Writing nurtured in a promised land
Ride the Tortoise author Liesl Jobson was tempted to rework these ‘versions of the sordid details’ of her life, writes Penny Haw
WHEN she was 14 years old, Liesl Jobson and her family moved from Cape Town to New Canaan, Connecticut, for 18 months. Several successful movies, including The Stepford Wives and Revolutionary Road, were made in New Canaan. It was also where Jobson discovered her love and talent for writing.
“While living there, I realised how much I liked to tell people what was happening to me in letters,” she says. “I loved writing letters and I loved getting letters. But I recognised that I was far more interested in what I was writing to people than what they were writing back. I guess that’s when I first came to an understanding of the power of bearing witness to one’s own experience. It’s when you tell your own story that you learn to understand what has really happened. Even if you don’t put the full spiel out there, writing is a means of making sense of it all.”
Jobson’s newly released collection of short stories, Ride The Tortoise (Jacana), provides a glimpse into the author’s psyche as she has endeavoured to “make sense of it all” since. And because she has done many other things in her life besides write, the tortoise provides a thrilling ride. In fact, it was announced last week that the book has been included on the long list for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, which is billed as “the world’s richest prize for a collection of short stories”. (The winning author receives £25,000 in prize money.)
Although Jobson is presently a contributing editor for BooksLIVE and edits the South African domain of Poetry International, her talent is not limited to writing. She is also a musician, who played the bassoon for, among others, the now defunct National Orchestra. And when, having returned to Cape Town from the US, it was time to make a decision about tertiary education, she enrolled at Wits University for a Bachelor of Music degree. At 19, she was also married.
The years that followed in Joburg were spent completing her degree, playing and teaching music, and producing two children. At some point, Jobson also sold her services as a psychic whose primary extrasensory perception came through smell. (The technique is known as “clairolfaction”.) She worked briefly as a journalist for a community newspaper as well, which, she says, was useful because it taught her to condense her writing and tell a story in 400 words. But the job didn’t last long: “I don’t work well with pressure. Deadlines and me are not friends.”
Divorce brought about at least one unexpected consequence for Jobson: it left her without medical aid. She spotted an opportunity to remedy this when she noted the absence of a flautist in the Soweto Police Band at a choir recital. She offered her services and thus began a two-year spell with the South African Police Service, first as a member of the band in Soweto and later as part of the communications team in Diepkloof. To supplement her income, she also taught music at some of Joburg’s most elite schools.
“It was a strange time. I traversed different worlds. In the mornings, I’d be in Soweto, where a single desk was shared by four children, and in the afternoon, I went to teach music at Roedean.”
As a member of the police force, she not only witnessed local communities at their most desperate but also saw her colleagues suffering the trauma associated with their profession. It was at about this time that Jobson began experimenting more earnestly with writing again. She discovered an interesting online world, where writers critiqued each other’s work and exchanged information about where to get their work published.
Among the first writers she interacted with online was Kenyan author, journalist and director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in New York, Binyavanga Wainaina, whose blurbs applauding her writing appear on the cover of the new book.
It was also online — “during the days of expensive dial-up connections” — that she discovered flash fiction, which is a “short-short” form of storytelling. “When I learned about flash fiction, I recognised it was a particularly good medium for me. It resonated with how I think about the world. I don’t necessarily have access to a linear process of thinking and tend to have a fractured way of remembering things and forgetting things. So the condensed, microvision worked for me.” She also wrote poetry, which, she says, “arrives like a bolt from the blue” and is not, like her stories, “a planned thing”.
Jobson began submitting her work to online journals such as Word Riot, Pig Iron Malt and SmokeLong Quarterly. A miscellany of characters, personae and roles — musician, divorcee, mother (compelled to live apart from her children at times), teacher, journalist, lover, policewoman, sister and daughter; and experiences — violence, pain, lust, love, grief, anxiety, laughter, regret and fear — emerged in her writing, many of which reappear in Ride The Tortoise.
By the time she decided to return to Wits to do a masters in creative writing (“to help find my voice, I guess”), Jobson had already published about 60 stories online. The director of the centre at the university, Pamela Nichols, suggested that she turn these into a book for her dissertation.
This materialised as Jobson’s collection of flash fiction, 100 Papers, which came out shortly after the publication of her collection of poetry, Views From An Escalator. The books won several awards, including the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award for 100 Papers.
Success triggered mixed emotions. It was a “profoundly validating experience”. But it also made her anxious.
“When you publish a book, you think it’s going to do all manner of miracles. Save your marriage, lose you 10kg, and restore your bank balance and youthful looks. Even the crack in the roof is going to miraculously disappear. It doesn’t fix anything. But once it’s out there, you’re a writer. You’re expected to sit down and write. Someone believed enough in your manuscript to shell out to publish it. Others went out and bought it, and gave feedback. You did something right. But there’s the pressure of wondering if you’ll ever be able to do it again.” But do it again, she has. “Ride The Tortoise came about after the publishing director for Jacana, Maggie Davey, asked me if I had a novel for the company. I said: ‘No, but I do have some short stories,’ and so work on the collection began. Again, (Davey’s request) was very validating and when people believe in you, it helps the creative process.”
That is not to say it was easy. Jobson had written most of the stories contained in the book years ago. Only one is an imagined piece. The others are “versions of the sordid details” of her life. Working with them again was “deeply unnerving” and she was tempted to make changes. But editor Karen Jennings convinced her otherwise, which is why there is a real rawness about Ride The Tortoise that reminds you it’s about “making sense of it all”.