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| photo: Rodrigo Moyses | |
Jason Gurley is the author of Eleanor, the fiction collection Deep Breath Hold Tight and other novels. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Loosed Upon the World and Help Fund My Robot Army!!! He was raised in Alaska and Texas, and now lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
How does it feel to release the originally self-published Eleanor with a new publisher?
Oh, it has been such an amazing and new experience, and a very different one! As a self-published author, of course, most of the work that goes into a book falls solely upon your own shoulders. One of the greatest revelations about working on the book anew with my publisher, Crown, is that there's an entire team of dedicated, enthusiastic people working on Eleanor from all different angles. It's no longer me going it alone, and that's really refreshing. It's also incredibly encouraging, knowing that each person working together to bring the book to audiences for the second time genuinely believes in it, and wants to see it reach readers.
You write from the perspective of multiple characters, including a pregnant wife and a teenage girl. Whose viewpoint did you slip into most easily, and who was the most challenging?
Eleanor herself was a bit of both. You know, I started writing this novel way back in 2001. In the earliest drafts, I was writing a story that was very similar to my own life and experiences, or at least deeply rooted in things that were on my mind all the time. I hoped that by writing from the perspective of a character drastically different from me that I’d remove myself from the story, gain some fresh perspective. Over the years, however, as the novel’s story transformed, I found Eleanor shedding any resemblance to me, and becoming a much more interesting, more well-defined character. Writing her has always been a bit like slipping into a shoe that looks comfortable, but contorts me into strange new shapes instead.
What made you decide to tell this family’s story by leaping around in time and dimensions?
I love books that play a little loose with the fabric of reality, especially when the story otherwise features very ordinary, relatable humans with ordinary, relatable problems. Who wouldn't want to revisit the past in order to subtly adjust the present?
The tragedies visited upon the Witt family are not only frequent, but devastating. When things go sideways for them, it's usually brutal, and with lifelong consequences. I wanted to examine the lives of family members a bit farther downstream. If you make a choice today, how does it affect your grandchild? Or their children? Would it matter? Eleanor is about choices--intentional ones, accidental ones--that create those kinds of ripples. Not all ripples are immediately obvious. By the time we understand the damage wrought by our ancestors, it might be too deeply ingrained for us to change it.
Finding the story's balance was a minor feat, to be sure. But the Witts are mostly stumbling through their present, still dazed by the various tragedies that have put them where they are. Eleanor's barely hanging on herself. Discovering that there's a whole world behind the world is a surprise, but it also doesn't quite go well for her at first, and I think there's a sense of acceptance there. Of course this unbelievable other realm is out to get her. What isn't out to get her?
I hear that in addition to writing your own stories, you’re also a talented cover designer.
Well, thanks! As I was saying, when you self-publish a book, you do everything. I've worked as a designer and creative director for the past 17 years, so much of that work came naturally to me. I designed the book covers and interiors for each of my self-published novels, including the original edition of Eleanor. But it's a bit magical to be in the hands of my publisher's extremely talented artists, I have to say. Crown produced a stunning cover for the novel, and the interior feels as if it's been soaked in the Pacific. It's lovely work. I've had a peek at the cover that HarperCollins has been working on for the book's U.K. release, and it's wildly different and equally arresting.
For a couple of years, I put my design skills to work for all sorts of authors and publishers. I designed many books for Wool author Hugh Howey, for example, and did a few projects for Subterranean Press and various Amazon Publishing imprints. I "retired" from book cover design at the beginning of 2015, however. I was balancing the various responsibilities of my daily work as a designer, as a husband and father, as a novelist, and as a cover designer. I'd forgotten what "free time" was altogether, and something had to give. Book cover design was the only expendable item on that list! I briefly came out of retirement, however, to design the cover for Star Wars screenwriter Gary Whitta's debut novel, Abomination (Inkshares, 2015).
I love the work of book design, though, and I'm constantly admiring the covers I see arriving each week at my favorite bookstore, Powell's. Of recent ones, I adore the cover for Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies and J. Ryan Stradal's Kitchens of the Great Midwest.
What do you hope that readers take from Eleanor?
I think one of the novel's pervasive truths is about the roles we play and the secrets we keep, particularly in relationships that have been defined by our culture and society for years and years. Children and parents are a prime example: it's nearly impossible for a child to see their parent as anything but a parent, at least until the child becomes an adult or parent themselves. Often a child doesn't see their parents' hopes and desires; they see the person who provides for and takes care of them. And clearly a parent is much more than just a parent. The same is true of children; parents struggle to see their children, sometimes, as individuals with their own stories to tell, their own lives to create.
After self-publishing the novel in 2014, I received many messages from people who had read the book and then shared it with their own mothers and daughters. It was as if each of them felt the book in a very personal way, as if it was really about them and their own relationships. And that was and is so moving to me. It means there's some truth in this thing that I've made. As a reader myself, I've done this before. Books become a sort of shared medium for understanding relationships. And if Eleanor is that, for anyone, it will be enormously gratifying. I hope it will be.
What’s your next project?
My next project is tentatively titled Limbs, and it occupies territory that isn't altogether unfamiliar: like Eleanor, it straddles the blurry line between the real and the fantastic, and follows a family that's strung out upon that divide. It's early, but I'm very excited about how it's coming together. --Jaclyn Fulwood