Jiordan Castle is the author of Disappearing Act, a memoir in verse. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to the LA-based food and culture magazine Compound Butter. Originally from New York, she has an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College and lives in Philadelphia.
Jiordan, in creating Disappearing Act, you’ve chosen a unique form – a memoir in verse. What drew you to this style, and how did it help you convey the complexities of growing up with an incarcerated parent?
There are so many ways to recapture a memory, let alone transform it for the purposes of sharing with a wider audience. Verse can give you the freedom to explore the impossible, urgent, and emotional aspects of memory. Because Disappearing Act gives readers a reimagined snapshot of my life at a difficult time, it helped to have a fluid form. There were so many moments growing up during that period in which language failed me, or I felt like I failed it, and being able to fill in the blanks (or leave them blank!), move around on the page, and even cross things out felt like the truest version I could share.
Your work spans a variety of genres, from poetry to essays and stories. How does working across these different forms influence your approach to writing, particularly in a memoir?
There’s that saying about when your eyes are bigger than your stomach—something along those lines. My ambition and my imagination are larger than my talents. Now, anyway! That’s my opinion, but I think it’s a healthy one to have in my early thirties. I’ve been writing since I was a kid and still I marvel that there’s no pass/fail to all of this.
I’m writing toward something I can’t name, a place I will never reach. It gets closer and further all the time. To that end, some genres and forms come more naturally to me than others. Sometimes it’s the container and sometimes it’s the content. For Disappearing Act in particular, the idea of prose just wasn’t on the table. The book didn’t want that. I didn’t want that.
In telling your personal story, how did you navigate the emotional landscape of writing about family and a parent’s incarceration? Were there specific challenges in balancing vulnerability and narrative strength?
This is my story, but I’m far from being the only one in it. I’m certainly not the only one affected by the events in the book or by the book having been published. My engine was thinking of my younger self and all the young people like me. I felt like no one was telling this story, our story.
Why not me? And if not now, when? When you think of the bigger picture, when you allow yourself to consider your story in service of something that could help others—especially young people who lack the autonomy I have in my adult life—the balance becomes easier. It quiets the critic inside who says you don’t have the right. You do. I do.
Your book has been praised for its accessibility to young adults while still resonating with older readers. How did you tailor your writing to appeal to such a broad audience?
I really appreciate that. What to me is a gift, bringing different age groups together, is a bit the opposite when it comes to traditional marketing. Where you shelve a book is needlessly complicated sometimes and I think at least the internet and special indie bookstores are helping the right books find the right readers at the right time.
I love YA. I also love poetry, memoirs in essays, and other experimental forms. I could say I wrote the book in a sort of cross-genre style I like to read, but I think it was the natural shape for this particular story. It didn’t feel like a choice the way some of my work has or does. It’s been incredibly special to meet with teens, mother-and-daughter duos, and fathers who all find something different in the book. When we read across genres and marketing categories, we make the world a little bigger. We maybe understand each other a little better too.
As someone with an MFA in Poetry, how has your academic background in poetry shaped your writing style and choice of themes in your memoir?
I tend to think my MFA has made me a better editor of my own stuff and a bit braver in terms of experimentation. I will never master poetry. Getting better is good! Being in community with other writers, other poets, helps me think in images and sounds and moments. Poetry is the perpetual present. That’s how writing the book felt to me. Reading from it too.
Given the introspective nature of Disappearing Act, can you share a bit about your writing routine? How do you prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for each writing session?
This book was a completely different beast than anything else I’ve ever done. I hate the expression “it is what it is” because to me it’s so… limiting. It is what it is, but what is that? What all is that? I knew this book would become a relic of a certain time, not just the time I was writing about but the time in which I was writing, and I had to make peace with that. Sometimes I still do.
I started those mental exercises early on because my agent and I sold this book on proposal—with sample pages and a plot synopsis, my first of any kind—and I knew it would become whatever it had to become within a matter of months, not years. For many of those months, I only had Fridays to write for long stretches. So I would sit in my chair and do as much as I could for as long as I could. It wasn’t exactly a fun book to write (probably true of most memoirs), but it felt like training for more—running to get somewhere beyond where I thought I could go.
Tactically, it’s like this: I have tea or water, I put on some video game soundtracks, and I write as much as I can. A lot of times my brain cheats or becomes distracted and I have to move away from the essay to get down the first draft of a poem, or my new sample pages inform the plot synopsis and vice versa. I have a mind that goes too fast, such that it can be difficult to pause my ideas let alone slow my anxiety, but sometimes I can make friends with the noise. Sometimes the noise is actually a new, good direction.
If you could have a conversation with any author throughout history about their writing routine or creative process, who would that person be?
This is the hardest question! I always freeze! There are so many authors I’d love to talk to across genres, stories, and times in which they were (or are) writing. But to get really specific with my head and my heart, Garret Weyr has always been one of my favourite writers and a particularly bold, singular voice in YA.
When I was growing up, I read and reread her books. She writes teenagers who have such rich interior lives and complex, real circumstances. I revisit them now, newer titles and titles from many years ago, and I always find something to love. The writing on a craft level, the individual sentences, is magical to me. And her plots—trying to demystify a sister’s suicide, falling in love with someone much older, fluid sexuality, the pressures of excelling at something in school or sports when you’re still figuring yourself out… Her work made me feel possible. Curious. Brave. In my opinion, it’s what the best books, and particularly the best YA books, do.
I’d love to know about the books you’re reading at the moment. What have been some of your favourite recent reads?
I discovered Mary H. K. Choi’s work with her third novel Yolk, which I adore and then I read her first two books, both of which were wonderful. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (a rare instance where I think both book and movie are perfect and perfectly different). I’ve also enjoyed being in Elizabeth’s Strout’s different worlds with Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. I find novels-in-stories very fulfilling.
I’ve also been rereading Louise Glück’s poetry collection Averno before bed. It helps that I’m married to an avid reader; we share and discuss and I feel my brain firing in exciting new directions.
Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring authors who wish to explore deeply personal and potentially painful experiences in their writing?
Sleep on your decisions. Fact check everything. Remember that writing and publishing are two separate things. Allow yourself to be surprised, to stay open, to be vulnerable on the page. If you have people you can trust in your publishing corner—your agent, early readers, editor, and so on—the business stuff is easier to navigate. And when you’re weighed down by outside expectations or not measuring up to the vision you have in your head, take a breath. Take a beat. Pet the dog. Read something you love and let it fill you. And then the work can begin again.
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