JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS
Photo by Nina Subin
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a writer of fiction and criticism. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Harper’s Blog, 4Columns, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, BOMB, and elsewhere. In this interview, she discusses her newly released debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q.
Interview by Liam Kelsey
What were some reasons you wanted to begin the novel soon after 9/11?
I chose the post-9/11 setting because I felt it foregrounded a very contemporary confusion surrounding questions of identity. I started the book during the 2016 election cycle, and I knew I wanted to write about the collision of different versions of reality — different narratives — and the violence and confusion that can result. The task then became choosing the situations and settings that best brought out those themes.
There’s a lot of doubling in the novel. Of course we have Percy and the mythic Persephone, as well as Percy and the woman in the exhibition. There are also subtler doubles, such as Percy and her husband Misha and their neighbors Harold and Claire. What were you trying to communicate with this doubling?
I think it’s hard for me to imagine plot without doubling, especially in a slightly absurdist narrative like Percy’s. The reality quotient isn’t quite one, and so I think doubling helps to normalize the rules of the world. It’s one thing when Percy wakes up and feels she “doesn’t recognize” Misha, another when her neighbor seems to experience a similar crisis across the hall. It establishes a pattern and a mood, a narrative world where a strange occurrence like disappearing from your own life, or not recognizing your life, has become the norm.
Eastern and Central Europe and the Baltic have a definite presence in the novel. Misha is from Bulgaria, while Percy herself is sometimes mistakenly identified as Ukrainian or generically Slavic. References are made to Wisława Szymborska, the Polish poet, and to Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish-American poet born in Lithuania. Percy is also half-obsessed with a painting of an old Russian author. How are these references meaningful to you?
I do have a personal interest in that part of the world. My grandfather grew up in Polish-speaking Detroit, and my grandparents on my mother’s side were Slovenian immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. When I was writing the novel, however, I was also doing a lot of reading about Central and Eastern European nationalist movements in the late eighties and early nineties. Leaders of those movements were faced with making a case for independence at a time when nationalist sentiment in Western Europe and the US was still very taboo. The memory of WWII was too recent. It was still a deterrent. Maybe not so much anymore. Those preoccupations were part of the pool of ideas I was drawing from as I was writing.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
A lot of the novel is about modern and contemporary art and — to a lesser extent — the art world circa 2001. What is the relationship, do you think, between the world of contemporary art, and the world of contemporary literature? Are they totally separate spheres?
Definitely not completely separate! I think I’d hesitate to say any sphere is totally separate from contemporary literature, though certain subjects can feel tired, others underexplored. I think novels today exist to be a little voracious about content. Same with contemporary art. Maybe that’s what they have in common? Or maybe it’s just that most artists and writers have ready internet access.
Who are some of your major influences?
I have trouble with this question because I feel like I’m always trying to change the way I write. Any book that captures me becomes an influence, because I start reading to figure out how the author achieved certain effects. I will say that I’m drawn, on the one hand, to cloistered, domestic narratives that heighten human cruelty and a sense of isolation, and on the other hand, to the hysterical picaresque. If there’s spectrum between these two very different genres, then I like to think of myself as existing somewhere on it. I’d say I am also deeply indebted to fairytales and folktales. My grandfather recorded folktales on tapes for me before he died and I used to listen to them as a kid before I went to sleep.
Does your background in mathematics influence your writing in any way?
It’s possible that studying mathematics, and especially proof writing, reinforced a certain approach to problem solving. I think of fiction as a process of keeping many different possibilities alive in your head at once and slowly testing certain choices to see which ones feel most elegant, most correct. I had that feeling in higher level math. But maybe that just means I wasn’t very good at it.
Your short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and Tin House. How did the experience of writing this novel compare to the experience of writing your short fiction? Do you prefer one form to the other necessarily?
I definitely prefer writing novels now, in part because writing stories doesn’t feel like something I can do on demand. Not that I can write novels on demand, either! But a novel is something I can return to every day, and I appreciate the rhythm of that. I tend to draft stories, by contrast, in a single sitting. It takes months to edit those first drafts, but I work in much shorter spurts. Who knows, though. Maybe next week, when I lose hope on the manuscript I’m working on, I’ll change my mind again and say I prefer stories.
Do you have any upcoming events or publications that you would like people to know about?
That’s very kind! I am doing a brief book tour. It would be wonderful to see people come out to those events, especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and DC, where I’m a bit of a stranger.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q is available now.
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Liam Kelsey is a writer from Minneapolis, MN. His fiction, science fiction, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Silver Needle Press and other independent publications. He would like you to read Break it Down by Lydia Davis and The Weird and the Erie by Mark Fisher. He would like you to listen to the band Pile.
