What Mennonite Girls Are Good For, the debut short story collection from Jennifer Sears, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by the novelist Margot Livesey. Through eleven connected stories, Sears asks how faith influences and informs our lives. Each story is a subtle and nuanced look into a life that spans the globe but is always searching for one thing.
Prior to releasing her debut, Sears MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She currently is an associate professor of English and creative writing at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York where she co-coordinates the Minor in Creative Writing with the poet Robert Ostrom.
Debutiful asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her debut book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
My earliest book was the Bible. I don’t know if my sisters and I were obsessed with the Bible as much as we lived inside its verses, which we sang before we could read. We acted out stories and parables for our family and the congregation. Our relationship with the text was physical. I do remember being “obsessed” rather early on with the romantic rivalry between Rachel and Leah. And, then Ruth and Boaz. As I got older, I turned to more innocent books.
What book helped you through puberty?
Nothing helped me through puberty. However, at a certain point, I read everything by Hemingway and was strangely preoccupied by his novel, Garden of Eden. There is so much in that book about bodies and hair. I also got hung up on My Story by Marilyn Monroe. I carried that book around until one day left it on a chair at church and it disappeared. I wouldn’t recommend either of these books to young girls going through puberty, but at the time, they must have given me ways out of a self I wanted to escape.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
At the moment, George Orwell’s 1984? But mostly, I can’t imagine making this decision. I just want teenagers to find their way to books that keep them reading.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I love this question. The challenge, of course, is the limit of a typical semester:
- Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey —to explore ways to structure plot on winds.
- Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven—to explore ways to integrate art and humor with crystallized bits of biography in face of increasing political dread. And for ways to disrupt ideas about endings.
- Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare and Bad Behavior—to explore ways to write about young women who realize early on they will head out on their own.
- Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony —to explore ways to connect landscape with character
- Nabokov’s novella Tyrants Destroyed or Lolita—to explore narrative voice and ways to intertwine humor with horror. And for more political dread.
- Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried—to explore mastery of pacing, directness, and ways to make stories burn, even when they don’t seem to be trying to.
- Herta Muller’s The Appointment or The Hunger Angel—to explore ways to turn sadness and confinement into dynamite. And for the dance scenes.
- Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay—for more dance scenes.
- Italo Calvino’s, The Watcher; Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North; Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho; poupeh missaghi’s, Sound Museum; Miriam Toews’ Women Talking… there are so many books I’m leaving out of this “Damn Good Writing” list, it damn well hurts.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
One section titled, “Sins and Symbols,” makes an obvious reference to Nabokov’s story “Symbols and Signs.” Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” influenced me at a certain time, so there is a glimpse of “Gazebo” in one of the older stories. Mennonite writers have influenced me as well, in particular Miriam Toews and Julia Kasdorf. But I’m not sure these are “guides” as much as resonances that help me shape sentences.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I live in a small apartment in Brooklyn, so this would have to be my e-nightstand:
- Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad
- Already re-reading Miriam Toews’ new memoir, A Truce that is not Peace
- Mikhail Iossell’s brilliantly impossible to categorize Sentence.
- Perhaps it’s a leftover from childhood, but I like reading in community. I’m currently reading Bleak House with A Public Space’s APStogether and Yiyun Li and The Confessions of Augustine with Garth Greenwell.