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Q&A with Jackie Shannon Hollis, author of This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story

“This is what I did. This is what my girlfriends did. With dolls, with little sisters and brothers, with children we babysat. We pretended. We practiced. We prepared. Our mothers said to us, ‘When you grow up.’ ‘When you have your own children.’ No question. We would grow up. We would have children of our own.”

~ from This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story

From the title and from the quote above, you might think Jackie Shannon Hollis’ new memoir, This Particular Happiness (Forest Avenue Press) is simply about one woman’s decision not to have children. But this book is so much more.

As women, we revolve around expectations passed down through generations: we will get married; we will have children; we will live happily ever after watching those children grow into adults, marry, have babies of their own. Those expectations may serve one woman well but may cloud the journey of another woman walking the same road.

Jackie Shannon Hollis’ new book digs into beliefs taken on so easily and grapples with the weight of them. When she meets and marries a man who does not want to have children, she must take a closer look at the vision of her life as she had planned it and redefine who she is outside of those expectations.

Written in a structure that mirrors the way we often reason things out, we walk alongside Hollis through past and present, as she studies one moment in relation to another, beginning to see how everything she has experienced is connected, not by the thread of desire to have children but by something much deeper and more vital to the core of her being: the desire to be happy, to love, and to be loved.

I’m thrilled to host Jackie today for an interview about her book, community, and the gift of travel. There’s also a book giveaway! Enter your name HERE by Tuesday, October 8th, for a chance to win a copy of This Particular Happiness.

And now, welcome Jackie Shannon Hollis!

Christi Craig (CC): Your memoir unfolds in a fluid way, moving back and forth in time, and several chapters work as stand-alone essays. Where did you begin in writing This Particular Happiness and when did you know it would become a memoir?

Happiness: Jackie Shannon Hollis

Jackie Shannon Hollis (JSH): I remember the exact moment. I was with my writing group. I brought in what I thought would be  an essay about being childless. I was in my mid-fifties and the essay was intended to explore what it was like to be at that point in my life when the possibility of pregnancy was long past, but the experience of being childless kept unfolding.

As often happens when I am writing these nonfiction pieces, I struggle with the awarenesses that context and personal history are such an important part of our current story. It’s hard to contain a story just in the present because I feel the need to understand how the present experience is informed by the past. As the group was critiquing my piece, they asked questions. “But why didn’t you have children.” “Why was it so important to you to stay with your husband when he didn’t want children and you did.” Well here was the whole entangled story to unravel and explore. I knew right then I wanted to write this longer story. 

CC: One of my favorite passages is in the chapter “A Path to Somewhere New,”where you write, “A friend said, ‘I look at your beautiful garden, your house, even the way you dress. It seems like something is trying to rise up in you.'”

She gently points you toward your creative self and writing, but really, what she says is indicative of how life works. As we go in search of who we are or what we are capable of, the pieces of the puzzle often lay right in front of us, if we are only willing to see them. Your book is testament to discovering those pieces and putting them together. It’s a book that will leave an impression on any woman struggling to move beyond the expectations society places on her. What impression has writing your memoir left on you? Or maybe a better question is, How has writing your memoir changed you?

JSH: Christi, I am so pleased that you were drawn to this chapter because, for me, this was a turning point in my life, for exactly the reason you express here. And it can get lost in the idea that this book is solely about childlessness. I see This Particular Happiness as being about the discovery of self and an exploration of meaning. I think most women go through this at some point, whether they have children or not, a turning point where we look at what we are doing and ask the questions: Is this what I want, or is it someone else’s want? How do I carry the expectations of others? How do I move forward when I know I am turning away from what is expected of me?

Writing this memoir deepened the sense that this path I am on is where all the various threads of my life were leading me. I feel a sense of confidence in myself that comes of no longer being secretive about the fact that I longed for a child, and the times where that longing still rises up. And I feel a confidence that comes from having chosen this different path, one I am happy about and likely would not have found had I followed the expected.

CC: Several years ago you wrote a beautiful guest post for my blog, “Writers as Witness,” where you talk about being in community and the rhythm of writing. What has been the greatest gift in sharing with other writers this journey to self, story, and publication?

JSH: The community of writers IS the gift of this whole experience for me (and I must say my community of non-writers had been delightfully excited about my writing all along and especially about this book).  

Happiness: Writing group gathered at table with pen and paper

I am part of a writing group that meets weekly. We call ourselves The Dreamies. We’ve been together for many years. We know each other and know and respect the unique angle each of us take in critiquing a piece of work that one of us brings in. My memoir was shaped in this group. I cannot thank them enough for their ears and eyes on my pages, and for listening to revision after revision of chapters I was struggling with.

Three of the five other writers in the group have previously published books and their guidance has been so important to me, both in the querying and submitting to publishers, and now in bringing the book out for publication. This is a long and vulnerable process and it helps to have people who have had similar ups and downs offer support, encouragement, advice, and reality checks.

I’ve wanted to have a book out there for a long time. For a while, I’d made peace with the possibility that this might not happen. Now that it is happening, I don’t feel like I am more or less for having a book published. I still feel like me. And yet, I do feel a new kind of confidence that goes with having made it to this point. And there is a certain external validation that comes of having a solid book to hold in my hands.

But most joyous to me is being part of the literary community, being celebrated for showing up, for writing, for continuing to write through difficult times, for risking on the page. This is what the writers I know and honor do for each other. 

CC: What are you reading these days?

JSH: Over the summer I read three ARC’s. Two debut memoirs which captivated me. Codependence: Essays, by Amy L. Long, is an exploration of chronic pain and opiate addiction told from the perspective of someone who understands her addiction and sees it as vital to management of her pain. This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, by Cameron Dezen Hammon, is a very personal exploration of her faith and of love. And I read The Royal Abduls, by Ramiza Koya, which is the next book coming out from Forest Avenue Press. I’m really excited about this book. 

I am just now finishing Sion Dayson’s debut novel, As a River.  She writes beautifully and with a sureness I admire, and the story is powerful.

I also listened to two very brutal and deeply researched and beautifully reported non-fiction books on audio. Missoula, by Jon Krakauer. I’m a bit late coming to this book, which came out in 2016. It’s about the sexual assault cases at the university there and the minimal response by the University and law enforcement. And Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Wow is this a powerful book.

CC: In your memoir, you touch on some of your travels. Where is one favorite place to visit?

JSH: I’ve had the good fortune to travel many places. I’m drawn to any place that offers me a view of other ways of living, new perspectives, different foods and landscapes and languages. But also, Bill and I now travel to the same places more than we go to new places. We go to London and Switzerland, to see friends whom we met on our travels. They have become family, which is something I write about in This Particular Happiness.

Happiness: desert land, The Wave Trail in Utah.

Of the places I’ve been, if we’re speaking of landscape alone, I am still most captivated by the southwest desert of the US — Southern Utah, Arizona. I also write about this in my memoir. In the desert you can see, so vividly, how the land was formed — under water, through earthquake and upheavals. The layers of time are painted into the landscape. The colors, the sense of unmarred history consistently draws me back. It’s a beautiful area to hike and to experience solitude.

Jackie Shannon Hollis, a lifelong Oregonian, resides with her husband in a home her friends call the treehouse. Her education and work as a counselor also pushed her to hold up the mirror to her own self. In addition to thinking she would be a mother, she once dreamed of being a June Taylor dancer or a racecar driver. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Sun, Slice, Inkwell, High Desert Journal, Rosebud, and other publications. Read more about Jackie and her writing on her website.

*Photo of group above by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
*Photo of desert: The Wave Trail, Utah by Gert Boers on Unsplash

Don’t forget: enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 8th, for a chance to win a copy of This Particular Happiness.

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Searching for Missing Pieces: Guest Post by Myles Hopper

I met Myles Hopper when Lisa Rivero and I co-edited Family Stories from the Attic (Hidden Timber Books, 2017). Myles and I worked closely together on his essay, “Exodus Redux.” I came to know him as a writer with great introspection and dedication, one who strives not only to uncover the pieces of a story but to retell it in a way that builds meaning and insight, for the author as well as the reader. Today he shares excerpts from his forthcoming book, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now, which speaks to the power of writing and the art of the story.

The Color Red is a collection of stories that comprises a memoir, rather than a chronological autobiography, which isn’t how I remember my life, nor is it the way many other people remember theirs.

Pieces: Roll of film in a spiral across image from left to right.

The experience is like standing in an editing studio ankle-deep in old-fashioned, raw film footage, searching for missing pieces. Some can be found, and memories can be refreshed; others, alas, are lost, perhaps forever.

Nevertheless, the search has been productive. The result is this book, in which characters and events move back and forth in time, the same way memories present themselves in unexpected flashbacks and associations.

Preparing this collection has been a long process. A story of mine, first drafted in 1992, languished in a file folder for the next twenty-five years. Before it had been relegated to that folder, another author had encouraged me to write the rest of the stories I wanted to tell. I told him I probably wouldn’t­––actually, I told him I couldn’t––though writing was what I most wanted to do. To his “Why?” I said, “Because, I don’t know if I’m able to tell the truth, and if I don’t, none of this is worth writing about.”

“The truth about what?”

“About my relationships with members of my family, maybe my father, most of all. There was a great deal of love and caring, but there also was violence and rage, and I still have trouble dealing with the lifelong aftermath.”

“Then I guess you have a decision to make.”

Though it took many years, I made that decision to finish what I had begun. It has helped me to keep in mind Joan Didion’s final sentence in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she reflects upon how her interests as a writer run counter to those she writes about:  “…writers are always selling somebody out.” [emphasis hers]

I was determined to avoid writing only for myself, about myself. My purpose has been to write this book in a way that might provide readers an opportunity to gain new perspectives on some of their own life experiences, to discover something of value that might have eluded them, to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. 

These stories acknowledge childhood trauma, tragic losses, and confusing, sometimes violent relationships within a family; they also celebrate the love and reconciliation, acceptance, and forgiveness. The result can be transcendent.

Winter 2017

December came and went, and it was my seventy-fifth January birthday. On that day, I had already lived five years longer than the too-short lifespan of my father. Frequently, throughout the winter, my thoughts drifted to how difficult it had been for me to unravel our complicated relationship. I recalled the day when, in my mid-twenties, a half-century earlier, I had been regaling my therapist with stories of my father’s magnificence.

“So, your father can walk on water?”

“Huh?”

Thus, began the healing. It has been a slow, sometimes imperceptible, process until heart and mind could remain open to understanding life experiences in new ways. I needed to arrive at a place where my love and admiration of a father––gone now more than thirty years––weren’t expressed in order to camouflage my darker feelings. I have needed all of that time to cease repressing or denying what was painful and debilitating. Only then could I allow another reality to emerge and coexist. To heal has required embracing the “other” and transcending the limitations of being lost and drowning in the lonely “self.” To heal has required relegating certain memories, photographs, and spoken words to a place called “that was then,” and cradling close to the heart the ones that are called “and this is now.”

Pieces: sunlight and fog coming from upper right corner through canopy of trees

Now, when I think of the person I was then, I imagine him walking slowly on a path under a canopy of foliage, all veiled in a gray, pre-dawn fog. He isn’t aware of my presence close behind him. His unhurried steps slow until he comes to a halt, and I give the slightest of nods as I pass him. 

At the sharp bend in the path, I look back just as beams of sunlight penetrate the canopy. In the light and warmth, he begins to dissipate along with the night fog. I watch until I see only green leaves glistening at daybreak. 

Midsummer 2017

In late afternoon, I leave my writing behind and walk outside to the garden. The oversized terra-cotta pot has been back in its place since early spring, and now the white rosebush it contains is blooming, as is the rest of the garden. In the midst of this loveliness and tranquility, it takes only a few seconds for a perennial fantasy of mine also to be in full bloom. In it, my father is alive and I ask him to work with me in the garden––mine, not his. He welcomes the request, and I welcome his suggestions regarding the placement of new plants and the appropriate preparation of the soil.

At the end of the day, we sit on the patio, enjoy a glass of scotch, and admire our accomplishment:  Not only has the garden been improved, but we’ve spent the day working as father and son without an angry word between us.

It waits until our second glass for me to tell him how much I learned as a boy and as a man during those times when we had been able to work and play together in peace. Then, I tell him that I have provided my children the chance to experience a garden’s peaceful beauty, but never have demanded anything from them in return. I tell him that they, now adults, take pleasure in asking me which plants they should choose and how to care for them. They do this not because I am a gardener, but because I am their father.

I know he understands everything he has heard from me, because he gives one of his self-conscious laughs, more like a quiet clearing of the throat, revealing the depth of his emotions.

By the time I emerge from my fantasy, shadows have grown long and advanced across the patio and the garden and onto the lawn, but there is one more task to complete before dinner. I select the proper spade for transplanting a languishing rosebush, so it will receive the sun and nourishment it has been deprived of for too long. At the new site for the rose, I lift a handful of the loamy soil and inhale its clean, sweet aroma.

On this day, nothing eclipses my sense of well-being, not even as my foot presses on the shoulder of the spade, and I remember standing at the side of my father’s open grave and releasing a shovelful of earth onto his coffin.

Pieces: image of Myles Hopper

Myles Hopper is the author of the forthcoming collection of stories, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now––a memoir. As a cultural anthropologist, he taught in several universities in the United States and Canada, and consulted with nonprofits engaged in strategic planning and organizational development. Writing is now his full time pursuit, with the exception of occasional consultations with organizations whose mission he supports. He and his spouse are parents of two adult children and live in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

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Q&A with Lisa Romeo, author of Starting with Goodbye

“When the time comes to eulogize my father, I have only my list and I edit as I go, turning each listed item into an anecdote, realizing this is what my father did when he tried to teach me anything in life: storify it.”

~ from Starting with Goodbye

When I sat down to write this introduction, I wanted to open with those moments after my mother died. Lisa Romeo’s new memoir, Starting with Goodbye, is after all about the death of a parent. But my words came out trite, almost prepared: the air shifted, my world collapsed, I walked around in a fog for months on end. Those things are true, but they do not begin to tap into the complexities of grief. What about the dreams? The tiny altars I created? And the way her furniture filled the new house we had just closed on?

There is so much that must be felt and figured out and reconciled when we lose a mother or a father; it is anything but predictable.

Starting with Goodbye dives into those complexities, as Lisa Romeo takes the reader on a meandering journey exploring a father-daughter relationship from the end back to the beginning. This is not a simple trajectory in reverse, though; the story moves seamlessly through past and present, infused with conversations between her and her father after he has died, interactions that serve as invitations–for Lisa but for the reader as well. You cannot walk away from these pages unchanged; a story about one woman’s grief becomes an invitation to explore your own. Even more, it serves as impetus to reconcile relationships still within physical grasp.

I’m honored to host Lisa and thrilled to offer a book giveaway. CLICK HERE for a chance to win a copy of Starting with Goodbye (deadline to enter is Tuesday, May 22nd, at noon).

Now, welcome Lisa!

Christi Craig (CC): In the Acknowledgments you say, “This entire book is a thank you note to my father.” When you first began writing about your father, did you envision a full memoir? What was the journey like, from creating a list for his eulogy to a 200+ page reflection on your relationship?

Lisa Romeo (LR): A full memoir was definitely not my initial plan! The eulogy led to a few essays. Then I just kept writing (and publishing) essays that were all somehow thematically connected—about grief, my father—for about six years. Each essay seemed to include the seed for the next, and the next. I love writing essays, and I wrote at different lengths, in varying forms and styles, so it always kept feeling fresh.

Then I thought it would be a linked essay collection. Feedback though (from publishers, one book coach, and some very smart author friends) told me it would work better as a memoir. But I was stubborn for a few more years before starting on the memoir manuscript.

Looking back, I can see that I continued to develop as a writer alongside the trajectory of this project. The accumulation of the essays, especially the longer more complex ones, was a key for me to develop the confidence and experience to tackle the more traditional manuscript that became Starting with Goodbye. While I’m not so glad it took as long as it did, I’m grateful for all the steps along the way.

CC: When we lose someone we love, we are usually told to anticipate the 5 traditional stages of grief. But you push through the boundaries of those expectations, writing about a different way in which we may experience such loss. At one point in your memoir you ask yourself, “what…would people say if I told them that my way of grief…is to talk to my dead father, to watch him move through my house, to think that we’re getting better acquainted?” Was there a moment during those visits from your father when you or someone close to you questioned that experience? What do you hope readers will carry with them after finishing your book?

LR: First, I’m a rather serious, pragmatic person, not prone to the mystical or seemingly unexplainable ideas. I would not even say I’m that spiritual and I am not religious. So, this came out of nowhere. So initially I didn’t tell anyone, for a long time. Also, it felt very private and I wanted to hold on to that. For so much of my life I did not feel close to my father, and now here I had a chance.

My husband first found out I was talking to my dead father when he read it in one of my published essays. He was skeptical but stayed silent. When he lost his own father—who he worked beside every day for 40 years—then we were able to talk about it a bit more.

When friends read some of those essays, they began to confide that they too had similar experiences. Finally, I began talking about it and found that many people were relieved to tell me how they too talk to their dead departed loved ones. Other people seem grateful just to talk about their gone loved ones because that’s something we don’t do enough of in this country. We take the idea of “don’t speak ill of the dead” too far – and in many families the dead are just never spoken about, period I hope readers will come away perhaps a bit more willing to talk about those who are gone, and maybe talk to them as well. To know that the point of grief is not to get over someone, but to remember them, to be curious about them. A life ends, but not the relationship does not.

CC: Outside of your work as an author, you teach writing classes, workshops, retreats. In fact, you have one upcoming in New Jersey (through The Cedar Ridge Writers Series), “Creating Memoir from Memory”), teaching alongside Allison K. Williams. If only I lived closer! What do you love most about working with students who are in the thick of the writing and publication process?

LR: Well, first of all, I learn something about myself every single time I teach— either from the general discussion that develops and/or from particular students, so there is a direct, somewhat selfish benefit in that!  When writers are still in the developing stages of projects— whether that’s a full manuscript or a single essay — there are so many options and possibilities, some of which they themselves don’t even see because they are too close to the story. I love being able to help them draw out all the undeveloped parts of a bigger whole, find the nuance and subtext, dig down to the underlying story-beneath-the-story, and see all the different ways a story might go; or maybe it’s two or three stories and not just one. When that lightbulb goes off for the (student) writer, it feeds both of us.

CC: What are you reading these days?

LR: I just started The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl, one of my favorite authors. I’d pre-ordered it and found it so ironic that the book arrived at one of the busiest times of my life, and its message is: slow down! I could feel my body loosen during the first chapter when she describes lolling under a shade tree as a young girl—but because it’s Patricia Hampl, it’s not just about lying under that tree!

When I get this busy, my reading slacks off and so I tend to reach for short stuff—I’ll pull a poetry collection from the shelf, or a short story anthology and dip in and out. True Story, from Creative Nonfiction Magazine, is perfect for that—a purse-sized mini-chapbook each month featuring one long essay or narrative nonfiction piece.

CC: What do you claim as your favorite writing space or where is a treasured place for retreat?

LR: The place I spend so much time each day working and writing IS my favorite spot. That was my goal five years ago when I replaced all the second-hand beige office furniture in my home office—yes, an entire room of my own!—with the furnishings and décor I wanted. The walls are bright red with white trim. There are two full walls and one-half wall covered in black wood bookcases. I have a huge black writing table (it’s really a dining room table; I hate desks) floating in the middle of the room. There’s a comfy wing chair in the corner, and I have all the space, light, and comfort I need. I work facing the front window so I see the snow piling up when I’m warm and cozy inside, and in summer I can enjoy the neighbors’ flowers.

~

Lisa Romeo is the author of Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss, (University of Nevada Press). Her nonfiction is listed in Best American Essays 2016, and published widely, including the New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine, Longreads, Brain Child, Brevity, Hippocampus. Lisa teaches with Bay Path University’s MFA program, and works as a freelance editor and writing coach. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and sons.

DON’T FORGET! Click HERE to enter the giveaway
for a chance to win a copy of Starting with Goodbye.