10 Questions for Jordan James

- By Edward Clifford

If you give me half of what your brought to the stage last night, I'll make you a record, girl. That's what I tell Adriana. Her stage name is Adie Wells, but I've known her since monkey bars and hopscotch.

She says, You goin' think half when I blow a hole through this mic.

I say, You better, or you and the Passionfruit are headed back to Lester's.

No the, she says. Just fruit.
—from "Adie Wells and Passionfruit," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I consider my first piece(s) to be a series of action/adventure/fantasy vignettes co-written with my cousin and childhood best friend. As children with wild imaginations, we were fortunate to grow up in south Mississippi, a part of the country beaten flat by a dense, complex history; miles and miles of pine woods; and a simmering humidity that warped our creative circuit boards in the best way possible. Southern creatives, especially the ones who chose to build their homes here after their adolescence, are the wounded, beating heart of Gothic America. The best Southern creatives are conduits for ghosts; this is the community I want to be a part of.

Our daily adventures were apparently so narratively rich to our ten-year-old selves that we concluded they must be recorded. Micah, my cousin, was an ace illustrator, and he volunteered to capture our daily play in drawings. On the next page in our “book,” I would recount the adventure in prose. We did this for at least a couple years. These stories were a gumbo of influences—a little Zelda and Indiana Jones with some Harry Potter and Power Rangers tossed in. These stories, which were collectively called M-Team because Micah was the kind of cousin who (lovingly) made me be Robin to his Batman for Halloween, are sadly lost to time. Is this the kind of answer you were looking for? Probably not.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I can be a little more literary here. The text I’ve been learning from the longest is probably Sandra Cisneros’s beautiful interconnected short story sequence The House on Mango Street. The poetic simplicity of the collection’s structure and prose is a mold I bake all my own work in. You can see this plainly in “Adie Wells and Passionfruit.” As far as the style of my prose goes, I am indebted to a whole generation of southern Grit-Lit authors like Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, and the like. These authors have a way of hiding a tender truth in the middle of a briar patch. This truth is worth reaching for, but there’s no way you walk away without blood running down your arm.

What other professions have you worked in?
Most of my employment experiences revolve around education: graduate instructor, substitute, TA, high school teacher. My undergraduate degree is in Business and Finance, so I’ve done some time floundering around banks and credit unions. I also try to monetize my love of guitar whenever possible, which usually takes the shape of me playing for a handful of local show choirs.

What did you want to be when you were young?
A better question would be who I wanted to be when I grew up, and the answer to that question would be Indiana Jones. My plans changed when I realized archeologists spend way more time brushing dead dinosaur teeth than they do fist-fighting Nazis. Like Indy, I did get to teach sleepy college freshman. My tally of Nazis punched still stands at zero, unfortunately. This is all to say: I still want to be Indiana Jones when I grow up.

What inspired you to write this piece?
In the year that preceded the drafting of this story, I wrote a few stories set in the world of music—junky drummers robbing houses and troubadour guitar slingers who have their songs stolen by Hollywood phonies and etc. etc. Eventually I looked at these stories and realized how easily they could be reworked into a larger collection of stories or an Egan-esque collage novel. “Adie Wells and Passionfruit” was my first post-epiphany story, the piece I wrote to help establish a world that I could grow out of and hopefully graft these previous stories into.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Music is everything to my creative process. Specifically, there’s no one artist that aids me creatively, though I give special preference to my holy trinity of Bs: Beatles, Bruce (Springsteen), and Bob (Dylan). I love the creative restlessness of The Beatles, the near-religious storytelling power of Bruce, and the way Dylan’s creative process leads him to rummage through the musical and literary history of America in search of something he can electrify and reanimate. I am generally drawn to any musician that does something interesting with language—aside from the holy Bs, Tom Waits, Kendrick Lamar, Dolly Parton, Townes Van Zandt, Killer Mike, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, The National’s Matt Berninger, Taylor Swift, and Paul Simon are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m leaving many out.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I do, and it’s strange in a way that I don’t really know how to describe. I’ll give it a try: I get in the shower and soak until God or the muses or the blessed ghost of Denis Johnson gives me inspiration. Maybe you could think of it as the slow cooker method, in which everything I’ve filled with my head with that day is cooked slowly into something interesting and flavorful. I’m always reading and watching and listening to something. On any given day, I could watch an episode of The Leftovers, listen to 2 Chainz’ “Grey Area” on repeat, and read a story from Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love. Whatever weird combination of things I’m into on that day will inevitably contribute to what I put on the page. There’s something magical about the hot water and the bubbling influences and the moment that one new line of prose hits me. I never fail to be amazed. So, am I the two-poems-and-a-cup-of-coffee-before-writing type? Ha. I’m more of the hot-shower-2-Chainz-in-the-crock-pot type.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My incredible wife KateLin Carsrud, who was recently nominated for a Pushcart for her story “The Basement” (OFIC Magazine). She is the natural writer of the family. If When my sentences begin to go off the rails in a bad way, she’s the first one to call BS and set me back on the tracks. My emotional/romantic/intellectual/artistic relationship with her is by far the best thing I took from my time in grad school.

What are you working on currently?
KateLin is currently pushing nine-months pregnant. Because of this, my energies have been redirected towards supporting and serving her in any way that I can and converting our home into a child-friendly habitat. Hopefully, once the dust settles after the birth of our son, I’ll get back to work on my book, which shares a cast of characters with the story your wonderful journal is publishing. “Adie Wells” is primarily focused on the title character as seen through the eyes of her producer, while the book would expand that scope to the rest of the band mates.

What are you reading right now?
Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic. I’m about a quarter of the way in. So far, the voice is unique and funny, and it only gets funnier the more bewildered and confused the narrator gets. Other books I’ve finished recently are Rob Delaney’s must-read A Heart that Works, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating, and Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated The Books of Jacob, which starts impossibly strong before becoming a bit of a slog. I’m always about a year behind on my reading, as you can see.