Author Birthday – 14 November – Jenny Offill

Happy Birthday, Jenny Offill, born on 14 November 1968.

Jenny Offill Quotes

1. I have always liked compressed and fragmentary forms. I trace it back to my mind being blown by John Berryman when I was nineteen. (Wikipedia)
2. I tend to be someone who wants to write the whole thing before I show it to anyone. It’s not ideal, because I’m also really, really slow. It’s such a private language, when you’re in the middle of a book, and there’s an associational, dream logic quality to the way I write. (The White Review)
3. I try to teach my students to read at the line level, because I think that’s what’s helpful: to start thinking about what they’re writing line by line, as well as the bigger picture. I’m also always trying to make them read things in different genres: poetry or essays or non-fiction or primary sources from science or anthropology. I want them to get a sense of the strangeness of language. (The White Review)
4. I want my work ultimately to feel beautiful and mysterious, and also to make people wonder how it was done. Because that’s what I like in books. I like to wonder how it was done. (The White Review)
5. There are amazing books that are just sad, and I’m sure there are amazing books that are just funny too, but when the funny and sad are together, those are the books I love and read over and over. (The White Review)
6. I do find, though, that if I’m going to do any writing at all, I actually have to not have a connection to the internet. (The Interlochen Review)
7. I find writing itself very hard, but I sometimes say I write in a kind of magpie style. I go around, and these certain things seem shiny to me, and then I take them, and then it takes a while to figure out the nest, but I have the shiny things for a while. So I have hundreds of pages of research notes, and very few pages of the actual book. It’s sort of ridiculous. (The Interlochen Review)
8. Libraries are one of the last noncommercial spaces we have where everyone is welcome. They strike me as a little glimpse of how we could live if we chose to be a generous society rather than a fearful one. (The Paris Review)
9. Any writing by a woman that insists on the whole range of emotional experience is a feminist act. (The Sewanee Review)

Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. She writes literary and contemporary fiction, often using fragmented narratives and dark humour in her work. The main themes in her books include climate change, motherhood, marriage, loneliness, and the uncertainties of modern life. She has written three novels for adults, Last Things, Dept Of Specualtion, and Weather, as well as a number of books for children. Her honours include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction. She has also edited works of non-fiction with Elissa Schappel. Offill taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Queens University. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Source for Image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikipedia

by Amanda Patterson
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