Interview with Jacqueline Vogtman, On Fiction, Fellowship & Girl Country No. 22.1

White square with black lettering over an autumn background. The black lettering reads "Fiction, Fellow and Girl Country" followed by "An interview with Jacqueline Vogtman"

Interviewed by Elly Salah & Jamie Manias 

Picture of Jacqueline Vogtman in nature

Jacqueline (she/her) was interviewed for an hour in the early afternoon on September 26th, 2024. This interview occurred in East Hall at Bowling Green State University, just a few hours before Jacqueline read at Prout Chapel for our reading series. We were thrilled to sit down with Vogtman and talk behind the scenes of life as a writer. This interview is split into two parts; the second part will be posted next week.

Jacqueline Vogtman received the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, awarded earlier this year, 2024. Jacqueline graduated from BGSU’s MFA program in 2010. She currently teaches composition at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. Vogtman’s short story collection, Girl Country, won the 2021 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and was published by Dzanc Books in May 2023. Vogtman’s book Girl Country is available for purchase with the following link:  https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/girl-country

Interviewer: 

You were recently in the woods as part of your fellowship. Could you tell us a little bit more about that experience? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I used some of my fellowship funds to book a cabin in the woods for a week as a DIY writing retreat. I went alone, with my dog, to this nice, little cabin. What was really amazing was returning to a solitude that I hadn’t experienced in so long. I normally dedicate so much time to being a mother, caring for family, and my students. The silence and the solitude were really refreshing, and they helped me have headspace to think through my novel and begin working on it.  

The first part of my writing process is on paper: brainstorms, scribbles, mapping things out. I did some of that, and then I was able to begin actually writing. I did a decent amount while there. Being out in nature is inspiring to me. I took a lot of walks while there. I find walking to be meditative and a good way to let ideas flow. The combination of solitude, silence, and just being surrounded by nature helped me get started on this novel.

Interviewer: 

Has it always been your natural inclination to go to secluded spaces or natural spaces when you’re in the writing process? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Absolutely! For me, it’s helpful to have a private space to write; I’ve never been one to do my best work in a crowded coffee shop. I find so much inspiration in nature, being surrounded by woods, or being in the countryside, even in a suburban backyard visited by birds and deer. These are things that help my creative process.

Interviewer: 

Can you tell us more about the moment you realized that you had a collection of short stories that would eventually be Girl Country? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I can’t recall an exact moment—but after writing several of the stories, I realized that they were all fitting together thematically and that my short story “Girl Country” was kind of the thematic thread holding them together. From there, I was writing new stories with these themes in mind—that they’d all somehow have something to do with girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, the body, nature, magic, and finding light in the darkness.  

Interviewer: 

Is nature integral to your writing? How do you not go crazy being alone in the woods for so long?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I’m definitely inspired by nature. I feel like I am at home in the woods. I have more of a fertile imagination when I’m out there. I know some people thrive in a city but that doesn’t do it for me. It was nice being alone in the woods because I constantly have stuff to do: teaching, mothering. I like stepping away from all that to be alone in silence. Silence makes me the opposite of crazy. Silence gave me clarity for the first time in a long time. 

Interviewer: 

I can see how that would be a relief. How do you feel about being back at BGSU? We read in one recent interview that your cohort had great rapport. 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yes! It feels surreal being here. On the one hand, everything looks the same. On the other, things feel different. It’s all such a long time ago but feels like yesterday. I would say some of the best years of my life were at BGSU.

I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but when I came here and met everyone, I felt like I was finally meeting my people. When I was growing up, I felt like a bit of a weirdo. Probably a lot of writers do, so getting to the MFA and meeting people who are on the same wavelength and interested in the same things was eye opening. I finally found myself. 

Interviewer: 

That’s awesome. Do you keep in touch with your cohort? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah, I made some great relationships. Now, we’re all sort of scattered around the country. It’s nice because we still have those connections. This past summer, a few of us had a mini workshop via Zoom because we’re all in different parts of the country. It was so nice to reconnect. I felt like I lost my writing community after leaving the MFA. 

Interviewer: 

We are scared to graduate! Thank you for the wise words. So you live in New Jersey now. How did you go about making a literary community where you are?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

The sad and short answer is I haven’t really. I find a lot of inspiration in non-writing communities and through my kid. She’s a kid, you know? Kids are imaginative. For my own adult writing community, I don’t really have one aside from sporadic mini workshops with my old BG friends. I don’t want to sell myself short though. I advise a creative writing club on campus where I teach. Obviously, the club is more focused on students, but it still gives me a sense of being a part of that world. 

I was also the editor of this literary journal called the Kelsey Review that has been running for a really long time. We focus specifically on the county. It’s not a national literary journal; it’s for people in Mercer County, NJ to submit their work. I felt lucky when I got the job as Editor-in-Chief. That’s another writing community I was a part of. It was really nice to see work from the community.

Interviewer: 

So you were the Editor-in-Chief of the Kelsey Review, you aren’t anymore? Do you still have a role on the masthead? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yeah, I recently handed it over. I’m no longer the editor. Some of my colleagues took over. I was the Editor-in-Chief for nine years. That was nice. But at this point, my main involvement is helping the new editors transition into their roles. 

Interviewer:  

How did you make that decision to give it up?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It was difficult. On one hand, it was such a nice part of my job that was a refreshing break from grading research papers. It was also very time-consuming, and there was a lot of red tape, working with the administration on money things. I don’t have a head for money. I don’t want to. I don’t want anything to do with money.

Running the Kelsey Review took a lot of time and headspace. At times, it became stressful. That all played a part in my decision to move on. I also wanted to step away from helping others publish, so I could focus on my own work. After publishing Girl Country, I am working on a novel now. I want to focus on that now. 

Interviewer:   

When you were in the MFA, was your thesis a short story collection? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Yes. I worked on short stories. Actually, three of the short stories from thesis ended up in the book. I wrote a whole thesis here. At the time, I was happy with it. When I left Bowling Green, I tried submitting the manuscript to a few places.

I wasn’t very aggressive about it. It wasn’t picked up. As time went on, I was not super happy with it. I basically put the whole project aside for a long time. Years later, I sat down and wrote a few, new stories that are in the book. One day, I realized that I have a collection here. I looked back at my thesis; some of my short stories fit into the new collection. It was a matter of taking those three old stories and somehow fitting them into the collection.

Interviewer: 

Did you ever consider taking your thesis in a novel direction? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Not really. I didn’t feel ready to write a novel. It’s such a different beast than a short story collection. I didn’t feel ready, and I wasn’t that interested at the time.

Interviewer: 

What changed to make you feel that you’re ready to write a novel? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

I finished this project of short stories, Girl Country. I figured I’d written all the short stories that I wanted to write. Sure, I still have ideas jotted down for a few new ones. But I’m not as interested in writing them right now. I want to try something new, the novel. I’ve had these thoughts of a novel for so long. Maybe there’s some maturity that’s happened like I can handle it now. Back then, the novel felt like a beast. 

Interviewer: 

Is the novel not a beast now? 

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It still is just not as big of a beast. I think it will always be a beast. With a novel, it’s so big. There is more structure, more to plot out. In general, there’s lots of pieces to put together with the novel. And that was the most challenging part.  

Interviewer: 

Have you heard the hypothetical: would you rather fight like ten horses, or thirty duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck? Would you say that is accurate to short stories versus a novel?  

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

Oh, I haven’t heard of that. It’s an interesting hypothetical to be sure. Short stories are more of a fight with a bunch of duck-sized horses, while novels are more of a fight with a horse-sized duck. A huge duck is one solid thing. So that feels right.

Short stories feel more manageable. Arranging the collection was putting pieces where I wanted them. Right now, I’m still in the thick of the novel, and there are lots of pieces. I’m trying to figure out how to create and mold the huge duck.

Interviewer 

That’s awesome. It’s interesting how a writer’s voice changes over time. I’m at the stage now where I’ll look back at my previous writing and not like what I was writing a few months ago. Does that stage end?

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

You mean that feeling where you’ll look back on something you wrote like six months ago and go “Oh that’s such utter shit?” 

Interviewer 

Haha. Yes.

Jacqueline Vogtman: 

It has changed a little for me. There’s always going to be shitty first drafts. It’s always going to be messy in the beginning. I think what I write now, like even the stories that I wrote for this collection, a lot of them came not fully formed. Obviously, there had to be a lot of revision, but I didn’t look back on them six months later and think “Oh god that’s so awful I’m so ashamed I don’t want to show this to anyone.” That does change. As you navigate this steep growth curve, it sort of levels out. Again, the first things you write are going to be messy for the most part, and once in a while, you’ll get a gem that just comes out and it’s like “oh my god I wrote this almost perfect thing and I don’t even have to do much to it”. That’s very very rare, but it might happen.

Interviewer 

Thank you for your time.

The final part of this interview will be posted on Wednesday, 11/21/2024.

Winter Wheat 2024: Registration is Open

Image of snow on wheat in the forest. This is promotional material for Winter Wheat writing festival.

The 2024 Winter Wheat Festival of Writing is open for registration! You can register for free by filling out the form on our website here.

Winter Wheat is a writing festival organized by Mid-American Review that features generative writing workshops, open mic night events, and a book fair on Saturday. This year’s festival will take place November 7-9th, in the Education Building at Bowling Green State University. The festival is completely free to register and attend and provides an excellent opportunity to connect with submitters and readers.

We have an amazing lineup of workshops in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and beyond that you can check out at our website. We hope to see you there!

Why We Chose It: “The Unbearable” by Brianna Barnes No. 11

American suburbs from a drone or bird's eye view

By Jane Wageman

Photo Caption: “Drone view of similar houses, driveways, and yards in the Utah suburbs.” by Blake Wheeler, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “The Unbearable” by Brianna Barnes for publication in Volume XLIII, Number 1, forthcoming.

Life has become increasingly unbearable for Judy, the protagonist of Brianna Barnes’ story—but reading about her existential crisis is anything but.  

Our staff loved the psychological complexity of Judy’s character, whose actions are often nonsensical—and yet make perfect sense within the framework of her own skewed logic.  

Judy is on a first-name basis with the agents at Poison Control, which she regularly calls while drunk to inquire about the effects of consuming certain toxins. She trolls the website FriendlyNeighborhood.com, posting under the pseudonym Carl Rogers and trying to get a rise out of the neighbors whom she lives alongside but rarely speaks to. She acts with certainty—even as she continually questions her relation to the world around her. 

The story begins in the aftermath of a forest fire, which has forced a bear into the surrounding suburbs. Judy, encountering her neighbors’ comments about this online, finds herself intentionally stoking their concerns about the animal. As she reacts to the bear-sightings, the story delves into her thoughts on consciousness and her place in an indifferent world. Walking through the trees’ charred remains in the opening scene, Judy notes: “The fact that. . . she was fully surrounded by a resplendent and unrepeatable beauty did not mean she was being loved by the forest or by nature or by some capital ‘G’ God; she was just as unloved as ever within a beauty which preceded her and did not need her, a wilderness, after all.” 

“The Unbearable” has a lonely, haunting quality in such scenes—but they are set alongside moments of sharp, critical humor that left many of us laughing to ourselves as we read. Ironic and funny portrayals of suburbia are sprinkled throughout the story: the particular smells and patrons of an organic grocery store, conversations between neighbors about recycling protocols in an online forum, and a description of Judy’s home, Pleasant Meadows, as “a suburb with profound rural pretenses, hyperbolic nature street names, and paranoid inhabitants.” 

As the story follows Judy’s growing sense of her own “nonsubjecthood,” it builds to an ending that feels both surprising and inevitable—one that you certainly won’t forget.  

Craft Corner: Art in Conversation with Itself: On Bob Dylan, T.C. Cannon and Joy Harjo No. 6

By Nathan Fako

Photo Caption: All the Tired Horses in the Sun by T. C. Cannon (painted between 1971-1972)

two horses (one red, one blue) are standing on a green prairie under a n abstract yellow background with white blobs which mimics a very bright sky with clouds

T. C. Cannon Fair Use

In 1970, Bob Dylan released Self Portrait, his tenth studio album. It was met with poor reviews and disdain from fans, the long history of which is well-documented online. Curiously, Dylan made a choice that alienated fans, whether intentional or not. The opening track, “All the Tired Horses,” does not feature vocals from Dylan at all. Where had the dynamo gone? Where was the “Rolling Stone,” the Dylan of “Corrina, Corrina,” the young man “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What did he mean, foregrounding a voice, a choir of voices, that didn’t belong to him? 

Around the time Dylan’s song was released, a young Kiowa-Caddo man named Tommy Cannon–popularly known as T.C. Cannon–returned from the Vietnam War and painted two horses under an ochre sky. One red horse, one blue. He named the piece All the Tired Horses in the Sun. Cannon tragically died eight years later, just a few months before his big opening show at the Aberbach Gallery in New York. While his life was short, Cannon was a prolific artist, known as both a painter and a poet. Was his painting a response to Dylan’s song? Inspired by it, surely, but carrying the message forward somehow? Transforming it? 

Finally, in 2018, a year before being named United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo was commissioned to write a piece for a book about Cannon. She wrote “All the Tired Horses in the Sun.” The piece has to do with Harjo’s Mvskoke identity and issues faced by Indigenous communities; perhaps, the piece has something to do with not just Cannon’s painting, but Dylan’s as well. 

Artists respond to the world around them; the world is filled with artists. How do we make sense of intertextual connections like those presented here? I don’t have an answer. We engage with art, think about it, are moved by it, and in some cases, make art in response. We keep our minds open. One avenue of entry that often proves to be interesting, if even as basic exploration, is the use of one work to frame another work. This is sometimes called a lens. So let’s use the Harjo poem as a lens for viewing the Cannon painting, and then listening to the Dylan song. 

First: Harjo. 

The poem begins with “Forever.” Harjo creates a landscape with anaphora and end-stopped lines. Readers have the sense of a weary propulsion. A tired procession of family, “my cousin. Auntie. Uncle. / Another cousin.” The poem opens in the center, and the subject is complexified. Up to this point, we are given context through the title, made to think of family members like horses in the sun, and then: “Vending machines and pop. / Chips, candy, and not enough clean water.” So we are handed food insecurity. Harjo’s choices are very intentional. The harshness of the end-stopped lines, the word choices having to do with junk food, and the absence of enough clean water paint a picture of a landscape that is difficult; it is hot, dry, “waiting and tired.” The final line of the poem is a call to action: “Go water the horses.” We the readers have the ability to positively impact our communities.  

Applied to the Cannon painting, Harjo’s poem provides the figures with further meaning. The two animal shapes are so close to one another that they touch. The blue from the horse’s coat is echoed in the lighter-toned saddle of the red horse. Their heads are down, likely to indicate that they are grazing. This is a family, pressed down under the weight of a sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas, a hot ochre with marshmallow clouds. The saddles indicate these are working animals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to link a working horse conceptually to the grim reality of Indigenous dispossession in our American history. So we have the sense of hot work, with one’s family, in an open landscape with no space for shelter.  

To my eye, the Dylan song–stay with me, I know it’s odd to go backward–ties the three works together. Making a lens of the poem makes the song quite simple, and in my opinion, poignant. There are only two lines of lyric in the song: 

“All the tired horses in the sun, / how’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.” 

If we apply the connotative landscape we have built by working backward, we have a picture of the horses in our minds. They are family members, moving through life under a hot sun, without enough clean water. Our families are working, the sun can be oppressive, and there is not enough. There is never enough. How can an artist–existing in a political landscape like the one inhabited by Dylan and Cannon in the 70s, the one Harjo has inhabited throughout her long career–rationalize the act of making art? How do you unpack the choice to be creative when there are so many practical problems in the world that need fixing? And how do you grapple with becoming a symbol–as Dylan was–for something you may not want to stand for?  

Simple: you focus on what you have to. You make the art. There’s no sense in hand-wringing.  

You go water the horses. 

Why We Chose It: “The Retch” by Colten Dom

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “The Retch” by Colten Dom for publication in Volume XLII, Number 2.

“The Retch” is one of those stories that contains seemingly incompatible subjects: on the literal level, it is about dog vomit; on a thematic level, it delves into marriage, family, nostalgia. One of the pleasures of the story lies in this unexpected pairing, the way in which the surface conflict of the story subtly explores the underlying conflicts of the protagonist, Queenie, through a balance of pathos and humor. What starts as a fairly ordinary occurrence (the family dog, Bee, eating something she shouldn’t and throwing up on the carpet) quickly escalates into the absurd, as Bee begins regurgitating objects she couldn’t possibly have eaten. First, it’s items from the owners’ childhoods, then unnaturally large objects (“a golf club or an intact model ship”), and eventually orbs that resemble fish eggs “warm to the touch, with the texture of a flayed grape and the smell of a leather armchair gone rancid in the rain.” 

As evident in the above description, Dom’s language is striking, with attention to sensory details that make even the impossible feel physically real. The opening paragraph is rich in sensory details packed into rhythmic sentences: “There are hooks made of sound: the slap of sex, the generic jingle of the nightly news or the cacophony of your husband sneezing. There are pop song sippets of adolescence, guitar licks that drag you back to high school. And jaunty radio realty commercials, dropping through time to mom and dad and the typical divorce, leaving your childhood toys behind to guard the leaky attic where they became toothpicks for a family of raccoons.” The poetic syntax, alongside the story’s absurdity, renders the familiar conflicts of domestic life unfamiliar and therefore new.

The story as a whole is built around pattern—Bee vomiting increasingly unbelievable things—but continually moves in directions the reader could not anticipate. George Saunders, writing about David Barthelme’s “The School,” describes this kind of structure as a series of “gas-stations” that propel the reader forward. While advancing the pattern, the writer “fling[s] us forward via a series of surprises; each new pattern-element is. . . introduced in a way we don’t expect, or with an embellishment that delights us” (177). The patterns and surprises of “The Retch” accelerate the story forward in unexpected, but nonetheless fitting, directions. The ending, in which Bee vomits a web that slowly forms into a house, provokes questions about Queenie’s relationship to the domestic sphere and her family, particularly things she has kept inside herself that ultimately must come out, however messy and unpleasant that might be.

––Jane Wageman, Mid-American Review

Note from the editors: This essay contains a quote from “The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School'” from The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2007, pp. 175-185.