Creative Nonfiction and Poetic License: An Interview with Jacqueline Doyle
Interview conducted by Ashley Balcazar
Jacqueline Doyle, Creative Nonfiction Editor at CRAFT Literary Journal, has distinguished herself as a literary exemplar with her innovative approach to form, attention to craft, and captivating voice. I first encountered her work in a creative nonfiction workshop in the spring of 2023. “Little Colored Pills” is a triptych essay about her personal and family history with bipolar disorder. As a woman with bipolar, I was drawn to the content and her candor before finishing the first line. After finishing the piece, I was hooked by her mingling of form. Within the overarching triptych, we see fragmentation, direct address, and persistent, impactful anaphoric repetition. The essay is visceral, haunting, resonant.
She is currently working on what she describes in an interview at Tiny Molecules as “a genre-bending essay collection called The Lunatics’ Ball that combines research into women locked up in mental asylums with memoir about [her] family’s own history with bipolar disorder.” “Little Colored Pills” will be included in The Lunatics’ Ball, along with flash such as “Lunatic Impromptu” and “The Madwoman on BART.”
For this interview, I corresponded with the author via email. In our exchange, she discusses “‘coming out’ as bipolar,” how teaching literature has impacted her writing, and how her work challenges the boundaries of creative nonfiction.
Ashley Balcazar: One of the many things I admire about your work is your attention to form. I saw in Rappahannock Review that you extensively explored the fragmented collage structure of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which you credit with influencing your gravitation toward that particular structure in your creative work. I see this especially in “Little Colored Pills,” but it is also anaphoric. Like many of your essays, it features hybridity in form. I see elements of enumeration, research braiding, fragmentation, collage, and the epistolary in your work. Do you typically know what form(s) you want to shape your story going into the writing process, or does form emerge as you write?
Jacqueline Doyle: I love the fact that there are no rules in creative nonfiction! It’s so different from academic writing in that respect. I’ve always been a big fan of segmented (or collage) essays, which allow for fragmentation and juxtapositions without connective tissue. I often start that way and move around pieces and take out pieces as the essay develops. Hybridity comes naturally to me. After so many years of immersing myself in literature during my PhD dissertation and teaching, literary allusions also come naturally to me. I’m too fond of epigraphs and often use them and then take them out. My segmented, ekphrastic essay about Joseph Cornell in Superstition Review, for example, had several different epigraphs as I worked through successive themes that were emerging: an emphasis on the subconscious (Gaston Bachelard), resistance to interpretation (Susan Sontag). Even when I remove them later, they can act as lodestars during the process of writing. I’m surprised to discover that I have a number of epistolary essays in my WIP The Lunatics’ Ball. The most recent evolved when I kept trying and failing to write something about Mary Todd Lincoln; I didn’t achieve the intimacy I wanted with my subject until I sat down and wrote a letter to her.
To me, attention to language and form, often involving experimentation, is what makes an essay literary. Sometimes form emerges as I write, particularly in essays based on personal experience, sometimes it emerges as I think about how to approach my material in advance, particularly in hybrid essays that combine research and memoir.
AB: I am about 20 years behind my peers in the classroom and entering the creative writing arena later in life as a linguist. You mention that you taught literature for several years before teaching creative nonfiction and also started writing later in your career, to which you credit the sense of urgency in your writing. What other strengths do you think your perspective and previous experiences bring to your writing?
JD: I think I am probably more than twenty years behind my peers! I finished my PhD and started my first tenure-track job teaching literature in 1986. Even the PhD was somewhat delayed, as I lived in Ireland and then Germany for four years before I started graduate studies, and later interrupted the PhD to live in New York City for several years after my first marriage broke up. I taught surveys and seminars on American literature and women’s literature and ethnic American literature and published scholarly articles in those areas for over twenty years before I ventured into creative writing. I was already in my fifties. I edged into creative writing through my growing interest in the personal essay. I began teaching lit seminars on memoir and autobiography. Once I started writing my own autobiographical essays, I felt the urgency of starting so late and also the emotional urgency of writing about my family of origin, which was falling apart after my father’s death. My son had just left for college so I was an empty nester. It all converged. Personal circumstances gave me a subject. Immersion in literature for so many years gave me models and a love of language and form. I started teaching creative nonfiction workshops and flash workshops and that deepened my attention to craft. I joined a writing group in San Francisco and got to know more writers. I started taking weekend workshops, in person and online. I’ve never regretted my late start.
AB: Related to your first career as an academic, how do you incorporate that side of yourself into your creative work? I really admire the research braiding in “Dear Maddy,” “The Lunatics’ Ball,” and “Lunatic Impromptu,” which ranges in prominence from subtle to center stage. Do you always go into a piece knowing you want to incorporate research, or does it sometimes emerge organically during the writing process?
JD: If anything, I find it difficult not to incorporate my academic side in my current project. Because The Lunatics’ Ball requires me to research the lives of women who were incarcerated in mental institutions over the past century or two, I go into these pieces knowing there’s a lot of information that I want to include. I’m fascinated by these women’s lives, and what happened to them requires a larger context in the history of the treatment of mental illness. In “Cutting Edge,” I felt I needed to explain what lobotomies were and demonstrate how widespread they were. I also felt that fictionalization (based as far as possible on facts) would be more effective than third-person biographies in “Cutting Edge.” I struggle with voice in this particular project, since expository prose can be deadening, and I’m so accustomed to academic writing. Using research in this project has been a challenge. It was fun to use a collage approach in “Lunatic Impromptu.”
AB: You note that you consider yourself primarily a creative nonfiction writer, but you also write fiction. Are there any stories that you think can only be told in one form or the other? Are there any specific factors that influence your choice of genre for a particular story, such as memory or emotional distance?
JD: I don’t write autobiographical fiction, since if something really happened, I prefer creative nonfiction. I have sometimes drawn on autobiography for aspects of my fiction though. The setting in my story in New World Writing, for example, was something I knew. I really did return to the US on a Polish freighter with a German boyfriend after living abroad for a few years. I have a lot of main characters in academia in my fiction mostly because I know exactly what they do, which means I can be specific. I could imagine what my main character may have been writing about “Bartleby,” for example, in my recent story in Five South. It took me a while to recognize that the lonely female academics in many of my stories are shadow selves—women that I didn’t become but could have.
A lot of my flash fiction is voice-driven, or character-driven, a break from my more serious concerns in creative nonfiction. Sometimes I set myself a formal challenge in advance: to write a flash that zigzags (Midway Journal). Or to run two conversations at a bar simultaneously (Ellipsis Zine). Or to tell several stories simultaneously with an absolute minimum of words (Wigleaf). I have fun when I write flash. On the other hand, the flash about violence against women in my chapbook The Missing Girl are very dark, not a break at all.
AB: I am taking a class focused on the blending of fiction and nonfiction. You mention in Rappahannock Review that you are interested in “imagined stories of madwomen lost to history” and write in “The Madwoman on BART” that they “haunt” and “possess” you. I couldn’t help but think of “Lunatic Impromptu” and the blending of history, research, fact, and fiction. How did you negotiate these elements in your conceptualization of the essay?
JD: I’ve accumulated so many facts from my reading for this project, but without first-person accounts, I feel I need to imagine history to bring them alive on the page. You probably know Lisa Knopp’s short craft essay in Brevity on “Perhapsing.” Imaginative reconstruction and speculation come naturally to me. Perhapsing (with or without explicit cues) often feels like the most exciting part both of the essays that I read, and the essays I write. SugarSugarSalt asked to reprint a tiny one I’d published long ago, and to write a craft note about it, and I was surprised to see how speculation overshadowed real experience even in my early writing. I sometimes cross the boundary into fictionalization, as I do in “Lunatic Impromptu” and “Cutting Edge.” I like to believe that creative nonfiction writers have their own version of poetic license.
AB: You note in Sweet Lit that “breaking silences” inspires you to write and “coming out as bipolar in ‘Little Colored Pills’ was a major step.” Was there an identifiable proximate cause that prompted you to take that step forward and break your silence?
JD: That’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure of the answer. Retiring from my teaching job when the pandemic started made me feel freer to disclose my bipolar mood disorder. I date my “coming out” in The Lunatics’ Ball from that, though I published the title flash before then and quite a few of the memoir flash before then also, including “Little Colored Pills.”
Gertrude Stein said somewhere that she writes for herself and strangers. That belief has allowed me to write about things I wouldn’t tell my colleagues at work, for example, or my husband’s extended family, or even friends who aren’t close friends. I wrote the first draft of “Little Colored Pills” for strangers in a very intense three-day workshop in Oregon with Lidia Yuknavitch. That weekend several participants had written about their bipolar mothers, or bipolar sisters, and after they read their pieces aloud, I felt I had to speak up.
AB: “The Lunatics’ Ball” navigates the complexities of stigma and societal perceptions surrounding mental health. Do you think creative nonfiction can contribute to breaking down these stigmas and fostering empathy and understanding?
JD: I don’t know. I hope so! I do know that reading books like Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias and essays like Sejal Shah’s in the Kenyon Review helped me, so models are extremely important. One of the regrets I have about my teaching career is that I came out as a recovering alcoholic, which was very important to a lot of my students in recovery or seeking recovery over the years, but I never came out as bipolar, though I had many students in crisis due to mental illness. I think I helped them, but that might have helped them even more.
AB: How do you practice self-care when revisiting previous moments of vulnerability? What advice could you give others who write about their experiences with mental illness?
JD: I’m not a great believer in reliving trauma in order to write about it. Not in the case of my students at least, whom I often counseled to wait until they were ready to write about subjects they found painful. But I do think there’s a time to revisit painful experiences and make sense of them, while taking care not to re-traumatize yourself in the process.
Bipolars need self-care anyway—sobriety (very important to me), regular sleep (also very important not to interrupt your circadian rhythms if you have a mood disorder), regular meals (my husband’s a great help there, since I forget to eat when I’m writing), a regular schedule. No more indulging in late-night writing binges, which I miss. I have always been heartened by Flaubert’s dictum for all writers: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Ashley Balcazar is a Teaching Fellow and PhD student in Creative Writing with a primary emphasis in Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Texas, where she also earned her MA in Linguistics. She is enjoying her transition from a focus on the scientific study of language to the creativity of the written word. Her work has appeared in American Speech, The North Texas Journal of Undergraduate Studies, and The Dallas Morning News. In her free time, she enjoys salsa, swing, and ballroom dancing and spending time with her family.