World Fantasy Award-finalist and Shirley Jackson Award-nominee Jen Fawkes
Jen Fawkes’s DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS (Abrams Books) is a sweeping novel set in the era of the Civil War in Nashville, delving into the lives of "public women," an enigmatic secret society spanning generations, and the profound and transformative power of femininity.
Jen Fawkes is the author of MANNEQUIN AND WIFE (LSU Press), a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award-nominee and winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award and a Foreword INDIES gold medal. TALES THE DEVIL TOLD ME (Press 53) won a Foreword INDIES silver medal, was named one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Collections of 2021, and was a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Locus has called Jen’s work “witty and dark, extravagant and savage.” According to Library Journal, she is “a writer to watch.” Her short fiction has won numerous prizes, including the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, and has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Crazyhorse, Best Small Fictions, and many others. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize in fabulist fiction, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her debut novel, DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS, is forthcoming from Abrams in April 2024.
What inspired you to begin writing, and what has your journey to publishing your debut novel been like?
My mother was a voracious reader and would-be writer who instilled a love of letters in me early. I took feeble stabs at writing in high school but didn’t gather the courage to write fiction until I was thirty. After writing independently for a couple of years, I took community writing workshops, then got a Creative Writing MFA and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing.
“The road to publication for DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS has been long and winding.”
The road to publication for DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS has been long and winding. It took me years to figure out how to leap from short—to long-form fiction. I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t generally outline; I write a short story from start to finish and don’t move forward until I’m certain I’ve got it right. But writing a novel that way is tough. If you don’t draft in a traditional sense, I’ve discovered that finding a way to break the story into manageable chunks—periods, storylines, alternating voices, something—can help. I wrote a version of this novel back in 2014-2016, but it was never working. I put the manuscript aside for three years, then pulled it out in 2020 after rereading LYSISTRATA and saw a way to overhaul it. I did a major revision, then signed with an agent who left agenting to return to editing. However, she expressed interest in buying my novel in her new role at Abrams Books, so I signed with Mark Gottlieb, and he sold DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS to my former agent.
Jen Fawkes’s DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS (Abrams Books)
Your book, DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS, is a work of fabulist fiction that poses questions about war, family, prostitution, and the earth-shattering power of women, employing actual events and figures from history and in a moment when women's bodily autonomy is under attack, raising a full-throated cry in its defense. What do you see as the direct connection to women's bodily autonomy being under attack—both in your novel and today?
DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS is set during the American Civil War with additional threads set in Renaissance Venice and Ancient Greece—all eras in which women, with few exceptions, were not permitted control over their lives. I was working on a major structural revision of the book when the Roe v. Wade memo was leaked, making finishing the manuscript feel urgent. I had never lived in a world without Roe, and I—like so many—didn’t believe it could happen—that we, as a nation, would actively decide to take such a giant step backward.
“…the Roe v. Wade memo was leaked, making finishing the manuscript feel urgent.”
The complexity, danger, and uncertainty of childbirth—not to mention motherhood—are themes of DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS, and the importance of bodily autonomy is a central message. In the novel's world, women can drastically alter their bodies—transforming into animals or monsters. As I see it, people own exactly two things—a physical body and a story (the narrative constructed out of lived experience), and I wholeheartedly believe each of us should have incontestable sovereignty over both.
In considering your writing, V.E. Schwabs’s THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE, Maggie O'Farrell’s THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, and Bobi Conn’s A WOMAN IN TIME come to mind. This is said to hold your work in very high esteem. Are there books or authors that have influenced your writing?
My writing is influenced by everything I’ve ever encountered, so most definitely! I haven’t yet read the books you mention here (though I did read Maggie O’Farrell’s wondrous HAMNET), but books that directly influenced and informed DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS include Margaret Atwood’s THE BLIND ASSASSIN, Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING, Tom Robbins’s JITTERBUG PERFUME, Charles Portis’s TRUE GRIT, George Saunders’s LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, E.L. Doctorow’s RAGTIME, Virginia Woolf’s ORLAND, Aristophanes’s LYSISTRATA, Walt Whitman’s DRUM TAPS, Margaret Rosenthal’s THE HONEST COURTESAN, Catherine Clinton’s STEPDAUGHTERS OF HISTORY: SOUTHERN WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, and Stephanie McCurry’s WOMEN’S WAR: FIGHTING AND SURVIVING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.
How’s it been working with Tina Pohlman, Regan Mies, and the team at Abrams Books/Overlook Press on your book DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS?
Everyone at Overlook/Abrams has been wonderful! When writing and publishing short fiction, you don’t generally work as extensively with editors, but your editor will get deeply involved with a novel. I’d heard people talk about working with editors who truly got what they were doing—who saw a better version of their vision than they did and worked hard to help them get there—but I did not experience this phenomenon until working with the editorial team at Abrams.
“Writing is a solitary endeavor, but I don’t write for myself.”
What do you love the most about connecting with readers?
Writing is a solitary endeavor, but I don’t write for myself. The drive to compose and create is inherently linked to my desire to share my creations. The joy of getting something right—of knowing I’ve cracked a code and made something that has weight and resonance is only surpassed by the experience of having a reader engage in a meaningful way with what I have wrought.
Do you have any interesting/unique creative writing rituals or practices that help you in your writing?
Writing is hard; unfortunately, the harder it gets, the longer you do it. My consistent practices include 1.) forcing myself to stay in the chair, 2.) breaking amid a scene/moment rather than at the conclusion, which makes reentering the text easier, and 3.) when working on a novel, not allowing myself to get too far away, since finding my way back in gets exponentially harder with each passing day. I strive to “touch” a novel in progress every day, or at least every other day.
Any advice for hopeful writers looking to become published authors?
Read, read, read! You can get your hands on everything in your particular genre (and across genres). And write, write, write! Most of what you produce, especially early on, won’t make it to print, but it’s only by writing your way through drafts—or by remaining in the same draft and tearing it down to rebuild as you go—that you will begin to find your voice, your subject matter, your primary (and secondary and tertiary) obsessions.
“…the best agents are both passionate about literature and attuned to the whims and vagaries of the publishing landscape…”
What do you feel are the qualities of the best literary agents?
I think the best agents are both passionate about literature and attuned to the whims and vagaries of the publishing landscape, which is constantly shifting. Combining an eye for art and beauty and a business head seems the best combination for a literary agent.
Similarly, what are the qualities of the best editors and publishers?
For me, the best editors are those who aren’t looking for a rehash of what’s trendy or for writers who check a certain box but for powerful prose, characters who live and breathe, originality, invention, and daring. Of course, I feel this way primarily because those are the books I love to read!
Are you reading anything good for pleasure?
Yes! I’m reading HALF-LIFE OF A STOLEN SISTER by Rachel Cantor, KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I’m almost finished with a re-read (for the first time since undergrad) of Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO.
Can you tell us what you’re working on next?
My next book is a speculative mystery novel set in a converted Kirkbride insane asylum, in which a female film professor tries to solve an eighty-year-old mystery involving the death of a patient—a 1940s film star—even as she is deluged by memories of her own mother's mental breakdown. The current title is LADY MANEATER.
Can you finish this sentence? I love writing because…
I love writing because people have always made sense of the world and our place within it through narratives. And for me, there is no more sacred task.