Monday, May 6, 2024

TBR: Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres by Charles Jensen

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books. 

 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

Movies and memory intertwine in Splice of Life. Each chapter hybridizes traditional memoir storytelling with discussion of a single film whose plot, symbols, or themes resonate with my lived experiences.

 

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

 

This is a nontraditional memoir, first because it is episodic and thematic, and second because I braided traditional memoir conventions with film analysis. Movies have always been so important to my life. If I weren’t a writer, I’d be a filmmaker. I wasn’t sure this was a book people would want to read, but the book as “product” is not something I think a lot about until it’s all done. Writing is always an exploration for me. Can I do this? Can I extend it and keep it interesting? Can I surprise myself along the way? I majored in film studies as an undergrad and film theory and form have inspired how I write poetry. For this book, I wondered what would happen if I leaned all the way in that. If I put movies into my book. If, by doing so, I could create a web of connections between them and me, between them and the reader, and between the reader and me.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

This was the fastest I’ve ever published a book. I started writing it in 2018 and dove into the first draft of the last essay in late 2020. I took classes at UCLA Extension with Shawna Kenney and Gordon Grice to help me revise a few chapters. A literary agent who visited Shawna’s class suggested I look to an indie or university press for this, so while I queried agents for a traditional publishing route, I also queried academic presses and submitted to indie presses, mostly through competitions. The queries weren’t successful, but then I got an email from Andrew Gifford at Santa Fe Writers’ Project telling me my manuscript was a finalist for their annual prize and that they wanted to publish it. That was October 2022. I had convinced myself somehow that this book was unpublishable and unreadable, so it was really surprising to me. I’m still trying to get comfortable with the idea people might enjoy reading this—a good reminder that publication doesn’t cure your insecurities! The way my mind works, I just don’t let positivity in for more than a few seconds. The high in the publishing process were those few seconds after I got Andrew’s email, and the lows were almost every other moment, when I was certain the book would never come together.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

It’s not really advice, but it’s Louise Glück’s introduction to her collection The First Four Books of Poems. It’s a brief meditation on the books gathered there, but what she wrote fundamentally changed how I write. She catalogs how, after publishing each collection, she looked back at what she seemed focused on, and what she had avoided. Her first book used a lot of sentence fragments, so in the second she challenged herself to write complete sentences. She noticed she resisted using question marks in another, so pushed herself to let questions occupy poems in the next book. If I could distill it down into actual advice, I’d say something like be sure you know where you’ve been so next time you can set out for somewhere new.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

My editor Adam al-Sirgany actually pointed this out to me. There’s a weird mirroring of the chapters in the book, with the seventh chapter serving as a hinge. The first chapter and last chapter concern competitions (prom court and Jeopardy, respectively). The second and twelfth are deeply internal meditations on gender and sexuality. The third and eleventh are about dangerous seductions and how we are broken by them. And so on. I didn’t plan that, but it’s present, and I’m obsessed with it!

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Titles are really important to me, and they usually make themselves known to me early on. Since I didn’t know I was working on a book until I had several chapters written, though, it wasn’t until I was done that I reached for a title. The idea of the cutting room floor was on my mind from the jump—the idea that in the process of putting together a story, there’s a lot we leave behind—and when I published the earliest essays, I titled them “Spliced: [essay title] / [film title].” That naturally evolved into the book title, which plays on the vignette nature of the chapters—slices of life—but spliced to include these other narratives. The subtitle changed several times and I owe the final version to Shawna’s class, where I realized genre was one of the unifying elements of my lived experience and the films I selected to pair with them.

 

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READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://charles-jensen.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Splice-Life-Memoir-Film-Genres/dp/1951631331

 

READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “Psychological Thriller”:

https://expositionreview.com/issues/vol-vii-flux/psychological-thriller/