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National award-winning writer,
translated into more than a dozen languages. Much of her fiction
grows out of stories heard in her WV childhood, family events, and
personal experience. Other fiction creates densely evocative
portraits of characters ranging from middle class mothers to those
living on the edge of American society.
Examples of scenes from
readings: � an entire small town goes along with a beloved
citizen with Alzheimer's who thinks he's twenty years younger ... in
early 20th-century West Virginia, an oriental railroad construction
worker is quarantined when he develops leprosy ... stories about
nursing mothers, a stripper, a mother and daughter discovering each
other, a veteran haunted by Korea
Personal:
Born 1952 and raised in Buckhannon. Also lived California, Colorado.
Now living in Boston. Married. Two sons, two step-sons.
Publications:
Sweethearts Truck Press 1976 and 1978, Counting
Vehicle Editions 1978, How Mickey Made It Bookslinger
Editions 1981, The Secret Country, Palaemon Press Limited
1982, Black Tickets Delacorte 1979, Machine Dreams
Dutton 1984, Fast Lanes Vehicle Editions 1984, Shelter
Houghton 1994, Motherkind Knopf 2000, plus numerous essays
and articles. Work anthologized over 40 times and translated into
at least 13 languages. As of December 2002, all hardcover titles
are available in Vintage paperbacks.
Education and Career:
BA WV 1974. MFA Univ of Iowa 1978. Presently Writer in Residence at
Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Has taught at Harvard
University, Boston University, Williams College, New York University
and Humboldt State University.
Awards: Pushcart Prize (twice), Fels Award
in Fiction from Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines 1978, St.
Lawrence Award for Fiction 1979, Sue Kaufman Prize for first Fiction
(Black Tickets). Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowships 1978 and 1985. Bunting Institute Fellowship
1981, national Book Critics Circle Award nomination. American
Library Association Notable Book Citation, New York Times Best Books
of 1984 citation 1984, Academy Award in Literature from American
Academy of Arts and Letters 1997, O. Henry Award 1984, Orange Prize
for Fiction nomination 2001 (Britain), Massachusetts Book Award 2001
(Motherkind).
Critics'
Comments:
- "Jayne Anne Phillips--is concerned with every sentence and
seemingly always operating out of instincts that are visceral and
true-perceived and observed originally, not imitated or fashionably
learned." (The New York Times Book Review)
-"Phillips' stories of loss and love are shown through her
beautiful use of language and her unique way of portraying her
character's ordeals. She uses analogies to convey the real issue
that she is trying to set forth--that America is dealing with the
breakdown of social values and morals and that the past is gone, but
not forgotten." (Aislin Cagney)
-"Jayne Anne Phillips is the best
short story writer since Eudora Welty." (Nadine Gordimer) )
Excerpts from In Their Own Country:
Kate: In the front of Jayne Anne's second
book of short stories, Fast Lanes, there's a long list of
her awards and honors, including an Academy Award in Literature
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Before any of the
honors are mentioned, it says," Jayne Anne Phillips was born and
raised in West Virginia."
Jayne Anne: Well, it's a lot more
important, and it came way before any award. I think my work is
really rooted in my childhood, my young adulthood, my family, my
ancestry. And it's very much rooted in place. I've sometimes
written about places very far away from West Virginia. And
people who certainly have maybe never seen the place where I
grew up. But the sense of hard reality, the edge in my work, I
think comes from having grown up there. There's just no
substitute for growing up in West Virginia.:
***
...I think there has to be that gut connection.
It may have to do with a sight or a smell. It may come from a
remembered line that you heard spoken in childhood. It may come
from a fantasy, something you saw somebody do, and you have no
idea who they are. But you have to start somewhere real.
And many times, you write what you never intended
to write. The writing always has an evolution that you can't
plan and you can't limit. And that's what's so miraculous about
it.
***
...I do subscribe to the gestalt idea of personality or
being in which, when we dream a dream, it's not just one facet
of the dream that represents us. Each facet of the dream is a
part of us. And I feel very much that way about writing. Every
voice I imagine is a facet of me - and a facet of the reader who
will then pick up that story or book and feel, hopefully,
different parts of himself or herself inside it. That's why, I
think it was Gorky who said that writing should be deeply
disturbing if it's effective. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes
in ways that are threatening. But a book should really act as a
kind of slow fire. You read it and think about it, and it
doesn't quite go away.
***
...I think if I'm going to take the reader deeper and
penetrate inside what our everyday lives really mean to our
unconscious selves, to what we do, to what we dream when we
fantasize or remember, the prose has to start at a communal
reality, then move into the super-conscious, the unconscious, to
all the things that literature can say that we can't.
***
... I remember when I was in Girl Scouts, writing a kind of
serial novel to entertain my friends. We met at various churches
around town. At the Baptist Church, they had these beautiful
mahogany cubicles like restaurant booths almost. They were all
enclosed by red velvet curtains.
They'd put various groups in these cubicles. We'd
draw the curtains, and I'd bring out my so-called novel, which I
began with everyone in it. Myself and my friends, we were all in
the novel. Then the heroine moves to New York City and falls in
love with a gang member. And there were wars going on in the
subway tunnels and so forth. But the interesting thing was, they
kept wanting to hear it, even after they'd been written out. And
that was my first understanding that writing is something that
people are interested in. And that they can be represented by
things other than themselves.
See also:
jayneannephillips.com, Literature Resource Center, North
American Review, Booklist, Contemporary Literary Criticism,
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook.
Program music performed by: Bob Webb |
