Jess Taylor
My writing space is in my bedroom by our windows that look out at the park. I’ve always loved having my desk facing a window so I can stare off into the distance and people watch. My process involves a lot of breaks, even just in my train of thought, so it’s nice having a natural distraction. Over the years I’ve come to accumulate and love plants and I need them in all my spaces, especially somewhere I’m creating, so I have plants over and beside my desk.
My desk is a hand-me-down from my father. When I was 19, I moved into the basement of my parents’ house, and my dad and I swapped desks. I needed something larger, and it required the least amount of furniture moving for our family. I fell in love with its glass top that always feels cool and the amount of space it allows for my setup. Seeing that I loved the desk and knowing how important a desk is to a writer, my dad let me keep the desk when I moved out, and I’ve since lugged it to eight different homes. I hope it will still be my desk until I can no longer write.
What music have you been listening to lately?
In the mornings lately, I’ve been listening to a Spotify playlist called Morning Classical. I listen to it on my way to drop my one-year-old daughter off at babysitting, and it chills both of us out in the mornings. Other than that, I’m stuck in endless loops of the ABCs, The Bath Song, and Rainbow Connection.
What’s in your fridge right now
We have been weaning so a lot of baby food pouches and juice boxes, along with a carton of whole cow milk, goat milk, almond milk, cashew milk, soy milk, and oat milk. We are trying all the milks until we find something my daughter loves to drink. So far everything, including juice, has been rejected with goat milk currently in first place. By first place, I mean that it is spat on the floor after two sips instead of one.
Have you ever failed at something you care about?
I feel like I’m always failing at things I care about. This is partially because I set high goals for myself that are hard to attain and partially because sometimes I just end up disappointing myself! I’m trying to work on being more forgiving of myself. I think “failure” is an essential part of writing, as we’re always getting rejected and then the next thing comes along. “Success” as others might view it usually doesn’t feel like success to yourself because you know all the mistakes that went into making it happen.
When I was in high school, I ran my first punk/ska show at a community centre. I got what I felt were really good bands, but I didn’t book a headliner with enough of a draw. Because I never banked on breaking even since it was my first show, I couldn’t afford a huge band. For a first show, it went fine, but the turn-out was smaller than was typical for the venue at the time and my bandmates and I saw it as a failure or a sign that I was out of my depth promoting. But I kept running shows and just a year or so later ran a show with a bigger budget. There was a blizzard, so I thought we’d have no one turn up, but the place was so packed we had to take out an expanding wall that divided the venue. We ended up being able to pay the bands extra on top of their guarantees and still made a profit that we were able to use to create a communal bandfund. Without that first flop, I wouldn’t have learned enough for the next show. I try to remember experiences like this in my darker moments.
When did you first receive praise for your writing? What was your first rejection?
Both things happened around the same time for me. I started sending work out when I was very young, around 12 or 13, by submitting to our local library short story contest. I won honourable mention one year and first another year. After winning first, I stopped submitting to youth contests and started to send out my work to magazines. I know I submitted to Sub-Terrain and Dandelion in high school and received rejections from both. While I’d be upset about rejections, I saved them all and tried to see it as part of the process. My mother had published some poetry when she was younger, so she encouraged this perspective and hammered home the point that if I wanted to be a writer, it would come with a lot of rejection along the way.
One of my most devastating rejections of sorts came from a workshop. When I was ten, my teacher put my name forward to be part of a writing workshop for kids run by a local writer at our bookstore. Some of the stories would be chosen for an anthology. Something like this was a rare opportunity in my small town. I was thrilled. I stayed in from recesses and lunch hour all day to write my story: A racoon named Hippogriff lived in a tree’s hollow and befriended a brave mouse named Orion. Together they battled an owl who wanted the mouse dead. I thought it was fantastic and easily the best thing I’d ever written. I recopied it more neatly and then gave it to my teacher. The school’s secretary photocopied it and sent it into the workshop.
On the Saturday of the workshop, I showed up extremely excited and nervous. Everyone was holding carefully typed pages and the other kids all seemed much older and more sophisticated than I was. No one was from my village’s school. My work was handed back to me covered in red ink from the writer. When we went around and read our work, I went onto the third page and saw a replica of the second page. The third, fourth and fifth pages were missing and everything was out of order. I had known my story would be there so I didn’t bring another copy. “This isn’t what I wrote,” I said. “The next page is missing. They copied it wrong.”
The writer lectured me on how being prepared was my job as a writer. He pointed out the other kids had typed material. Back then, we didn’t type all our assignments and my family shared one computer which my brother and I rarely used for school. I held back tears and was totally embarrassed.
I don’t know why I didn’t give up on writing after this experience—maybe because I was already used to being a bit out of step with the crowd. As a result, I began to type all of my work on an old laptop that my dad’s work was going to throw away.
Latest book you’ve read or favourite book ever?
I really love Milkman by Anna Burns. A more recent favourite was Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. As a new mom, the book perfectly captured my experience as a new mom who can morph into a dog.
Anything you’d like to promote?
Jess Taylor is a Tkaronto (Toronto) writer and poet. Her second collection, Just Pervs, was released by Book*hug in Canada in September 2019. Recently, Just Pervs was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction. A short story from that collection, "Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love", was long-listed for The Journey Prize and included in The Journey Prize Anthology 30. The title story from her first collection, Pauls (BookThug, 2015), "Paul," received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Jess believes that collaboration and helping other writers is an important part of her writing practice. She is currently working on a second novel, children’s picture books, a middle grade cli-fi series, and dreaming up other projects.
