Conversations with Jackson Bliss

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jackson Bliss.

Hi Jackson, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started writing seriously in high school, wrote my first novel in college (but never tried to publish it), & took my first creative writing workshops after a stint in the Peace Corps in West Africa. I eventually went to Notre Dame for my MFA and USC for my PhD in Literature & Creative Writing. It’s not an overstatement to claim that writing has been a fundamental part of my identity since I was a teenager. I found self-empowerment, self-realization, musicality, & personal/cultural discovery in the writing process. I’ve never stopped since then.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it’s been a rocky road filled with potholes, landmines, detours, & decayed infrastructure since the very beginning. My liberal arts college didn’t accept upperclassmen to its creative writing program, I was rejected from the very first fiction workshop I applied to in Seattle, I received hundreds upon hundreds of rejections by literary agents, editors, & hiring committees. Even when I had an agent back in 2016, she couldn’t sell my mixed-race coming-of-age novel about ninjas, cults, androids, & racial self-discovery because editors didn’t like Asian American male narrators with attitude problems. TBH, if I were a pessimist, I would have abandoned my writing career a long time ago and never have published anything because there was so much evidence showing me that I wasn’t meant to have a publishing career. But I’m an irrational optimist and I also believed–then as now– that just because the New York literary establishment had rejected me didn’t mean I couldn’t have a writing career. I also realized that the publishing industry publishes enough derivative crap that there should be room for writers like me. I just refused to give up & I published three books in the space of ten months: a short story collection, a novel, & and a memoir.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I write about mixed-race/hapa, AAPI/BIPOC identity but I also write about the redemption of love in a broken society and the empowerment of language, culture, connectivity, & perception. I write about writing: many of my stories both celebrate and challenge the act of storytelling. Whether it’s a story about a tween rebellion involving four nonsensical ransom notes, a high school student who rebels against his family by only speaking French, sixteen intersecting pieces of flash fiction about driving in Michigan, an art scholar who slowly loses his vision, or a photography student who has eight separate destinies depending on which streets she chooses at a busy intersection (COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES), a backward novel about four BIPOC characters whose lives intersect on the C train right as Hurricane Sandy smashes into the Eastern Seaboard (AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS), or a choose-your-own-adventure memoir about mixed-race identity, love, language, & Japanese culture (DREAM POP ORIGAMI), in all three books, I’m as invested in how mixed-race people come to understand themselves as I am in the fixed/metamorphic act of storytelling itself.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
TBH, I feel like I’ve had unbelievably bad luck as a writer. I really do. Most of my success has come from perseverance, stubbornness, commitment to self-improvement, & willingness to put in the work. But there’s no question that if I hadn’t kept putting myself out there, if I hadn’t applied to the MFA and PhD programs that accepted me if I’d hadn’t submitted short stories & personal essays to literary journals every year for two decades (we’re talking thousands of submissions in my lifetime), I wouldn’t have had the success I’ve had. Eventually, I found the right readers for my graduate school applications, literary journals, & small presses, so I’m incredibly fortunate about all that. I’ve also met a number of truly amazing writers, editors, poets, & readers during my voyage and I’m incredibly grateful to have met them. I’m not sure if I would have survived these past 3-4 years–emotionally speaking–without them. But just in terms of luck, almost every writer I know has had better luck than me and most of that is connected to having a New York literary agent who is on a first-name basis with every major editor of every major imprint in the Big-5 publishing houses.

Pricing:

• Subscription to MIXTAPE, my Substack newsletters is $5 a month (https://jacksonbliss.substack.com/about)
• DREAM POP ORIGAMI, my choose-your-own-adventure memoir, is $20 (https://bookshop.org/p/books/dream-pop-origami-a-permutational-memoir-about-hapa-identity-jackson-bliss/18279033?ean=9781956692747)
• AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS, my backward novel about four BIPOC passengers whose lives intersect on the NYC subway during Hurricane Sandy, is $19 (https://bookshop.org/p/books/amnesia-of-june-bugs-jackson-bliss/18341662?ean=9798985376203)
• COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES, my experimental short story collection about Asian/mixed-race identity, is $18 (https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781934819975/counterfactual-love-stories-and-other-experiments.aspx)
• My rates for editing services are available on FIVERR (https://www.fiverr.com/jacksonbliss/save-your-ass-from-an-upcoming-deadline)

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.jacksonbliss.com/books
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonbliss/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacksonbliss/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacksonbliss
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/jacksonbliss
• Other: https://linktr.ee/jacksonbliss

Image Credits
The pic of me reading COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES in a black mask was taken by Aya Mac.