Interview + Reading with Jodi Cressman
An excerpt of “Geographical Histories of Centralia, Kansas,” written and read by Jodi Cressman.
The full piece appears in our Summer 2026 issue.
Tell us about your relationship to writing.
For most of my professional life, I was an academic writer composing scholarly essays for a narrow audience of contemporary literature subspecialists. Then, five years ago, two things happened: I was asked to teach a creative writing class, and I figured I should try it out myself before telling other people how to do it; and, around the same time, I took a trip to Centralia, Illinois, learned about the mining disaster in that town’s history, and fell headlong into the rabbit hole of my current project, a hybrid memoir-history that explores all of the towns named Centralia in the U.S. With some of these towns, the historical material is so thin that I had to draw on personal memory and subjective experience to get what those places meant to me. It’s taken me a while to shed the worst features of academic writing (the technical vocabulary, the need to endlessly contextualize and qualify, and so forth). At first, I tried to drop my scholarly voice altogether, but I could never fully break free from it: it’s too baked in. Over time, I realized that I didn’t need to—I could blend scholarly and creative approaches, interweaving them in a larger composite. Once I finish this Centralia project, I want to dive more fully into documentary poetry, pursuing that same blend in a different artistic form.
Do you have any non-literary hobbies?
I think my family would say that I’m a talented baker. I’m also an enthusiastic but unskilled gardener. And I go through flare-ups of various passions. A couple of years ago, I took up sewing and made pants out of psychedelic-prints for everyone in my family, I think seventeen pairs altogether. They were not particularly good pants; the pant-legs were often uneven. I think everybody’s glad that experiment’s over.
Who have been the most influential writers in your life?
Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison left the deepest marks. In terms of contemporary prose, Eula Biss and Maggie Nelson have been transformative, and, in poetry, I have been awed by Claudia Rankine, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Layli Long Soldier, Paisley Rekdal (her extraordinary book West, especially), Susan Briante, and every word that Anne Carson has ever put on a page.
What’s been inspiring you lately?
These days, I’m paying a lot of attention to the people around me who show courage, not just in big moments, but as a matter of habit—small, regular micro-acts of bravery. Like people who stand on corners holding protest signs in their small, rural towns, where they are likely to know the neighbors shouting obscenities at them from cars. Or young people trying to make a career in stand-up comedy, facing rejection in immediate, palpable, public ways. Or my students who choose to study art or philosophy or English, going against the advice of their well-meaning parents. They remind me that I don’t need to save up my reserves of bravery for the obviously significant moments, but can push myself personally and artistically in small ways as a matter of course.
Tell us about your writing process and your approach to craft, generally or for your featured piece, “Geographical Histories of Centralia, Kansas.”
My writing process is incredibly slow, and a lot of it involves things other than writing. I usually begin by making lists: specific images, memories, lines from materials in the archives. After that, I read broadly, following my intuition as to what I should pick up next, taking long walks between chapters to process the material and let ideas surface. I work like some painters do, blocking out a canvas, trying to understand how bits of the piece might work spatially within the whole. Only then do I start drafting complete sentences.
I wrote two or three polished drafts of this piece before submitting it, including a draft where I “un-weirded” it, trying to tell the story through a conventional linear narrative structure. That was a protracted, painful process, which confirmed to me that the material just didn’t want that shape. Eventually, I came to a point where I knew the piece needed something else, but I couldn’t see it. I sent it off to the Massachusetts Review almost like a message in a bottle, a desperate plea for help. To my lasting indebtedness, Shailja reached out to say that she saw something in it, too, and that she’d work with me. Her and Britt helped the piece grow into itself. I submitted eight more drafts within our “revising” period, about four of which I had labelled “final.” May every writer be so lucky as to find such generous, sharp-eyed editors. One of the larger ideas coming through in my Centralia project is that our seemingly private memories and experiences are bound up in larger collectives. So it feels really fitting—probably necessary—that this piece should enter the world through extensive collaboration.
How did you decide on the formatting for “Geographical Histories,” especially that of the farm-plot, timeline, and headings?
I had remembered reading Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America in graduate school and was fascinated by her idea of arranging narrative events as bounded shapes on a single plane, the same way that farming fields appear from above. I drew on Stein for initial inspiration and started to play around with other ways that history might be organized across space as well as within time. The headings are experiments with ways we might frame histories, suggesting that events circulate and recur rather than conclude. There can be so many headings, so many attempts to tell the story of every small town. History is far more about the telling of events than about the events themselves. We can never fully know the past. All of our attempts will ultimately fail, so we must continue to tell new stories.
What’s your favorite thing in or about Kansas?
I love the rolling hills of eastern Kansas and the way it feels to drive over them. You crest a hill and approach a horizon, then plunge into a new field. Because I come from a farming family and spent a lot of time in rural Indiana, I think fields are beautiful. I would guess that we have far more works of literature about mountains and bodies of water. I think the midwestern field is overdue for its moment.
Do you have any unpopular literary opinions or advice?
The best advice I ever got was from a fellow writer who read an early draft and told me to “go weirder.” She was right.
Some of the less useful advice I’ve gotten has urged me to put more “I” on the page, be more confessional, dig deep for a big emotional reveal. I definitely enjoy some books that follow that arc, but I’m also excited by writing that manages to be lodged within personal experience without being confessional. That’s my unpopular (possibly unhelpful) advice: tell the story that only you can tell, but don’t assume that the artistic truth is always within you.
What are you reading right now?
I’m one of those people who always has four or five books going at the same time. I’m trying to make up for gaps in my education by reading a lot of canonical geography and philosophy about how we assign meaning to places. I’m about four chapters into Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, two chapters into Kenneth Foote’s Shadowed Ground, and one chapter into Paul Ricouer’s Memory, History, Forgetting, which I’m taking two or three pages at a time. I’m maybe ten pages away from finishing W.G. Sebald’s incredible Austerlitz, which I wish I had read ten years ago so that I could have more time with it in my system. I don’t want that novel to end. Maybe I’ll never finish it.
JODI CRESSMAN is Professor of English at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. Her scholarly articles and books focus on the intersection of literature, medicine, and visual culture. Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, Gordon Square Review, and others. She is an alum of the Kenyon Review and Bread Loaf writer’s workshops, and a former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently at work on a hybrid memoir about slow violence in American towns named Centralia.
