Interview
SPIRITUALITY, Creativity, and the Art of Essay-Making: aN INTERVIEW WITH Jessie Van Eerden
BY Jordan Avery, Stephen Harrison, & Joshua Wilson
March 2025
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With the introduction of her new collection of essays titled Yoke & Feather (Dzanc Books), Jessie van Eerden impresses with her control of language. The essays, which are written in a braided style, weave elements of both the common and profound, and with a sweeping grace and technical prowess, fuse the two to create a manifestation wholly unorthodox and undeniably profound. The level of intimacy this work achieves is a product of van Eerden’s acute and calibrated perception, and anyone who seeks to find rhythm in life’s ineffable static will be satisfied by the fruits of this collection.
Van Eerden is no stranger to success. Her novel Call It Horses won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for fiction, and her previous essay collection The Long Weeping won the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award in the essay category. Along with her personal endeavors, van Eerden has over 20 years of teaching experience and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University. In this interview, van Eerden provides us with a peek into her creative process and delivers insight into how she so aptly utilizes the essence of the mystical to extract meaning from ordinary life. |
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Glassworks Magazine (GM): Your latest essay collection, Yoke & Feather, doesn’t shy away from spirituality or religion but instead embraces it. Has it become more difficult over time to write earnestly on these subjects as society has increasingly moved towards atheism as the dominant belief system in the United States? Do you ever get a feeling of personal isolation when writing about these themes?
Jessie van Eerden (JVE): To begin, thank you for your thoughtful reading of my work and for these provocative questions. There is much to contemplate here! Regarding spirituality, I think it has become easier for me to explore the spiritual in imaginative writing as I’ve grown less and less compartmentalized in middle age. The spiritual, the tactile, the political, the sexual, the comic, the humdrum all belong, all present themselves as fair game for material, especially in the essay-making process which is inherently omnivorous in its means and approaches. Spiritual questions that interest me are pretty bedrock: What does it mean to live within and without time? What peculiar gifts might be hidden in disappointment? So, my forays into specific religious perspectives and biblical material in my work are in service to a good wrestle with these questions, not to adherence to dogma or religious prescriptions. For that reason, I have company all around me in writers and readers who wrestle with questions! Also, I have always sought the tutelage (and reception) of writers with a completely different worldview from mine; not that I don’t also court conversations with fellow readers of the Bible, but the best literature is nontribal: it’s personal, grounded, immersed in the particular experience of one’s tribe, but it must paradoxically open outward and not inward, in welcome and invitation, by translating—literally carrying across—that experience into a new place where it can be both strange and deeply recognizable for a reader. |
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GM: In your novel Call It Horses, there is a sense of movement away from West Virginia, from the Appalachian region. Yoke & Feather seems firmly rooted in place with an intentionality about experiencing your home. Call It Horses is an epistolary novel while Yoke & Feather is a collection of braided essays. Is there a significance to the epistolary nature of a story about moving away from home as opposed to the connectedness of braided essays and staying rooted at home?
JVE: My choices in genre and form are probably not that intentional, but I love the question! In the new collection, there is likely some unconscious force at work that aims for rootedness by means of braided structures with their recurrent imagery and uniting of disparate things. An epistolary stance, though, seems even more emphatically rooted rather than moving away. Although it’s not overtly stated in Call It Horses, I imagine Frankie writing her letter to Ruth from the table of her home back in West Virginia, describing both the recent westward road trip and the arc of the events leading up to that trip which eventually land her back at home. In the novel, I would say her “return home” is most importantly a return home to herself, with a settledness and marveling and sensemaking, and the letter form offers her an interlocutor in her mind that helps her fully live in her own skin. The push away from and the pull toward home in that book are equally strong, to my mind. And a letter is addressed to a present absence, negotiating the friction-filled space of longing. Essays participate in that negotiation as well.
GM: In a 2019 interview with Blackbird, you lamented the impression that “liberal academic society” has of Appalachia. Do you feel that the modern political landscape has changed that impression in any way, positively or negatively? Have your efforts to challenge assumptions about a dismissed society been successful?
JVE: As a college professor, I’m as much a member of “liberal academic society” as I am a member of Appalachia, so I hope in that interview I wasn’t just pointing fingers. Maybe I was, but it’s not fruitful to do so. At our worst, we humans bend toward lazy dismissiveness of what is strange and doesn’t fit in our container of the known; that dismissiveness makes us susceptible to the ready-made packaging of people, groups, ideas, etc. The modern political landscape is a tiring and tired one, so polarized it’s next to impossible to peer into the real stories behind packaging. The package of a rural bigot is as ready-made and reductive as that of a self-righteous leftist professor. I don’t know that I ever think about my artistic efforts in terms of success or failure, but I’d say the main assumptions I’m always trying to challenge are my own.
JVE: My choices in genre and form are probably not that intentional, but I love the question! In the new collection, there is likely some unconscious force at work that aims for rootedness by means of braided structures with their recurrent imagery and uniting of disparate things. An epistolary stance, though, seems even more emphatically rooted rather than moving away. Although it’s not overtly stated in Call It Horses, I imagine Frankie writing her letter to Ruth from the table of her home back in West Virginia, describing both the recent westward road trip and the arc of the events leading up to that trip which eventually land her back at home. In the novel, I would say her “return home” is most importantly a return home to herself, with a settledness and marveling and sensemaking, and the letter form offers her an interlocutor in her mind that helps her fully live in her own skin. The push away from and the pull toward home in that book are equally strong, to my mind. And a letter is addressed to a present absence, negotiating the friction-filled space of longing. Essays participate in that negotiation as well.
GM: In a 2019 interview with Blackbird, you lamented the impression that “liberal academic society” has of Appalachia. Do you feel that the modern political landscape has changed that impression in any way, positively or negatively? Have your efforts to challenge assumptions about a dismissed society been successful?
JVE: As a college professor, I’m as much a member of “liberal academic society” as I am a member of Appalachia, so I hope in that interview I wasn’t just pointing fingers. Maybe I was, but it’s not fruitful to do so. At our worst, we humans bend toward lazy dismissiveness of what is strange and doesn’t fit in our container of the known; that dismissiveness makes us susceptible to the ready-made packaging of people, groups, ideas, etc. The modern political landscape is a tiring and tired one, so polarized it’s next to impossible to peer into the real stories behind packaging. The package of a rural bigot is as ready-made and reductive as that of a self-righteous leftist professor. I don’t know that I ever think about my artistic efforts in terms of success or failure, but I’d say the main assumptions I’m always trying to challenge are my own.
"In the novel, I would say her 'return home' is most importantly a return home to herself, with a settledness and marveling and sensemaking, and the letter form offers her an interlocuter in her mind that helps her fully live in her own skin." |
GM: You’ve talked before about your interest in Midrashic texts, rabbinic works that uniquely interpret and elaborate on biblical narratives. What compelled you to expound upon the story of Lazarus using the Midrash style? Do you use those same exploratory processes when writing about your own experiences of living and teaching in West Virginia?
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JVE: Yes, that sounds about right, and maybe that’s connected to your question above. Midrash is attentive to the in-between, the what-ifs, the unvoiced, the maybes. That’s wonderful imaginative terrain to tread. When I wrote “What I Want Your Voice to Do,” I’d just read Pär Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas in which the main character visits the resurrected Lazarus and asks him what the realm of the dead is like; Lazarus, who comes across as bored and trapped in being a showpiece for his miracle, says, “It is strange you’re asking such a thing…They don’t usually.” I wanted to spend time there, asking Lazarus about this weird experience of knowing death and then being torn from death only to have to face it again. The story had a new sheen for me, was full of oddness and possibility. And, yes, I hope that the writing I do about or from WV—well, the writing I do about or from anywhere—pays attention to the gaps and asks the less usual questions.
GM: In “What I Want Your Voice to Do,” you compare an author’s voice to the voice Jesus used to resurrect Lazarus. Does art really possess such transformative power? What role does a writer’s voice play in giving impetus to that process?
JVE: I do think art can change us, even—or especially—in the slightest ways of: I didn’t see it quite like that before; things may be otherwise than I thought. But it’s playful, too; it’s not all firm-mouthed seriousness and righteousness. Sometimes we can luck into our art and just have to humbly accept the luck. Maybe the voice in writing looks for the give in experience, the soft place. I think about the wonderful title of Ann Pancake’s story collection Given Ground: if you think of voice as given ground, it means both that it caves in beneath you, requiring groping and not-knowing, and also that it is a sacred gift, the thing given to you as your tool.
GM: In Yoke & Feather, your essays oscillate between grounded, literal experiences, such as forays into online dating or youth basketball, and the contemplative and imaginative. We thought this could be interpreted as a kenosis occurring as you were writing these essays, an emptying of the real to permit the exploration of the mystical. Could you talk a bit about your intention in weaving these approaches together?
GM: In “What I Want Your Voice to Do,” you compare an author’s voice to the voice Jesus used to resurrect Lazarus. Does art really possess such transformative power? What role does a writer’s voice play in giving impetus to that process?
JVE: I do think art can change us, even—or especially—in the slightest ways of: I didn’t see it quite like that before; things may be otherwise than I thought. But it’s playful, too; it’s not all firm-mouthed seriousness and righteousness. Sometimes we can luck into our art and just have to humbly accept the luck. Maybe the voice in writing looks for the give in experience, the soft place. I think about the wonderful title of Ann Pancake’s story collection Given Ground: if you think of voice as given ground, it means both that it caves in beneath you, requiring groping and not-knowing, and also that it is a sacred gift, the thing given to you as your tool.
GM: In Yoke & Feather, your essays oscillate between grounded, literal experiences, such as forays into online dating or youth basketball, and the contemplative and imaginative. We thought this could be interpreted as a kenosis occurring as you were writing these essays, an emptying of the real to permit the exploration of the mystical. Could you talk a bit about your intention in weaving these approaches together?
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JVE: Kenosis is a big word to fill, and I’m not sure that my intention fills it! Weaving is a smaller word that I do think is right to use here. Weaving suggests, in a nonbinary way, that each piece belongs to the whole and is essential, which feels like a more apt metaphor than emptying out the real to give the mystical the stage. I’m intrigued by theology but not a theologian, and I love the idea of the incarnation, the Word made flesh, and, theologically speaking, there is an emptying-out of divinity that happens in that act of taking on human limitation, but artistically speaking, it’s a filling: to flesh out the abstract word. So, app dating and shooting hoops become vehicles for the mystical on the page and give the mystical a fullness of body, a place to inhabit; likewise, the mystical recognizes in the mundane experience its sacredness.
GM: Your writing seems to hinge upon ekphrastic translations of complex images. For example, these images stood out to us: “The light of the hawk’s being shines through the small tear….” “A feather coming loose from a wing, left to go dingy, matted…” “A rush in the high grass as when a storm blows up. All the red clover left wild, and the rye and the sedges…” Have you ever felt that, as you analyze these images, you have discovered things that exist without their borders, things that your mind had previously silenced from your attention? If so, does the presence of these attributes change the constitution of the original image? |
JVE: I often encourage my students to reach for images that will outlive them. I also often teach ekphrasis, and I love how you’re suggesting that ekphrasis is more about a quality of attention than about a specific work of art. I love Kiese Laymon’s essay “Da Art of Storytellin’” about the hip-hop duo OutKast, which offers marvelous ekphrasis of their music as Black Southern artists, but the essay is also about his grandmother and her labors working in a chicken plant; in fact, maybe it's more about her. In the spirit of Laymon, I encourage students to render the labor of someone with ekphrastic attention. What changes when we change the quality of our attention?
GM: In the essay “Answer When You’re Called” you say something that resonated with us: “When you’re not listening is when you’re called.” How do you get yourself into a state of hearing instead of listening? What methods do you use to dissect personal discoveries that were previously ineffable and ignored in your mind?
GM: In the essay “Answer When You’re Called” you say something that resonated with us: “When you’re not listening is when you’re called.” How do you get yourself into a state of hearing instead of listening? What methods do you use to dissect personal discoveries that were previously ineffable and ignored in your mind?
"I do think art can change us, even--or especially--in the slightest ways of: I didn't see it quite like that before; things may be otherwise than I thought. But it's playful, too; it's not all firm-mouthed seriousness and righteousness. Sometimes we can luck into our art and just have to humbly accept the luck. Maybe the voice in writing looks for the give in experience, the soft place." |
JVE: I think that line touches on the ways we might be called to something, meant for something, that we do not at all expect—it comes out of left field; it blindsides us. But we don’t want to miss the thing even though we’re not expecting it. So maybe we prepare ourselves to be able to hear, we cultivate the ground to be receptive to the seed. I can’t talk about it without metaphor, it seems.
Your second question describes the essay-making enterprise so beautifully: to reread our lives, especially the moments of great befuddlement, and discover something we did not see before. This task is different from explaining our lives to ourselves, or marshaling our lives into an appealing (and saleable) narrative; instead, the task is to recognize the strangeness of something that has been dulled with smug familiarity. |
GM: Do you think creativity is an act of defying self or of assimilating with self; is it a running away and looking back at what was, or is it a running toward and looking around at what is? Do your vivid insights on faith, religion, and identity spawn from an analytical perspective or an immersive perspective?
JVE: Both, and. All of the above. The self-emptying required for imaginative work seems as essential to me as a deep reconciliation with self. Away from action needs a simultaneous toward action; understanding what was requires looking at what is. Maybe that’s why I’m often drawn to old transpersonal stories and myths: in casting aside their illusory totality (the notion that they are complete and shut-up in themselves in their explained packages), I can read what is into them and discover greater possibility in both the myth and the present.
Anne Carson’s essay “Decreation” (in her book of that title) offers a triple portrait of Simone Weil, the Greek poet Sappho, and the mystic Marguerite Porete, all of whom write at length about defying self. Carson writes, “To be a writer is to construct a big, loud, shiny centre of self from which the writing is given voice and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in some important acts of subterfuge or contradiction.” There is such a vibrant self at the core of creative work, and at the same time there’s a relinquishing of ego that moves the work, hopefully, into a place that touches other humans. The analytical mind is important to this project, but immersion in the work—in a very hands-on sense, immersion into sound and syntax and image and form—helps to keep the mind collaborative with the soul, heart, and body.
JVE: Both, and. All of the above. The self-emptying required for imaginative work seems as essential to me as a deep reconciliation with self. Away from action needs a simultaneous toward action; understanding what was requires looking at what is. Maybe that’s why I’m often drawn to old transpersonal stories and myths: in casting aside their illusory totality (the notion that they are complete and shut-up in themselves in their explained packages), I can read what is into them and discover greater possibility in both the myth and the present.
Anne Carson’s essay “Decreation” (in her book of that title) offers a triple portrait of Simone Weil, the Greek poet Sappho, and the mystic Marguerite Porete, all of whom write at length about defying self. Carson writes, “To be a writer is to construct a big, loud, shiny centre of self from which the writing is given voice and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in some important acts of subterfuge or contradiction.” There is such a vibrant self at the core of creative work, and at the same time there’s a relinquishing of ego that moves the work, hopefully, into a place that touches other humans. The analytical mind is important to this project, but immersion in the work—in a very hands-on sense, immersion into sound and syntax and image and form—helps to keep the mind collaborative with the soul, heart, and body.
Read Nonfiction Editor Jordan G. Avery's Review of Yoke & Feather
Follow Jessie on Instagram: @monathehound
Find out more about Jessie on her website: https://www.jessievaneerden.com
Follow Jessie on Instagram: @monathehound
Find out more about Jessie on her website: https://www.jessievaneerden.com
