AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER LANG
By Lisa Rizzo
Jennifer Lang
Writer and teacher Jennifer Lang’s memoir, Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (Vine Leaves Press 2023) takes the reader on her journey with her French-born husband, Phillipe. Using experimental prose and forms, Lang reveals her struggle with their different religious needs while making peace with Israel as their final home. Poet and memoirist, Lisa Rizzo met with Jennifer to discuss her artistic decisions.
Lisa Rizzo : How do you describe your book? Would you call it a collage memoir?
Jennifer Lang: This book is a love story with a lot of conflict about home.
I wouldn’t describe it as collage because it’s linear, chronological. I call it unconventional, untraditional, experimental. Sometimes people equate experimental with hybrid, but I don’t consider my book hybrid because I didn’t combine different genres.
LR: What was your impetus for shaping your pieces as you have, putting prose on the page in different ways?
JL: It’s been a non-linear writing journey. I started with a 65,000-word manuscript that felt overwritten. After working with an editor who gave me extensive notes, I put it away for a few months. During that hiatus, I took a Kathy Fish Fast Flash workshop that rocked my world. I started writing compressed prose about my Israeli life and tightened long, over-written pieces to 500 words, 300 words. The words popped!
When I saw a submission call from the women’s magazine Mslexia to write a 300-word piece using the prompt “J is for …” I went back to my manuscript and found the word “jury” buried in a 3,015-word chapter. I zoomed in closer on the word and cut the excess to create a flash piece.
Then I used the same process to identify words for every letter of the alphabet, reshaping my manuscript completely. But the arc of the story still wasn’t right. I kept thinking about how a mentor during my MFA program and a friend who’d read the overwritten manuscript said the same thing: “I think you’re asking the wrong question.” I kept searching.
LR: What was the right question you needed to ask of your book?
JL: “What was my journey?” I realized that journey, which I had first framed within the context of my marriage and in geographical terms, was different than my internal journey, which began in 2011, as soon as we landed in Israel.
With that understanding, I started a new manuscript, beginning anew from when we returned to Israel in 2011, which is the topic of my next book, Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses , (Vine Leaf Press, 2024). Crafting the earlier story into Places We Left Behind came later.
LR: I love this book’s subtitle: memoir-in-miniature. Why miniature?
JL: Because my book is 13,000 words, much shorter than a traditional memoir. The chapters or vignettes, whatever you want to call them are compressed, some only one sentence, or charts or lists. They’re mini.
For example, one reader gave me the feedback that they wanted to see the pros and cons of my quandary over moving in with Phillipe. That’s when I realized I could rearrange the prose into lists to mirror my conflict in a different way.
(page 9)
LR : You also have one chapter titled Coordinates. Why did you choose that form?
JL: I was fearful of sounding repetitive. I put the directional coordinates of White Plains, NY, where we were living at the time, and Israel to show their locations. I had already written about the distance between these two homes, but I could show this again without using traditional prose, without sounding redundant.
(page 61)
LR: And the flow chart, why did you choose to begin your book with that chart?
(page 5)
JL: I needed a way to help readers understand the geographical leaps my husband and I made as a young couple, then with our children, to show how different my young adult life was from my childhood. I wanted to use a very spare form to do that.
LR: One technique you used was striking through text. What were you hoping to accomplish by using that technique?
Here’s an example:
“Do I understand that he changed his lifestyle for a country? Absolutely not .” (page 2).
JL: I wanted the reader to know what I was thinking but felt ashamed by some of my own thoughts. The striking through gave me distance in an odd way.
LR: What is a connection between using these different forms and the “aboutness” of your book?
JL: I like pithy writers; I like self-deprecating writers. But I’m not like that. I didn’t know how to find that voice. I kept trying to go at it from different ways until I finally figured out that these forms were a way to embrace my voice.
LR: It’s interesting that you were looking for your voice in writing at the same time you were looking for your voice in the story.
JL: Now, because I don’t know how to write “normally” anymore, when I heard you say that I saw Voice 2 .
LR: I love that. Any final words for others?
JL: Ironically, as a writer, I felt that words didn’t suffice. That pushed me to try unconventional forms to express ideas that prose couldn’t. To keep writing another draft until I liked what I got. To do something to change the writing. To dare to find something new.
_____
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jennifer Lang lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs Israel Writers Studio . Her essays have appeared in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, and Midway Journal . She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is an Assistant Editor at Brevity , and a longtime yogi. This October, she’ll teach “Dare-Push-Play on the Page” workshop at Manhattanville College . She has two unconventional books forthcoming, Places We Left Behind: a memoir- in-miniature (9/5/23) and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses (10/15/24), with Vine Leaves Press. Find her on Instagram and Facebook, here and here .
Lisa Rizzo is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 National Federation of Press Women Awards, and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her work has been published in Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, Rain Taxi and the Brevity Blog. She was a 2022 writer-in-residence at Craigardan Collective. Visit her in Portland, OR where she is busy at work on a memoir or at her website .
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