2022 Fellow Jena Salon reflects on pod meetings. 

My novel The Way They Whispered follows two sisters, Nina and Cora, after a tragic accident has led to the death of their young brother. Both of them are devastated by the loss of their brother, but while Cora begins to open up into the world outside the family, Nina, undone by her guilt, retreats into her mystical and sometimes dark imagination. 

Coming into the BookEnds program with a complete first draft, I thought  that the success of the novel hinged on convincing the reader that Nina was not evil, but traumatized. They needed to feel for her, and buy into the imaginary world she created. In BookEnds, we send our podmates questions to consider about our work as they read and offer feedback in each three-hour session about our books.

So when I first met with my podmates, Jeff Perkins and Rashaun Allen, this was a question I asked outright: “Do you read Nina as evil?”

But while my instinct was correct—readers did need to understand Nina—I was asking the wrong question. Or rather, the questions I posed to my pod were not producing the answers that were most helpful. 

Instead, it was in the conversations, those three hours of time spent on my book alone every few weeks, that I began to learn what my novel needed. 

Pods are different from your typical readers. In my experience, at least, all the people who had generously read for me over the years would give me fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, maybe an hour of conversation. Maybe they would give me intensive line edits, maybe marginalia filled with love, excitement, confusion. These readers were always willing to answer questions I had, but  it was hard to excavate what I really needed to know. There was a guilt that built up over time when I wanted to ask them just one more small question. I blushed with embarrassment having to ask if my seventeenth version of a paragraph now solves the problem they’d pointed out. And in the conversation, between just me and this other person, I became trapped in my own perspective. 

With the BookEnds pods, time and care are built into the equation. They exist to sit with you in your discomfort, to care about your project. That’s their job. They are like your book’s grandparents, always proud, always interested, always invested, even though they’re not the one’s doing the day-to-day heavy lifting to shape and mold your book baby. Other people lose interest in your book, but not Grammie and Papa. You can ask questions, brainstorm solutions, circle back. Their curiosities, concerns and ideas feed off of each other, so in a way, I became less central. I could sit and listen. It was a luxury. 

It was during those pod meetings with Jeff and Rashaun— three full hours of time and space blocked off from the world, with nothing to do but talk about my book—that the magic happened. When we had finished talking about my specific questions, we had nothing to do but hold my book together. This was where the most useful conversations took place. We talked about my book outside of my expectations, guided by what moved Rashaun and Jeff. And because we were sitting there, with time and space to be in this world, they began to ask small questions which dug in deep, and proved to be the most revelatory.

Through those conversations I realized that my edits were not just about filling out Nina and adding a line of exposition here or there to explain why she had the idea, say, that she needed to get her sister to cut another little girl’s hair. The reader needed to understand the entire universe. Every character, the entire mythology. They needed to understand it viscerally, so that every individual choice made sense within the world of the novel. I loved and understood Nina already. But I needed to do the work of crawling out of my own head, and putting my heart—Nina’s heart—thread by thread onto the page. 

Thanks to conversations with Jeff and Rashaun, I was able to flesh out Nina’s belief systems, why she made certain decisions, what she knew and didn’t know, how she cobbled together her knowledge. We talked through how her thoughts impacted her feelings. We were talking about my characters as if they were human. Doing that forced me to answer questions as deeply as if they were living in the world. 

Jena Salon’s most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Litro, Identity Theory, Annalemma, BOMB, and Bookforum.