Interview with a Vampire

Annelise Jolley

Once upon a time a literary agent friend of mine decided to stop doing literary agenting and do something else, a move not all that uncommon in that specific world or in the plain old regular world too. People change. One of the things that happens in the wake of such a change is that agent’s clients have to find new representation. Annelise Jolley was a client of my once-upon-a-time literary agent friend, a client whose writing intrigued and impressed me. So we had a conversation or two, Annelise and I, and now I’m honored to be working with her.

Although Annelise does create content, so to speak, and is an influencer in certain circles (her family immediately comes to mind), she is at heart a writer’s writer—which is the kind of writer you both love and hate, love for being wowed by their craft and hate because, well, you’re honestly a bit jealous of their gift. Yes, hate’s a strong word, but you hopefully catch my drift.

Here are her bio lines: Annelise Jolley is an essayist and journalist who is incurably curious about the world. She writes often about motherhood, ecology, place, and Christian spirituality. She’s written for National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Christian Century, Sojourners, Inkwell, Literary Mama, and Brevity. Her work has won a James Beard Award, a Dart Award, and an Overseas Press Club award. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing.

Annelise is a runner, a reader, a rusty Spanish speaker, and a general enthusiast. She lives in San Diego with her family. You can also find her here and there.

Alright, Annelise, what are you reading right now, and how is it challenging or confronting you? (And this would encompass that expansive reading vampires do which means sucking from many necks—books, movies, music, art, etc.)

How I love this question; it’s such a particular pleasure to rummage through the file drawers in my brain and pluck out the right poem (voila!) or book recommendation to share with someone. If we were talking in person we could probably head off for hours down this conversational road. But I’ll hold back and give you just a few.

I recently read two of Louise Erdrich’s books side-by-side. The first was a dystopian novel called Future Home of the Living God. The protagonist is a pregnant 26-year-old living in a world where evolution has reversed and wombs are now government property. The second was The Blue Jay’s Dance, Erdrich’s memoir about early motherhood and her life as a writer. I loved noticing echoes of each book in the other and watching one writer’s mind work across subjects and genres. The co-reading added resonance and depth, and it’s something I want to try more often. Lousie Erdrich, man! One of the writer-mothers whose work most flattens me, in the best way.

The novel I’ve wanted to talk about most this year is North Woods by Daniel Mason. It’s received a lot of attention, I think with good reason. Is it a ghost story? An epic, multi-generational narrative? A story about place and the relentless continuation of nature? Yes, yes, yes. Spooky, sublime, and often funny, North Woods is one of the more unusual and absorbing novels I’ve read in years.

And then there are certain poems that I’m always returning to. I love dipping into the strange and simple language of Lucille Clifton’s work as well as the poetry of black-belt sinner Mary Karr. This poem by Joy Katz has been a favorite for many years. “I was given a mud hut. The walls curved to meet the ceiling like a tongue curves to make a word.” I can’t tell you what it’s about, only that it makes my body hum in recognition.

As for what else is confronting me, here’s a moment worth mentioning. A few weeks back, I stumbled into an exhibit of Russian icons. “Stumble” is the right word; I was on a run through San Diego’s Balboa Park and saw that the Timken Museum (always free admission!) had an iconography exhibit featuring Mary. I ran right on inside. The walls were filled with icons: icons the size of me, icons the size of my palm. Mary was centered in most of them, looking out at the faces who studied her or into the face of her child. To look at an icon is also to have the icon look at you. I spent a long time in that room, studying the Mother of God and feeling her studying me right back. Mary has become increasingly important to me in recent years, and it felt like a mystical gift to be surprised by her in the middle of a Saturday run.

A gift indeed. Okay, please tell us when you were last amazed, astonished, or awed? Charm us with the whole sucking story (charm from the Latin carmen “to sing”).

The other evening my husband and I sat together drinking beer, the sunlight still warm at 7 p.m. He told me about an interview he’d recently heard with a writer, who argued that all writers have one subject that they circle for their entire lives. They return to it through different tunnels and vantage points, in different costumes and characters, but the subject is always the same, burning through their work like a live coal.

This idea reminded me of Tony Hoagland’s brilliant essay about obsession. He argues that poets—and I’m going to expand this to include any writer—are blessed. They have an endless well of material to draw from, a subject that makes their work crackle with heat. “The obsessed psyche knows unerringly where to go, like a Geiger counter to uranium, or a dog to his master’s grave,” writes Hoagland. “Lucky dog, to have a master.”

This is a long way of saying that my own writerly obsession is with transformation. I’m drawn to conversion stories, and not necessarily the spiritual kind. By “conversion stories” I mean narratives with a clear before and after, where a character steps across a threshold from one life into another (This might be because my own spiritual life has felt distinctly undramatic: a long and wandering attempt to deepen into the love of God, no dramatic plot points to mention). Whatever the reason, these stories are the ones I return to again and again.

Childbirth, it turns out, is the ultimate transformation story. I gave birth to my second daughter in April of 2024, and her birth continues to astonish me. Well over a year later, I still feel its residue in my mind. The physical experience was seismic enough—an entirely original human exiting my body, both of us working together to deliver her. What could be wilder? And because birth is a threshold, it also returned me to the world of postpartum and infancy, where I hadn’t lived for several years. It was a world of intense caregiving, physical intimacy, hypervigilance, sleeplessness, repetitive devotion, and delight. Now that my daughter is well beyond infancy, I can look back on the birth and those early months with more clarity. But for a long time I felt struck mute by the experience. It was too vast to make sense of. I could only stand ankle-deep in the shallows or the enormity would swallow me.

Birth is one of the few times I’ve experienced a total conversion from one kind of life into another. It reminds me of something the character John Ames says in Marilynne Robsinson’s novel Gilead: that, every once in a while, “transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life, and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving.”

Many thanks, my friend. Well done.