my own during the days while he and his teams holed up in various windowless conference rooms. But in the evenings, I might join them, and I got to meet a lot of these techie guys, and gals, of all different nationalities and backgrounds. I got to know what they were about, the kind of people they were. Coders, programmers, system engineers and architects. People like you and me and everyone we know, they care about what they’re building, making. They do it because there is nothing else, they can do. —Meanwhile, back in Silicon Valley, there seem to exist only unicorns, evangelists, Elon Musks and the press focusing on the few but not the many. I wanted to write the un-Silicon-Valley story, a story about all the guys—and those few gals—out there fighting to keep the nuts and bolts of technology churning, growing, changing, and evolving. Under-the-radar guys, and those few gals, working from all corners of the world, dedicated day in and day out making technology work. There is no Silicon Valley cover story about these guys.
How much research did you put into the setting for your novel?
I can’t write about a place unless I’ve wandered through its back alleys, breathed in its tepid air, and tangled with its sordid people. I also love wandering around alone, typing a destination into my GPS and setting out with little expectation. Never do I find myself somewhere expected, my original destination, or what I thought was that destination, lost somewhere along the way. Not to be cliché, but the destination ends up being the journey itself. Miles and miles, it might take me to get there, my feet will be aching and my back breaking, and then my battery will go dead (or my husband will text me) and I’ll turn around and make the journey back.
What message do you want to share or pass onto readers?
This is how I want to leave my reader feeling, altered, as if they’ve been transported even though they haven’t left their bedroom. I want the feeling to stay with them long after they’ve put the book down, just as a journey lives on long after you’ve returned home. The moments keep coming back to you—the scooter zooming past, that uncomfortable rickshaw ride, the fish moving on your plate, and indecipherable sounds, the sense of isolation and aloneness amongst such beauty and wonder. Foreignness isn’t just about being overseas, it’s a metaphor for our daily lives. A physical connection is now virtual. If I want to connect with another human, I no longer walk or ride the subway to their apartment, I open my laptop and click on Zoom. If I want to network for job purposes, I don’t go to a cocktail reception, I turn on my social media app and enter a virtual chat room. I have become an emulation of the physical version of myself. Who are we any longer? Or that person sitting on the other side of our Zoom call? Who hasn’t ever had the sense that that person wasn’t speaking to you in a different language? That being in a relationship with them was like crossing a border into a foreign country.
What scene or memory brought you joy with writing?
There are many, but I’ll mention the scene in the Shimbashi Train Station, a major interchange railway station in Tokyo, in which the female protagonist gets lost after skipping out of a tech conference she’d been interloping. I myself had had a rather transformative experience in that station, happening to find myself there during rush hour, to buy a Starbucks no less. I was able to grab a rare empty seat at a balcony above the fray, where I sat dumbfounded for some time staring down at the cavernous hall. Hundreds and hundreds of commuters, dark suits and cases, all headed in one direction. And they just kept coming. And coming. I felt out of body. All those people headed off to work, like you and me and everyone we know does at one point or another in their lives. Work. My novel is, in part, a discourse on work. The privilege of work. Living to work. Working to live. Working to eat. Working to escape. The drudgery of work. Working so that one day you won’t have to work. Working because striving is the only thing you know how to do. To the far reaches of the earth you will go to find this work.
Then, what happens when you don’t work. When the work goes away? The work you love, in the hands of automation software, cheap foreign labor, millennials, men. The work that has betrayed you. The work you left, and are constantly thinking of going back to.
I knew the visual of this scene would make it into one of my novels someday. Here is that day.
What’s next for Jackie Townsend
Could you share a little more on what you plan for your next step in this journey? Is there another book you are writing?
According to the writing legends, it’s taboo to talk about what you’re working on next. But what the hell, life if short, and knowing me this novel will become five different versions of itself until it won’t resemble any version of this whatsoever, something that starts this:
An American woman is visiting her Italian mother-in-law in Italy. Their relationship is troubled, but then something happens unrelated to any of their monotonous and beleaguered miscommunications—an elderly woman shows up at the door. She lives in the crumbling old villa up the hill and has come to spending her days comatose in an easy chair, incapacitated, and under the care of her ever more reclusive, hoarder husband, or so the town whispers go. No one sees her anymore. Until this very moment when she knocks frantically on the mother-in-law’s door, not looking so comatose at all.
What advice would you give anyone wanting to become a writer?
Listen closely to your reader while you’re writing. In another life, I worked for start-ups in Silicon Valley. Why most start-ups fail? You have a brilliant tech engineer who spends years and lots of his own, not to mention his friends’ and family’s money, creating a product only to find out that there’s no market for it. Or that the market for it is not what she thought it was. Often what we create is a reflection of ourselves. We write with ourselves as the reader, not our reader as our reader, which has been a big take-away for me on my journey as a writer, learning to write beyond my own reflection, with my reader in mind.
Build your stamina people, get out of your comfort zone, this is a long game.
Connect with Jackie Townsend
Readers, Denise would love to hear from you. You can connect with her here.
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