Jared Green discusses The Garden of Perfect Brightness, featured in the Spring 2024 issue of Colorado Review, with editorial assistant Maia Coen.
Jared Green is an author, visual artist, and professor of English literature at Stonehill College. His fiction, poetry, and critical writing have appeared in numerous journals, including Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Review, Phoebe, Subnivean, and The Missouri Review Aud-Cast. His work has been recognized with a 2024 “Best of the Net” nomination, a 2021 Pushcart Prize nomination, and fellowships with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the state of Rhode Island’s Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Foundation. He has recently completed his first short fiction collection, Mastodons of the Late Anthropocene, and is working on his debut novel, This Is How We Walk on the Moon.
Maia Coen: I’m interested in your short story The Garden of Perfect Brightness, published in the Spring 2024 edition of Colorado Review. My first question is about how you came up with the octopus metaphor to cover so many serious emotions.
Jared Green: It had sort of a long, kind of glacial drift from its earliest conception. I had written a much longer story that was realist, and it engaged with some experiences that my wife and I had as new parents. I was very unsatisfied with it, and I realized I didn’t have the right kind of distance to be able to speak about it in a way that didn’t feel like just reporting my memories. The original idea was not an octopus, but I did think I needed to access some other kind of species. I realized that I didn’t just want to write about our specific set of medical concerns and new parenting; I wanted to write about change. When I got to octopus, I thought: that’s the creature, because their intelligence is similar to ours, but their form is alien. Then I got to thinking about octopus maternity. The act of motherhood for an octopus is ultimately a total sacrifice. They die as a result of giving birth. The mother octopus doesn’t move or eat or do anything for her own well-being and ultimately dies. I thought that was such an extraordinarily cruel and beautiful and almost unimaginably exquisite way to talk about being a parent. So, this creaturely form was the one that I felt gave me the opportunity better than anything else I came up with.
MC: That’s what’s so cool about fiction, right? Sometimes when you try to write what’s real, it just doesn’t work, and you have to add the more mystical lens to get to the actual heart of it.
JG: Absolutely. This story was part of my recent turn toward non-realist writing. I started writing fiction differently, and this story was a part of that transition as a writer. I was able to say things in a way I hadn’t been able to before without feeling strained. It had probably been done better by realist writers who were not me, so this just became a way to talk about personal and intimate experiences, or experiences that were not necessarily my own, but things that I might have curiosity or anxiety about. It became a way to get into it and to transform it in a way where I felt I could communicate something fresh.
MC: I think that’s probably why I was drawn to the story, because I like it when we leave realism, but we leave it to find something more true. Have you heard of Ramona Ausubel? She works at CSU and has some excellent short story collections that bring in similarly weird elements to talk about emotion and truth.
JG: I’ll definitely look into her work. I’m really interested in reading more from authors who are doing that kind of work, who are accessing the “other than real.” I like that sidestep into a parallel way of seeing. You might be surprised how many people have asked me if this story is true. I’d like to think I made it plausible enough that someone thought for a second that it was real. So, I take that as a compliment.
MC: I can admit that there was a moment towards the beginning of the story when I was wondering about the same thing. Just a second, and then I realized—no, this is a framing of a bigger conversation, not a real condition.
JG: One second is all it takes for a reader to accept that, in this story’s world, that’s a reality.
MC: I actually wrote a story about a woman who gives birth, and it turns out she’s allergic to girls, so she has to go through the process of putting the baby up for adoption.
JG: Wow, she’s allergic. You should send that to me, I’d love to read it.
MC: It was just published in Glasswork’s fall 2024 issue; you can read it online. That story came out of an experience I had adopting a dog before I realized I was allergic to him and had to give him back. And I thought, what if this was a baby? What if this was how that worked?
JG: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s terrible and heartbreaking, to have to give up a pet in real life, but in some ways that itself would probably not work as a literary story. It would be hard to turn that into something that felt satisfying or that could really communicate what that loss feels like. But you found that sidestep into a parallel story that made it possible.
MC: Definitely. Let’s switch gears and talk about the characters. I thought Yael was really exceptional. Your characters are so distinct in the story, and they’re developed so effortlessly on the page. Misha, the angry husband and father, who happens to be the more positive and less worried of the pair, and Yael, the confident yet nervous and worried wife and mother who can’t understand why her husband isn’t trying harder to understand what is wrong with their daughter. What are your processes for character writing? How do you imagine these people? How did they become who they are here?
JG: I usually try to imagine if I were in a situation with slight variations, so a character will emerge out of what I know and how I react and how that would be different if a certain set of variables were different. Sometimes I’ll start a story with a character I just feel like getting to know. Or I already have an idea for a situation, and I want to put them in that world and see what happens. Other times I just have a vague concept, and I need a person to embody it.
MC: Yeah, I’m so interested in character. I think, over the years, I’ve realized that I’m a character-driven writer, but I find that it’s hard to talk about process for me. I think I’m learning as I go, but trying to explain to another person how I create a character is difficult.
JG: I’m certainly not someone who sits down and says, here’s my character grid. I’m really not deliberate in that way. And usually, I’ll go through a number of iterations of a character that are absolutely wrong and do not ring true, don’t hang together— I don’t like them, they don’t like me. Nothing is working. And then sometimes it is just this little detail. And it’ll happen by accident, because you observe somebody one day, or you yourself connect to a memory, and you reach into something that’s just a little more nuanced, and then you find that person, and then, it sounds quasi-mystical, which I certainly don’t mean, but once you have created a little fictional world in which they’re existing, you do start to get a cue from them about who they need to be.
MC: That’s the part that does feel mystical.
JG: Yeah, it feels that way. But I tend to not like speaking about writing in mystifying terms, it’s more of a long grind. Sometimes it comes together really quickly and that’s the high that any writer chases. But mostly it’s just getting it wrong and getting it wrong until it’s just a little more right, and then you know that you’re on the right track. Character is everything. I think the works we remember best are ones that include a way to connect to human experience and take you somewhere you haven’t been. I always tell my students, whether they’re literature or creative writing students, that writing characters is the only way you get to live one thousand lives. That is a kind of magical way to expand the otherwise narrow band of our experience.
MC: I did have a question about your work as a professor. It looks like you teach a lot of different courses at Stonehill College. How does your work as a professor influence your writing and how are you finding ways to balance those parts of your life?
JG: To answer the second part first, I don’t always find ways to balance. No, it’s very hard. I remember when I was just starting out in a graduate program and thinking I would get my PhD as a kind of fallback position for my writing. I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t know how any of it worked, how the job market worked, or what teaching was like. I just imagined, oh, this will be practical. It’s absolutely connected to what I try to do as a writer, but it’s not always compatible with the kind of mind frame, or just simply the time that it takes to produce creative work. I guess I figured out ways to find a little unseen dimension of time inside of my responsibilities, to put things down on the page, and then they accumulate, and something emerges, but it’s hard to have a regular writing practice during the semester. Luckily, for college professors, we have our summers, which can be devoted to research. I have a position that allows me to do creative work as part of my publication agenda. So, I’ve certainly been supported by Stonehill College, but you have to seize your time whenever it accidentally shows up. I say to all of my creative writing students, if you are in a writing class or program, make the most of it, because it gets harder when you’re outside of that structure. It gets harder to give yourself that license, right? Because your writing, however profoundly significant it is to who you are, is always the thing that you can lower the priority on when other obligations are making demands of you.
MC: I think it’s refreshing, to be honest, to hear somebody admit that. It’s not the easiest combination of jobs to be a professor and a writer.
JG: Yeah, it looks like it would be right? But you know this, being in an MFA program.
MC: Right. There’s a lot of different things that I’m doing, and it’s a lot, and there’s definitely conversations being had among my cohort, that it’s just too much. We’re saying we’ll just get through this; we’ll just survive this and then we’ll be writers after the program. And I’m starting to realize that, oh no, it just gets harder. This is it; this is what we have.
JG: Absolutely. I’ve stuck with it because it matters enough to me to keep trying something that’s very hard. So, I don’t want that to be discouraging at all. But that’s the reality of it. Some people get very lucky because the ‘permission’ to do more creative work can happen because a publisher purchases the work. And so, there’s that money, and maybe the book does well, and so the license might come from achieving success in the marketplace. But most writers do what you’re already perceiving: figure out how to keep up a writing practice, take it seriously, and ask others to honor that you take it seriously. But there are other demands. And yes, it does get harder. It’s doable, but it doesn’t come easy. All that said, I’m not complaining, because the combination of academic life and writing is probably as good as it can get.
MC: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on these topics.
JG: Well, I hope I’ve given you some kind of worthwhile answers.
MC: Yeah, I loved hearing about the process of the story and about teaching and writing. I think most of us that are in this world like learning about other people’s experiences.
JG: It takes discipline. You’ll figure it out. Because writing matters, or you wouldn’t be in an MFA program and you wouldn’t be talking to me and you wouldn’t be connected to Colorado Review. I hope it’s going to be a nice smooth path and your best seller pays the rest of the way. But if it matters, you’ll find a way to do it anyway. Thanks for your interest in the story and thanks for talking to me. I appreciate it.
MC: Thanks, Jared, that’s very encouraging to hear.
Maia Coen is an MFA candidate in fiction at Colorado State University, where she serves as an associate editor at the Colorado Review. She writes weird stories that push people to examine the darker parts of themselves but is still an eternal optimist.