First Draft Episode #264: Morgan Jerkins
August 4, 2020
listen to the episode
Morgan Jerkins, author of essay collection This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, talks about her new book, social history and memoir Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of essay collection This Will Be My Undoing about her new book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. Part history of Black American's displacement and disenfranchisement during the Great Migration and part family memoir.
I so loved what Morgan had to say about how learning languages keeps her humble, what it took for her to put herself in her nonfiction narrative, and what is lost when communities migrate and what is retained. Everything that Morgan and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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If you're an aspiring writer with questions about the business, or you've been around a little bit and some things still escape understanding, I'm with you, and you should be listening to Track Changes. That's the podcast mini-series that has been appearing in your First Draft feed the last few months. The most recent episode came out last week and it is spotlighting Inequality in Publishing. How did we get here? How bad is it really? And what can we do to change it?
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Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Morgan Jerkins.
Sarah Enni: All right. Hi Morgan. How are you?
Morgan Jerkins: Good. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. I'm so excited to talk today.
Morgan Jerkins: I'm excited too!
Sarah Enni: Yay. So for my podcast, I really like to start with a little bit of background. I'd love to hear where you were born and raised.
Morgan Jerkins: I was born and raised in Southern New Jersey. I first grew up in Egg Harbor Township, which is like perhaps 15, 20 minutes from Atlantic City. And then I moved to Williamstown, which is about 35, 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia.
Sarah Enni: Okay. What was reading and writing... how was that a part of growing up for you?
Morgan Jerkins: It was, I mean, embarrassingly enough, I'll admit that I was not that much of a reader. I knew that I had an imaginative mind, but I didn't really find many books that resonated with me or stuck with me for a long period of time. It actually wasn't until my senior year of high school that I started to find literature extremely engaging.
Sarah Enni: What was most of your creative intake do you think?
Morgan Jerkins: Movies. Movies. I would watch movies and I would think in my mind, "How would I recreate this scene?" Or, "How would I revise this scene to something that I'd like to see?"
Sarah Enni: That's interesting. Okay. So you were like fixing it?
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah!
Sarah Enni: You were editing.
Morgan Jerkins: Mm-hm. Yep, yep.
Sarah Enni: Well, that's so interesting to me. What, if any, creative outlets did you have before college, basically?
Morgan Jerkins: Well, I would say that I did take, now that I think about it, I did take creative writing class in high school that I really enjoyed. Public speaking was also creative for me. And then, this is another embarrassing fact, I used to be a child actress for a very, very short period of time. So I guess you can count that as a creative outlet.
Sarah Enni: Totally. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. You're so close to the city too. I mean, in my perspective you're close to New York if you're living in New Jersey. So it feels like you can go into the City and do tryouts or whatever.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. That's how it happened.
Sarah Enni: I love that. That's so interesting. I really do want to spend a minute on that, that up until senior year you were not finding books that were engaging to you. Do you remember what books turned the tide for you?
Morgan Jerkins: When I was in an AP English class I finally had the freedom, or privilege rather, to choose my own books and do a presentation on it. So I think one of the first books that I really engaged with was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and, Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. So those were the two that really stuck with me.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. What do you think it was about those books that really got to you?
Morgan Jerkins: I think with Madame Bovary, it was the language. Just how maximalist, I would call it, the way he describes just love and you know, that sort of thing. And then with Lolita, it was just the scandal of writing material like this. And for it to be heralded as one of the most important books of the 20th Century. I was like, "Wow!" When I read it, I was engaged not only with the language and syntax level, but just with the plot itself.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. In high school, I remember one of the assigned readings was East of Eden for AP English for me the summer before. And I remember looking at that book and being like, "Oh my God, Steinbeck, please." But it was so scandalous and soap opera-y, and over-the-top that I was like, "This is literature!" Like, "This is fun." And then, on top of that, all the themes and the stuff that you can academically get into, but it was just characters. Anyway, so I love that. Then what was the influence? What did you go to Princeton to study?
Morgan Jerkins: I studied comparative literature. So funny enough, I think reading Lolita was my foray into Russian writers. So when I was at Princeton, I studied comparative literature and my specialties were Russian and Japanese literatures.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about this cause you speak five languages besides English. Is that right?
Morgan Jerkins: Yes.
Sarah Enni: That is amazing. Plenty of people study comparative literature without taking that extra step. I'm so interested in what drew you to really going the extra mile and wanting to study the language itself?
Morgan Jerkins: So at Princeton, you had to know two foreign languages. You had to be able to read in those languages by the time you were upperclassmen and completed what we had a JP, or junior paper, and then in your senior year, your thesis. So that was the requirement. In fact, the reason why I chose to do comparative literature instead of English was because I wanted to have that global perspective and to be multilingual.
So I chose Japanese and Russian as my languages. I already knew Spanish from grade school. My mom saw that I was accelerating with it so she got me a private tutor. And I also watched telenovelas with the caption on. So that's how I was able to expand my vocabulary. And then I watched a very landmark film called City of God, which is about Black Brazilians. And when I saw that I was like, "Okay, I want to learn Portuguese."
So freshman year of college started Japanese, sophomore year of college started Russian, junior year of college started Portuguese. And then in my final year I realized, using the comparative literature world, obviously it can be very Eurocentric. And usually you're kind of left out if you don't know French or German. So my senior year of college, I got a private tutor to teach me French.
Sarah Enni: Wow! It's also like, wow, so intimidating to think about Japanese and Russian and then French. I mean, it's not like you chose a bunch of romance languages. You really went for it.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. And it's all varying degrees of fluency, but I would say the language that I'm most confident in is Japanese.
Sarah Enni: Wow. That's so cool! Have you gotten to go? I know you're a big traveler.
Morgan Jerkins: So yeah. So I've gone to Japan, I've gone to Russia. I've gone to France. I've gone to Spain. I have not gone to Brazil or Portugal yet, but I'm trying to make my way over there.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Well, it'll happen eventually. That's so fun. So from here, I'm interested in tracking your journey to your debut novel.
Morgan Jerkins: My essay collection?
Sarah Enni: Yes. Your essay collection. Oh, sorry.
Morgan Jerkins: It's okay.
Sarah Enni: I'm so used to saying that.
Morgan Jerkins: No, it's okay.
Sarah Enni: The journey to your debut book, if I read correctly, I think you went and left college and immediately tried to find a career in publishing and it didn't go so great. Do you mind telling that story?
Morgan Jerkins: Of course. When you go to Princeton from the moment that you become a freshman and it's at that welcome weekend or week. You're told that you're among the cream of the crop, that's how you're indoctrinated. And throughout the four years, I had it in my mind that because I went to the number one school in the country that I would at least be able to get an editorial assistant gig.
I mean, I studied there, I had a literary background, I speak multiple languages. And I was also told that in order to break through to a publisher, you had to do unpaid internships. And I did that. I was living with a friend of mine who graduated two years before me, who was kind enough to let me sleep on her couch for $50, for those two nights, every single week.
And I would go intern in SoHo and then I would get on the Bolt bus and go back to South Jersey every single week. I did that and I still did it while school was back in session. And it was crushing to me to spend all day, you know, like leave school, to go an hour and a half to Midtown, then perhaps another half hour to get to a job interview for an interview that only lasted 15 minutes.
And when I was there, I never shook hands with an editorial assistant that was not a white person, not a white girl. And it was so hard on me cause I was like, "I don't understand why I'm not getting these jobs?" You know, when you put a job description, I'm like, "I fit all of these qualifications." And yeah, I went back home and it was rough.
Now, one of the things that was like an anchor during that time was that I got into a low residency MFA program at Bennington. I only applied because my late stepfather was a veteran and they had this program where if you went straight to grad school, you would get a stipend. Mom was like, "Just apply." And I applied because, you know, deadline didn't pass. It seemed like a good program. And also because I didn't have to take out student loans. I didn't have to take a GRE either.
So I applied thinking I was gonna get a rejection, and I got in. So that helped. But at the same time, I was so sad. Cause I was like, "I did not want to be back in South Jersey." And I was afraid I was gonna get stuck. And also on a personal side, I got my heart broken, you know? So my lack of confidence was shot professionally and personally.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And maybe post college is not the best time for...
Morgan Jerkins: Now, when I look back in retrospect, it was helpful because, and this is where the privilege comes in, I was allowed to stay at my mother's place rent free. I graduated from Princeton with no student loans. So there wasn't an impetus to work and work hard. And so what led to me getting to this point was really just going online and seeing how content was just being produced by those who were around my age. And I realized that, "Oh, you can do that and get paid for it? Well then why don't I try my hand at that?" I had all the time in the world.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna pause on a couple of points there. I'm interested in what was the pull to being a part of publishing? Like, while you were in college studying, you were studying comparative literature, I wonder if you ever thought of translating or engaging with books in a different way? Or what was the draw to...?
Morgan Jerkins: I'm a nosy person and I've always wanted to be able to connect with people where they are. And so I thought that four languages would be a great way to that. I remember there was a moment, it happened when I was around 14 years old, I was a part of this People to People, student ambassador program. Where you would go to a foreign country for like two weeks and just sample what's going on over there.
And I remember there was one point where some of the students that I went with, they just assumed that people were gonna speak English to them. And it really impacted me because I was like, "How can we fly 14 hours and you expect these people to speak English? You should be speaking Japanese." And I think it was that moment where it was like, "I don't want to have this expectation." I think that whenever I speak a different language, or maybe just learning languages in general, has kept me humble and it's a versatility that I love.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And choosing to engage with books, I mean, I'm just so interested that you came to books in a real way senior year of college. And then it seems like you were very determined to make that your livelihood.
Morgan Jerkins: Right. I mean, I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was 14 years old. And my first book, This Will Be My Undoing, I talked about how I thought I wanted to be a doctor. My father is a doctor and I had this plan that I was gonna get like an MD PhD from Columbia and then take over his practice. And then when I was 14, I went through some terrible times of just being bullied. And I'm not a confrontational person. I internalized all of that.
So writing was a therapeutic vent. So I was writing what I thought were novels at the time. And I was just turning them out because it was just a place to escape. How was I gonna turn it into a business venture? I had no idea. I was just trying to create as messily as I could.
Sarah Enni: And so what made you think, I mean, Princeton is kind of like a gateway to publishing. How we traditionally understand it. But what made you think of being an editor or being on this side of things?
Morgan Jerkins: Well, I will just say at Princeton, I mean, I still didn't think I was gonna be successful. I didn't get into our creative writing program, even though I applied twice. And there were a lot of people around me who were more interested in working at Goldman Sachs and Deloitte and McKinsey, because you will be making the big bucks at 22 years old and they would come recruit our campuses.
So there was this point where I was like, "Am I making a mistake? I don't want to struggle. How do you go to a school like this, and you leave struggling?" And I've just always been good with words. When I got out of college, I had a friend of mine who had this very small indie blog, and she asked me if I wanted to partake in it. And I said, "Sure." That was like the babiest of baby steps of editing.
And then, I think it was the fall of 2015, I had just been only a couple months in New York, and I got a job working at Catapult, which is like a literary startup. They publish content online, they publish books, they have workshops. And that was when I was an editorial assistant. And I wasn't doing so much developmental editing, it was just like final edits, you know, looking at the mechanics and things like that. And I really liked it. I liked seeing stories at all of their stages and I liked reading about other people's lives.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I do think there's an element of nosiness to people who, I mean, I love reading memoir and it's like, "What else is it?"
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. I'm just a naturally nosy person I want to read about other people's lives.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about the MFA program. I talk to a lot of writers and I always like to ask about the MFA experience. Yours is so unique because it was low-residency and you seem to be, not only writing with the program of course, but finding yourself through writing online at the same time. Do you think, I mean, how do you think the low- residency experience, it seems like that was uniquely great for you. You know what I mean? Cause it gave you that free time.
Morgan Jerkins: It was interesting because when I got into the program, I thought it was a joke. Mind you, like I said earlier, I was rejected twice from my school's creative writing program. So I just assumed that I was like, "I'm not gonna get into this graduate level program. It's not gonna happen." And when I got there, I was the youngest person in my, what we call term. That term, the first term, I was the youngest person and I was the only Black person in my term.
So I just thought, "Oh, maybe they just had a quota to fill." And I'll never forget it. I was sitting next to one of the faculty members and I told her my name and she's like, "Yeah, I was one of the people that was like, we should let you in." And that's when I was like, "Okay, I do have a right to be here."
I knew I wanted low-residency because I did not want to live anywhere for two years. Now granted, I think Vermont is beautiful, but I did not want to live in Vermont for two years. And I also like the freedom of a low- residency program. I liked the fact where it's like, "Look, if you give me a deadline, I will meet it. If I get to construct my own reading list and I get to provide you with annotations every month on what I wanted to read."
So I like that freedom. And also you can live anywhere. So I liked that. A lot of people, they try to say you have to be self-disciplined to go to a low-residency program. And I agree. Probably even more so than full-residency programs. And I'm very good at that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It seems like you're a self-starter, like when you're in charge of your own creative intellectual pursuits, you tend to really thrive it looks like. That's exciting.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. Thanks.
Sarah Enni: Low-residency is something I like talking about because aspiring writers often are talking about MFA programs and, "Should I do it? Should I not do it?" And I feel like that's a great common ground for people who can't leave their kids at home or whatever. Or are more self-start-y. How did you start writing for the internet and getting traction there? What was that experience like?
Morgan Jerkins: I will say it was because of the start of the Black Lives Matter movement when Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, and the summer of, ooh, was that 2014? I mean, I just remember that I knew I wanted to write. I had already started writing opinion editorials when I was a senior in college. And I was noticing there was so much talk about diversity. And now we're talking about police brutality, which is something that Black people have known about for a long time.
But these news rooms didn't have a lot of people in there that looked like me. So they were relying a lot on freelancers. And that's where I found my entry, my portal, so to speak. I just had it in my mind I was like, "I may not be the best writer, but I'm gonna work harder than the best writer." And I remember I first started writing op-eds about these particular subjects for Quartz, which is a part of Atlantic media.
And it was the type of thing where I could produce a thousand words in 45 minutes, write it in at 10 o'clock see it go up at noon. And I knew that. I knew that I could be efficient. I knew that I could file on time and I knew that I could turn in a clean copy. And that's how I think I was able to establish my reputation with editors and also just expand my portfolio.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I'm so interested in this. Were you also writing nonfiction at the MFA program?
Morgan Jerkins: No! And that's the funny thing. When I was studying at Bennington, I was fiction. But I was writing nonfiction online.
Sarah Enni: Right. I'm so interested in this. And what kind of fiction in particular? Poetry?
Morgan Jerkins: Literary fiction.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I mean, I love this. And actually in another interview, I think with BNN, which is a great interview and I'll link to it. You were talking about being a Gemini.
Morgan Jerkins: No, I was literally about to say that, like I gotta have it all! Like, it can't be either or for me. So just like with the languages, I gotta be able to speak to multiple people. When it comes to fiction, I gotta be able to do nonfiction too. They play into one another.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I'm also a Gemini, so I deeply relate. And I write fiction and then I have this, which is like a whole other thing.
Morgan Jerkins: I have to have my hand in different things.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. So how do you think, I'm just so drawn to the fact that you really seem to start to find your voice in nonfiction writing and in deeply personal writing. What was the process of that? I mean, we'll get to the collection cause it's so deeply personal, but I'm just curious about what your thought process was in revealing so much of yourself publicly.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. So, I mean, even though I'm a Gemini, I suppress a lot. I minimize my pain. I minimize the grandeur of my feelings and try to make it seem like it's not that big of a deal. Sometimes it has to deal with trauma. Sometimes that deals with just being afraid to talk about the good things in life, because you're afraid it's going to turn around very quickly in a devastating way. And other times, just because I pour into other people a lot and I forget about myself.
And so when the book was acquired, it was a way to give honor to myself. And the way to show myself and other people, I existed. I exist. And these things happened and they matter. And the reason why they matter is because they're still stuck in my brain X amount of months or years later.
And I'm able to narrativize that in a way that younger me could never do that. And my book was that type of like, it was a document to give shame back. That's why I call it This Will Be My Undoing. It's an undoing of whatever was pressed upon me. I didn't do that myself. And it is deeply personal, in a sense. I don't know if I can write an essay collection that personal until, you know, X amount of years or a decade or two come around again. Because it was so much.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I talk about this with young adult writers too. I don't know if this is relevant, but a lot of my friends are kind of reaching this window where it's like, "Okay, we've reflected on our young life now through these works of fiction, maybe now we're moving to process the next decade." And as we get into our thirties, we're like, "Oh, I think we're starting to write about 20 somethings now."
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. I think it was so much processing and it was so personal, in a sense, that now it's like, "Okay, leading into my next book I could talk about history, my personal history, but I want to set it into a much, much larger context, something that has broader implications." And I'm loving more reportage. I'm loving more of connecting people's stories to one another. And that's something that really excites me nowadays. So it's just an expansion of what I've been doing.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Well, let's lead up to that. I want to talk about how you were going from studying an MFA and really finding a lot of traction online. I think at least a couple of your stories, or your articles, went viral. And you were kind of a known voice on the internet, which is exciting. So how did the idea for an essay collection come to be and how did you kind of start to put that together?
Morgan Jerkins: My agent said to me, "Why don't you think about an essay collection?" Which, it's funny, because when I went to meet my agent for the first time, I had a copy of Bad Feminist in my purse. So those things come around full circle because Roxanne was the one who gave me the blurb for This Will Be My Undoing. So that's cool how things do come full circle. But yeah, I was not interested in writing nonfiction, period. I thought that books, nonfiction books, are for those who have lived extraordinary lives.
Sarah Enni: So you were not? Wow.
Morgan Jerkins: Or those who are experts on a particular topic, I'm talking about 20, 30 years deep in a very esoteric subject. I didn't think there was a space for me. But what's interesting is that from the years 2014 to, I would say 2016, excuse me, 2018, because my book was published in 2018. There was just this huge boom, I guess, in feminist literature.
Essay collections, memoirs, people wanted to read about the lives of women for better or for worse. And it was a ripe time and she called it. And she saw that I was already writing subjects online that had to do with race and gender. And she just thought that because I had already had that platform, I might as well build off of that.
Sarah Enni: Had you been thinking that fiction was how you wanted to go forward?
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah! In fact, we actually shopped around a novel that I had written in my MFA program, but it didn't sell.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. It's funny how the world works sometimes and how smart of your agent to be like, "I see the potential for this." I'm interested in... I've never written an essay collection, so I'm not sure how... You had a bunch of items that had already been published, but most of what's in this, the vast, vast majority of This Will Be My Undoing is original writing. Did you think about reprinting some of your previous work?
Morgan Jerkins: Right. But there was just so much I wanted to say. You know, when you're writing online, usually online essays, at the time, and I'm talking about the time where again, there was this interest in personal essays. Editorial budgets were vast and there were all these sites popping up that were just as well known, at certain points, as the Legacy Publications. And at the time, essay collections could run anywhere from a thousand words to, if you're lucky, maybe 2,500 words, but that's if something tremendous happened.
A lot of the essays in that book, they're 5,000 words. And I can't cut them because if I cut them, it's gonna be terrible. You know what I'm saying? So the reason why it was so much original material, because there was so much I wanted to say. And I knew, having existed online for a certain amount of years already, but I just could not condense it in a way that would be digestible as you're commuting to work.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's such an interesting point. And I like thinking about that. So when you did decide to move forward and put a collection of essays together, how did you start thinking about structure? What kind of stories you wanted to tell? How you were gonna tackle it? Like, how did you conceive of it?
Morgan Jerkins: I will say, when it comes to, how do I put this? When you want sell an essay collection, you have to come up with a book proposal. And a book proposal, one of the components is chapter summaries, and then sample chapters. So I already had ideas of what I wanted to write about, but when it came to the structure, a lot of that was editorial sculpting.
Because, for example, the first chapter of my book is a combination, or blend, of something that happened to me when I was nine and then something that happened to me when I was a teenager. And my editor was like, "This needs to be the first chapter altogether." And I was like, "Oh my God!" I was nervous because I said, "I don't want somebody to go to Barnes & Noble and read this and then they're so turned off by the intensity, or just the honesty, that they put it back." But now that I've read the essay collection in its entirety, I'm like, "Oh yeah, okay. I understand why." It was just the genesis of my thought process and how that pain impacted me.
Sarah Enni: Right. And the first essay, it does totally set the scene. And I think in that, you're talking about the first time that you realized you were Black at a cheerleading tryout. Do you mind just kind of giving the...?
Morgan Jerkins: I knew that I was Black in the sense that I knew I wasn't white. But what Black meant to other people, I got that sense. I wanted to try out for a cheerleading squad. You know in pop culture, cheerleaders you're known as being popular, you're known as being beautiful. And that was what I wanted. But the cheerleader squad was pretty much all white.
And I tried out, other Black girls tried out. None of us made it. And I was devastated. And I remember me and a friend of mine who was, by the way, another girl of color, she was Filipina. We were arguing about something, I don't even remember cause we were so young, but she said, "You want to know why you didn't make the squad? Because monkeys like you don't make the squad."
And when she said that, I remember it. I remember it like it was yesterday. And I remember just kind of being, there's a level of hurt where it goes beyond hurt. It feels just like a gong where you're just congealed, I would say, is the best way to describe it. And that's how I felt in the moment, congealed. Where I didn't even hurt. It just went straight past hurt into being frozen. Because you're just so shocked that someone would say that.
And in that moment, even though I was young, I was like, "Oh, I didn't make the squad because I'm not human." You know what I'm saying? And that's when it made me realize like, "What was I really trying out for? Was I trying out to be a cheerleader? Or was I trying out to have a piece of humanity that these other little white girls are afforded immediately and I don't get?"
Sarah Enni: What was fascinating throughout the collection, and heartbreaking, was you write so honestly about these moments of realization. These moments, the gong moments like you're saying, and not only are you being confronted with external things that you can't control, other people's biases that are ingrained for whatever reason with them, but then you have to turn it on yourself and say, "Yeah, what was I trying to find by trying out?"
Morgan Jerkins: Right. And it was weird because even though we were arguing, I just was thinking like, "I couldn't believe somebody would say that to me." You know what I'm saying? Even to this day.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's pretty shocking. The essay collection, I'm interested in how you found the voice for it. It's so colloquial, but it's incredibly smart. It's got a lot of academic language. Like I could tell that you went to Princeton and when I read it, I was like, "Oh yes." But it's also about your real life and your family and how you talk to each other.
So I'm just interested in how you found the voice. And it's also very engaging. You know what I mean? It's like you're listening to your friend tell her story. So how did you develop that?
Morgan Jerkins: I'm not sure because that's just how I write. I'm able to switch between being colloquial, to being academic, to trying to find some way in between. Because I've had to move in and out of all these different spaces. I had to think about, "Could I write in a way that my mom would feel at home with? Could I write in a way in which my professors, my former professors, would recognize me? Could I write in a way in which the literary and publishing worlds of New York would recognize my voice because of what they already read online?"
So I had to juggle. But I was not that conscious of it. It's just something I've always had to do what I've had to move in spaces that were, and were not, my own.
Sarah Enni: Right. And that is an interesting point cause I'm curious about how much you thought about audience while writing these things?
Morgan Jerkins: I mean, you have to. When you're writing for money, it's a business. You have to market it, you have to sell it. So I had to think about, "Okay, this is a paperback book, it's an essay collection and I'm in my twenties. I can't write as if I'm writing my dissertation, it's gonna turn a lot of people off." And a lot of times, if I'm writing about a little girl that's trying to get into a cheerleading squad, why do I need to write such elevated highfalutin language for that? I don't need to do that.
So it's a matter of, I would say, flexibility. And I think also just knowing that, I'm just trying to tell a story, at the end of the day. Now, if I want to bring in the research then I know I might need to expand. But when I'm just trying to tell a story, I'm just trying to tell a story.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I guess the root of my question is just in imagining writing something really personal, where you're talking about your family, and you're talking about your sex life, and very personal topics. But you are always thinking about audience and how it's gonna be interpreted, or received, by even people you love or strangers.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. It's funny when you say sex, cause I was like, "Lack thereof." For me, I'm not gonna let anybody put any shame on me anymore. I said what I said, and I said it because it needed to be said. And it's interesting when you're a young writer or a female writer, or a young female writer, or young female Black writer, people always want to ask you, "Don't you think you went too far?"
And I get where it's coming from because I don't think it's coming from a place of malice. But I also feel like people never ask men this irrespective of age or race. In fact, they get praised for their audacity. And I tell people this all the time, "I get to set the line. I get to set the boundary for myself." So when people say, "Did you go too far?" Where's the boundary drawn? It might be your line, but not mine.
And now granted, ever since the publication of the book, I've been recalibrating a lot. You know, I'm still in my twenties. My energy is different. My boundaries are different. They're more directed. And so I do have a different level of judiciousness with what I disclose in personal and public circles. But at the time I was like, "I do what I want." You know, "I do what I want."
Sarah Enni: I love that. I was telling someone the other day that I think every real fight I've ever gotten into boils down to me saying, "Don't tell me what to do."
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah! I get where it's coming from, but it's like, "I did it for a reason." And it wasn't for me to be a provocateur. It wasn't so I could just bring up gratuitous scenes but it was like, "Cause it happened! And it's real. And it may be uncomfortable, but imagine for the person who housed these emotions for so long." You know?
Sarah Enni: What really struck me when I was reading was, and I'm gonna tell you my impression and let me know if I'm really off. But it felt like you were writing as a young Black woman to other young Black women who would probably see themselves and know your experience very well, or can relate to it really deeply. And that it was the parts that I didn't know or understand, like all the discussion about hair, which a lot was new to me, was this gift of being able to relate to you as, not a character, but the writer of these essays. And hear conversations I may not otherwise here.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. And I like that impression. I also just want to add that there were some Black women that couldn't see any of their experience in me, and that's fine. I make it clear about my privileges. If you see my Twitter, if you've gone to an event of mine, even in the book, there are certain privileges that come with me being light-skinned. There are certain privileges that come with my socioeconomic status, there are privileges that come with my education and I don't shy away from that.
And so I don't want to say, and I even say that towards the end of the first chapter, "I cannot speak for all women, Black women, and I don't want to. Because that's just reifying a structural problem in the publishing industry." However, I do think the ideas of being stigmatized for your race and gender, Black women can relate to.
Sarah Enni: Right. And like you're saying, I mean, white women writing memoirs are not asked to write a memoir for all white women like that.
Morgan Jerkins: No, not at all because there's so many, you know what I mean? There's so many to choose from if you go to a Barnes & Noble.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Right. I want to expand to talk about your family. And that kind of naturally leads to Wandering in Strange Lands because I was so struck by your conversations. In This Will Be My Undoing, you talk about your mother and how she raised you with such honesty, but also with such grace and respect and understanding for her. And then I was totally heartbroken about how much you learned about her by asking questions that she hadn't asked for many reasons. So I don't know, I'll kind of officially jump into this in a second, but what did you feel was sparked while you were looking into your own past that made you want to think, "Dig deeper."
Morgan Jerkins: The silences. I grew up around a lot of Black families where silence was like another family member. Silence was embedded in every single conversation. The tapering off of things we do, the stories that we have. There was always an origin, a genesis, that was missing. And I knew that. I knew when I would ask my mom questions about the customs that we uphold, the sayings, and all that. That she'd say, "That's just what we do." Because she didn't know.
But also because she grew up in an environment where there were strict delineations between conversations to be had, and conversations not to be had, for many different reasons. Could just be trauma, could be because of age difference. And also just because you just don't know. And once I created a book that contained so much self-interrogation, I wanted to step back a little bit further and interrogate my own family. And when I saw all of these missing pieces, that's what really sparked this sort of investigator in my mind. Where I just wanted to know. And that's what led to the book.
Sarah Enni: I love that, the inner detective.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. I was like, "I want to know because there has to be a root there." And I've always been a genuinely curious person. I like the journey more than finding the answer, I always have. And I knew, when you're speaking about Black families and oral histories that sustain themselves along generations, you might not always get the answer. But if I could find potential threads that resonate, and also can be convincing, and also show overlaps in other places, then I've done my job.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, let's just get into it. Just like stepping way back for a second. When you sold, This Will Be My Undoing, was it a two book deal?
Morgan Jerkins: No, actually Wandering Strange Lands and the novel that I'm working on, that was a two book deal.
Sarah Enni: Ooh, interesting. Okay. I do want to ask about the reception of the essay collection, because it's not always common to, it was a bestseller out of the gate.
Morgan Jerkins: It was crazy.
Sarah Enni: Debut bestseller. You're on the cover, which is so gorgeous and amazing. What was it like to have that reaction, the world like come to your book? Did you expect it? Was it unnerving?
Morgan Jerkins: Well, here's what I'll say. When the book sold, I think I was still working at Catapult. And even though I was working on the online side of Catapult, I also took part in editor acquisition meetings. I would just sit and watch and I would see every week, the manuscripts that would get rejected, the manuscripts that you'd have to table for next week and the next week, cause you didn't get to it. And I would think to myself, every time we'd go down the list like, "Damn!" Sorry for cursing.
Sarah Enni: Oh yeah, you can go for it.
Morgan Jerkins: Like, "Who knows how many years that person had been working on that?" You know what I mean? And I know it's a numbers game, but I didn't think. I was like, "Wow!" And also I read so much about first-time authors, or authors and the nature of writing, of the nature of success, the nature of money and sustainability, that I just was like, not expecting failure, but just not to get my hopes up.
I think the tide was changing for me when Roxanne reviewed my book. And also when I became a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. That was when I was like, "Okay, stuff must be happening." And then I saw that I kept making all these anticipated lists and that's when I was like, "Oh yeah!" Like, "Maybe something's happening here." But I will just be honest, like in terms of the promotion and the buzz around my book, I don't think it could have gotten any better in my eyes as a debut author.
I mean, I went on a month long book tour, my book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. I got a good review from the New York Times, I was in a two-page spread in Elle magazine. I was on PBS News Hour. I was nominated for, long-listed for, the Art of the Essay award from PEN.
I think it's gonna take a while for me to understand the grandeur of that. Because even with my second book, I'm still thinking I'm a debut. Like it's weird. And maybe it attests to the quickness of how everything has been happening, but also just because it doesn't sink in. It just doesn't.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And that's why I asked about it. I'm happy for you that you had so much publishing experience and know-how cause then I think it contextualizes things. And I'm not naming names here, but I've seen some people have success right out of the gate and it can be very disorienting, especially if they don't have grounded people around them being like, "This isn't normal." Like, "It won't always be this way."
Morgan Jerkins: But that's what I had to remind myself. I just had to tell myself like, "It's not! It's not normal." And I think because I see publishing, and I see people talk about the privileged to be a writer and I'm like, "This is not normal." You know?
Sarah Enni: That is pretty exciting.
Morgan Jerkins: It was very, very exciting.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about the origin of Wandering in Strange Lands, cause it's kind of a unique book. So how did you come up with the concept?
Morgan Jerkins: It's gonna sound crazy, but I was watching Get Out, the movie. Have you seen the movie?
Sarah Enni: Yes.
Morgan Jerkins: So the climactic scene towards the end where Daniel Kaluuya's character has his hand wrapped around Allison Williams, I think that's her name, her throat, and the police come up. And everyone in the theater gasped. Now mind you, I was watching this in Magic Johnson theater in Harlem, so it was a Black audience. And I thought it was so intriguing, to me. Cause I'm always a person that has to look beneath the surface... always.
And I thought to myself, "Yes, we're Black in America. We understand police brutality. But to have that collective anxiety, where does that come from?" Cause we're all not from Harlem. Our people probably came from all these different places.
So I was really interested in like, "What unites us? What connects us in spite of time and distance?" And when I started doing some preliminary research, I realized that one of the greatest or most influential time periods I would argue in American history was the Great Migration. When millions of African Americans fled the South and moved to the North, to the Midwest and the West to have a better chance at life.
And when I realized that all of these communities, they scattered across the country, but yet you see similarities in our food, oftentimes in the way we speak to each other, the traditions that we uphold. I want us to be in dialogue with each other. To have these conversations between those who left and those who stayed. Just to show us, and to show the country, or the world rather, that in spite of the time and the distance, despite the land displacement, despite the racial terrorism, despite the trauma, we are still connected to each other. And so that's what it was, it was an investigative journey.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's like an investigative road trip memoir.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. Because throughout the first iterations of this book, because it went through many drafts, it was hard. I don't like to use the term blood, sweat, and tears, but this book was the hardest thing I've ever done. Because I had opened up so much in my first book, naturally, you want to go back in your shell again. So the first couple of iterations of Wandering in Strange Lands, I tried to take myself out of it. I tried to put myself just as a researcher going to these places.
And my editors were like, "You are a part of this." And then I realized, "Yes, I am. My people weren't from New Jersey. They hadn't been there since emancipation. They had to have come from someplace else." And I found out that they did. And so once I realized like, "You have to go back in again." It took a couple of drafts, but I had to go back in again. And once I did, and I did interviews with my family, and then I looked at the transcripts from all of my field work that I had done, I was like, "Oh, they're in conversation with each other." And it started to line up in very magical ways.
Sarah Enni: That's so fascinating that at first it didn't have this structure because it feels so organic.
Morgan Jerkins: Nope. I wanted to take myself out of it completely. And I realized that like, "You're going to a place where maybe a lot of people have not gone, where there are people that they've never met, and you have to stay with them."
Sarah Enni: And you bring up early in the book this, I'm so interested and I want to talk about your research strategy or how you went about it, because you talk about Eurocentric research and wanting to do something different. So can you define what Eurocentric, what you mean by that?
Morgan Jerkins: Just a Eurocentric framework where it's like, "How do we define truth?" I'll never forget, when I used to live with two roommates, one of them was a white guy and I've been living in Harlem, but this was in my first apartment. Every time I talk about my experience as a Black woman, he would always ask for my data, my statistics. And I realized that is so much about life. When you talk about truth, as you know it, people want to see the research. They want to see the quantitative qualitative analysis. They want to see the data. They want to see the hard paperwork, the documents, the paperwork.
Well, when it comes to history of African Americans, a lot of our lives aren't documented. And oftentimes when you find those documents, they're corrupted. They're not in our hands they're in the hands of the state, they're in the hands of the city government. A lot of times, it's just not written down. That doesn't make it any less true. And so for me, I had to constantly tell myself, "Stop looking for the hard facts all the time. You might not get it." But what you can do is to be a little bit imaginative, to try to understand why these stories persist in these families for so long. What is it about the present that can provide a mirror to the past? And also to learn, to be more sensitive.
The last thing a family wants to do that knows about the erasure in their town, that knows about the erasure with their ancestors, is for somebody to come to them and say, "Where's the documents though? Where's the proof?" What does proof mean when you're talking about a marginalized and disenfranchised group in this country?
And I found it, you know, when I say African Americans, there are many other sub-ethnic groups of African Americans in this country. It's not just African American. You have the Louisiana Creoles which, mind you, some may say that's not a subset of being African American, which is a whole other conversation. You have Gullah Geechee people. You have those who are considered Black and indigenous.
These are people who have been erased time and time again, but their stories persist. They are their ancestor's stories. They are the living embodiments of that. So what do you do with that? I have to step outside myself. When you are indoctrinated in the Academy, when you're in all these white spaces, the first thing you're trying to look for is proof. Now that doesn't mean I didn't do my research. Of course, I consulted with scholars. I had a freelance transcriptionist. I went to the library. I looked through books. I did that. But I made sure that these secondary sources needed to amplify, not override, what I saw with my own eyes and what I heard.
Sarah Enni: Right. And the story of your family, which is the thread throughout. And I thought of the terminology of oral histories. Cause some of the most compelling, like I loved when you talked about magic and superstition in Black community, around your family, and then a transcribed conversation with your, is it two uncles?
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: I mean, and that was just so illustrative of your point, and also just kind of felt like you were sitting, listening to these stories and recollections that are, like you said, facts and data from their life experience.
Morgan Jerkins: And I've never talked to them about that. And it was so vivid. When I heard them speak, and when I saw them, it literally felt like they were returning to a memory. And I thought about how lucky I was that these men are in their seventies and I could have forgotten all this. I could have not asked them anything. And I recorded it so that even when they transition, I'll always have it.
And I've noticed that when I was talking to other Black people, when you get them into a space where you ask them about their lives, something happens where they're physically present, but they're going back. And it can often ignite something in them where they're excited and they're very animated. And oftentimes it can be characterized by more silences because they think about the pain and their body remembers it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well, I wanna talk about your mom in this context. Cause as I alluded to earlier, my heart totally broke. You talk about a moment where you informed your mom about where her dad was born and she didn't know. Can you described that?
Morgan Jerkins: We didn't talk about it. I remember I told my mom I was doing the research and she recorded my Pop-Pop, my grandfather, talking - her dad - about what it was like in Georgia, and why they left. And she recorded, she was talking about just the brutality down there. And she said, "I never heard this story. I never heard this story." And I was thinking, "Why don't you tell people?" Then I'm also like, "Who wants to hear about all those things that happened in the South?" And I'm trying not to spoil it, but she didn't know.
And I didn't ask about how did it make her feel? But I kinda just feel like people just move on. I always like to tell people, so much of African American life is characterized by movement. When you think about the treacherous journey from the African continent to America, or the colonies at the time. When you think about the Great Migration, when you think about the Trail of Tears, it's so much about moving. And in this book I wanted to interrogate what happens? What's lost when you move? And what is retained?
Sarah Enni: And what really struck me was, I love phrasing it that way, that's so true. And even within a generation. I mean, because you talk so much about having to sort of... and I want to be careful on how I phrase this... but in having to sort of unlearn some of the things that your mom taught you, not that she was teaching you it for ill intent, but to survive in the world. And her parents had this intent. I mean, the change over that time is enormous.
Morgan Jerkins: Right. Right. We could talk all we want to, you know, when I get in Black circles, about what our parents did and what we'd have to undo. But we have to also understand that, depending on when your parents were born and raised, they had to survive under stressful times that no human being has to survive through. I mean, my mother, she grew up seeing KKK burned crosses in our backyard because they were the second Black family on the block.
This is in South Jersey, this wasn't in the deep South. So when you're alive at that time, you got to survive by any means. And that's the thing that I had to remind myself, is just to be sensitive. Be very sensitive, even with your own relatives, who decide to let you in to those parts of their memory that they may not access otherwise.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested, obviously I'm an interviewer also. So I'm interested in when you were conducting this research in the field, what did you learn about helping people feel safe evoking those stories? Cause I think, and this is just my thought, was that it may not always feel safe to tell these stories. So it was kind of a new experience for them maybe to divulge this, especially when there's a microphone.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. One of the things that I did was I spoke to most people I was interviewing before they even saw me. And so I knew that, I said, "Just because you're Black does not mean that...you don't know these people. These aren't your communities." And I made sure they knew who I was. They heard my voice before I went there. I gave them my website so they knew I already had a bestselling book. This is where I'm based. You can go online and type it in and you can see me.
But also because I was Black, and when they saw me, I was showing up literally with a recorder, with a notebook and pen. And I'm also short. And I wasn't showing up with a whole team, and a camera crew and lighting. It was literally, not all the time cause at certain points in my journey, particularly when I was in Louisiana and when I was in California, I wasn't by myself. I had someone with me, but it was always like one other person. But beyond that, I was by myself. So I kind of think I put people at ease cause I'm a woman, also. Now that might be sexist, I don't know if that comes out right. But I'm not as intimidating, you know?
Sarah Enni: Right. And I relate to that and I feel like there's a benefit. I mean, I can speak to my experience of even asking someone to hold a microphone. They can forget that they're holding a microphone when it's just this, it's an audio format, it feels like a very intimate conversation. And when people forget that they're on tape is when you have these wonderful conversations.
Morgan Jerkins: Right. And also I'll say, and this is gonna sound, I don't know if this will sound narcissistic or whatever, but people have always told me that I'm really easy to open up to. I don't know why. I don't know if it's because of the energy that I give or whatever, but I find that people open up to me really easily. And what I do is that I do just like you're doing. I will put the recorder right in between us so they would see it. They would see what I would start and stop. They would see that I would be writing in my notebook.
Other times, some of these people that I've interviewed before, they would tell me they know people that were putting the recorder in their back pocket. You know what I'm saying? Or they talk to them and they realize they weren't even being recorded. It's things like that. So they would see that. And I would be spending time with these people over the course of days. I'd come to them, even though I'd be scared a lot of times. In fact, there were many moments where I'm like, "How the hell did I gather the bravery to go to these places?" And by myself! But it was because I had a job to do.
Sarah Enni: Right. Well, let's talk about that. The actual travel element of this book. I know you're a big traveler. I just would love to hear, like, when you set out to do this, was it always you're like, "I want to be in the field."
Morgan Jerkins: Yes. If you're trying to have this sort of national dialogue with people who fled, people whose families fled, and those who stayed, you have to go where they are. And I think that's a part of me being a storyteller is that you have to follow me going there. If I didn't explain to you what these places looked like, what it felt being there, it would lose so much intimacy, it would cause so much distance. And in fact, I'd even argue that the book would fall apart in a sense.
Cause I want you to feel that Southern heat. I want you to be able to see the many fields of land that I'd see. I want you to be able to understand metropolitan spaces. What it's like to be alone. What the water feels like. I had to go there. And I also thought to myself, because I left, in a sense. Part of me being born and raised in New Jersey is because my ancestors made a choice that changed the course of my family's lives forever.
So for me not to go back, and just stay in my comfortable New York life? Would be a huge disservice to the research that I was doing. And just as a journalist, and also to my audience, it would be a huge disservice to them. I also think my editor would not like that. They would not. They're like, "No. You gotta go there."
Sarah Enni: That wouldn't have flown. This feels like it's such a unique work of nonfiction. And it did feel like this beautiful blend between fact and data supported analysis of what happened. And also an oral history of tracing generations of people and the stories that they've passed down. I'm having a hard time articulating, but it just felt so important, and this lived reference point.
I think about museums where you walk through and you just see clothes that people wore, like normal stuff that was over the course of someone's life. And it engenders empathy and understanding in this way. There's not a question here, I guess, but it's just such an interesting work in that way.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah. I mean, that's all I wanted. I wanted people to meet the people that I met and to be moved by the people I met. And to just understand that the lives of African Americans are so multilayered and so complicated and so rich. And I know that...in a global sense. But in a molecular intimate level, aside from my family, I wanted to know that. And I wanted to be able to document that. And what I hope that it inspired for, I'll say first for a Black audience, is to start asking questions to the people in your life who are still alive. And I think for non-Black audiences, is just to understand how we, as a people, have survived and still been able to speak to each other in spite of what it took for us to remain here.
I think that that is what I really wanted to convey with this book. And just for me personally, I want to have a child one day. Now I understand to my child that because of this book, because of the journey that I took, that my child will now be able to name ancestors 300 years back. That, for me, is probably one of the greatest gifts I can give to my family now and in the future.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. And a good reminder about telling stories to our kids. I mean, my family experience is obviously wildly different, but my grandma was born in Michigan, the daughter of two people from Finland. And it was like, she wasn't gonna talk about it. Cause it was really sad. Her parents died young and it was tragic. But I'm like, "God, I wish I had those stories now." Because she really lived a life that I can't imagine. And it's a good reminder, while they're there, document it, internalize it.
Morgan Jerkins: And that's the great thing, it's like, I have this collection of voices, you know? Those who are my family and those who aren't. Even when they're gone I'll always have it.
Sarah Enni: And contextualizing your own family, I feel like that's a useful thing. Everyone in your family can read this book and be like, "Oh, I learned about myself." Oh my gosh, I want to talk about your novel. This is so interesting. Can you tell me, I don't know if this is true or not, but it feels unusual to have a nonfiction and a fiction title sell in the same contract.
Morgan Jerkins: Oh no. There's two book deals that sell all the time. I mean, to me, cause I'm in the New York publishing world. But yeah, this is a novel that I had been working on. Oh, I'm so excited. It's a novel I've been working on since I was in grad school. I first wrote it as a short story. And the book, It's an African American folk lore. Which I actually give a little bit of a teaser in here, is that it's believed that if you're born with a call, which is when you're born in the amniotic sac, you are blessed with healing properties, the gift of second sight, being able to see into the future or see in the past. And I wanted to contextualize that into modern day Harlem.
One of the things that I've been fascinated with and mortified by is the precariousness of Black mothers in this country. So I wanted to write about what does it mean to possess a call? So I write about this matriarch family, where they profit off pretty much selling their call and their bodies. And how does this capitalistic effort intersect with the ideas of family loyalty, and of course, motherhood? And it's set in modern day Harlem.
And I wrote it actually as a short story. I was in grad school. I was afraid to write it. I was like, "What kind of book is this? What kind of story is this?" And my advisor at the time was Alex Chee. And when he read the short story, he said, "This needs to be a full-length book." And I was like, "Oh man." Cause I just wanted to try my hand at short stories. And sure enough, the novel it sold.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's amazing. I feel like when he says something, you're like, "Okay!"
Morgan Jerkins: He did! I'm glad I took his advice.
Sarah Enni: What has it been like to shift from writing nonfiction so intensely for a few years into this fiction space?
Morgan Jerkins: Fiction has always been my first love. It has always been my first love. And it's like a secret space because the world doesn't know me as that. The world knows me as nonfiction. Even though people say you went to the Bennington writing seminar, I think a lot of people assume it's for nonfiction. So it's something that I've held in my space for a very long time. And what I had to do to shift, I worked on Wandering in Strange Lands and then I worked on the fiction and I felt like my voice felt more confident. I felt more authoritative, but also allowed myself the idea of like, "Let your characters take you where they're gonna take you."
It's the same thing with like with the journey with protagonists. Think about the journey with like this field work. You don't know these people. Yeah, you got in touch with them, but they might lead you to certain places that you didn't expect. And I think that's the type of thing that I wanted to repeat in novel writing, is to have an idea, but to take your hands off a little bit. Cause I can definitely be controlling. And if it comes to narratives and trying to hold onto things, it's like, "Let it breathe and see what happens to it."
Sarah Enni: Right. I totally relate to that. I love the parallel between interviewing and letting someone tell you their story and letting a character develop.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah, just let a character develop. But you may not know how the chapter is gonna take form until you write the previous chapter. You get to the end and you're like, "Okay, now I know." But trust yourself enough to know that your brain will find the connections when it needs to. I used to be a type of person where I needed to chapter-by- chapter, "This is what happens, this is what happens, this is what happens."
And that might work. But I remember when I was in Bennington, I was listening to a lecture by a poet named Marie Howe, I think her name is. And she said about being in the state of not knowing. And that has influenced me for a while where it's like, "It's okay to not know where you're gonna lead. Stop catastrophizing." Which is something I tend to do. And think you're just gonna get to the end of the chapter and it just gonna stop immediately. And you're not gonna know where to pick up the pieces.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited for you.
Morgan Jerkins: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: That's thrilling. I want to wrap up by talking about therapy and then advice.
Morgan Jerkins: Yeah!
Sarah Enni: I am a huge proponent of therapy, I talk about it on my show all the time. And so I was thrilled to hear you bring it up often in your interviews for This Will Be My Undoing. And I just wanted to give you the chance to talk about how that was a part of untangling these nonfiction stories about your own life.
Morgan Jerkins: Right. I needed it. I grew up like many other Black people, religious Black people, were therapy was just not something that we discussed. It was not something I knew anyone did. But I needed it. I needed someone to help me figure out the tools for self-care, for forgiveness, for grace, for boundary setting, and for celebration.
And I think that, for me, it's something that I still do. It's like a tune-up every week. I can submerge myself in work very quickly. I can submerge myself in the thoughts, feelings, and lives of other people. And it's like a check-in. So it's something that I'm fortunate to do, because I remember when I was a freelancer, when I had a $4,000 deductible, it was not easy. So it's a privilege that I don't take lightly.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's a really good point and that it's important to point out. But man, everyone should be in therapy.
Morgan Jerkins: They should. All of us are, I would say, all of us are dealing with trauma on some level. You know, when I was younger, I used to think trauma was like, someone had a near death accident, someone was at war. No. Trauma could be heartbreak. Trauma could be someone forgetting your birthday. You know what I'm saying? And sometimes you need someone to help you souter those wounds. Sometimes you need a person to help you heal. You know, you don't have to do it alone.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. I remember when my dad passed away when I was young, when I was 23, and at that time even, you're like a baby adult. But I still had a hard time saying that that was a tragedy. Like I was like, "Oh, no tragedies happen to other people." Like the Titanic is a tragedy.
Morgan Jerkins: Right, you try to push it all.
Sarah Enni: Right. And as I got older, and with the help of therapy, I was like, "Oh no, that absolutely was. And I absolutely need help dealing with that." You know? So I was happy to hear you talk about, sing the praises of, therapy. And I can only imagine for writing personal stories and working through all that, that therapy helps you unearth narratives in your own life, I think. So it would be a great help.
I love to wrap up with advice. And any general writing advice would be great, but I'd love it if you could share advice about researching or writing nonfiction, what you've learned?
Morgan Jerkins: Oh, man! It's always, god, when it comes to researching have separate folders in Google doc. When I was going to all these different places, there were folders upon folders. Outsource the work if you can afford it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, you said you had a freelance transcriptionist.
Morgan Jerkins: I had a freelance transcriptionist. If I did not have her, who knows how long this would have taken. Somebody had to coach me in there. They were like, "You don't have to do it all, you know?" And then I realized like, "I don't have to do it all." Talk to people. I was very fortunate to reach out to scholars and academics who helped me. And I realized a lot of them are just sitting in their office. That doesn't mean they're not busy, but they would love to have somebody reach out to them. And so talk to them.
Whatever type of insight that you have, or some type of guesses, talk to the people because they had a specialty for a reason. They're passionate about it. So talk to them about that. Question everything. Be careful when you come into places with preconceived notions about what you are or aren't gonna find.
And I would always say to debrief. If you're doing work out in the field, always debrief at the end of day, whether it's writing down notes, whether it's journaling your thoughts and feelings, recording yourself, always debrief. Just a way to do that final ejection at the end of the day.
If you're a woman traveling alone, make sure someone knows where you are, take pictures of your license plate number, the picture of the car. And what I mean, let people know where you are, let them know who you're with. Let them know what hotel you're staying at. All those sorts of things.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing advice. Can't get too practical on this show. I love that.
Morgan Jerkins: No, you cannot.
Sarah Enni: And what about writing? For people who are writing personal essays and who are maybe a little scared to expose themselves, what would you say to them?
Morgan Jerkins: You'll know when you're ready. Like I tell my students all the time, "You only have one body." I am not a type of instructor where I just say, "Write. Write." I'm like, "Where are you?" Some essays that I wrote in This Will Be My Undoing, I've been trying to write them for like two years prior. And every time I'd open up a Google doc, I would just look at the blinker and click it out. Cause I wasn't ready. You know, I was still deeply traumatized.
And so not every essay you need to go there right now. Check in with your body. And if you feel like it's too intense, come back to it. You can always come back to it. When I say, when you write about your personal life, just understand that some people read your things in good faith, and some people read your things in bad faith, but at the end of the day, go there when you're ready.
I also say, "Don't ask permission to write for what you want to write." Period. If you want to do reportage, if you want to do an op-ed. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of times women, especially women of color, especially Black women, we know what it's like to be overlooked. We know what it's like to work twice or three times as hard. And I think what helped in my career was this dogged persistence. If someone said no? "Well, let me talk to this editor? Let me talk to was this editor." It doesn't stop my show, nothing derails me.
And you have to have that type of hustle when you're a freelancer. So I think that's important. But when it comes to personal essays, check in with yourself. Write the story to the best of your abilities, be open to editing. If you're not open to editing then you're not gonna be able to write publicly. And also, don't be so tethered to one thing. Whether it's the structure, how you want to start it, how you want to end it. Because when you allow an editor to come in, a good editor, they might show you places in which you can expand. And it's okay to do that. Things that you probably didn't even think of.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that, the collaborative side of it. This has been such a joy. Thank you so much for taking your morning with me.
Morgan Jerkins: My pleasure. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much to Morgan. Follow her on Twitter @MorganJerkins and on Instagram @_MorganJerkins. And follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks also to transcriptionist-at- large Julie Anderson. And, as ever, thanks to you maximalist scandalous literature lovers for listening.
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