Cherie Jones

The Barbados-born writer, lawyer and Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner describes how her debut novel is the fulfilment of a teenage dream

‘Idecided on publication by a reputable publisher as a personal objective sometime in my late teens. So I started submitting stories to local newspapers. The editors at the time would publish one or other of my stories in the Sunday lifestyle magazine and I’d be paid about $25 each time. Just to open the newspaper on Sunday and see a story I wrote was indescribable – pure elation. It was more the joy of thinking that someone “got” the story and thought it worthy of publication and less about being paid for publication, but I was hooked all the same.

‘When I had a few short stories together, I started querying. I also started entering writing contests. I figured the contests were a good way to gauge whether my work was compelling enough to judges and eventually, to agents and editors. I especially aimed for writing contests that offered feedback to entrants.

‘One of the things I’d read was that it was likely to take several tries before finding a literary agent willing to represent me. Some famous writers whose work I loved and respected were quoted talking about tens and even hundreds of rejection letters before they landed an agent or publisher – so I settled in for the long haul. Quite early on in the quest for publication, I only had a few finished stories that I thought were any good, but it seemed like a brilliant idea to start querying before I had a full manuscript in hand, seeing that it seemed to take so many rejections over a long period before I might get accepted. I figured I’d complete the manuscript as I collected rejections. So I started querying – wayyyy before my work was truly ready. The first agent I queried with one of the stories asked to see the full manuscript – and I didn’t have one to give.

‘I can laugh at it now but let’s just say that I didn’t sign with that agent and it would take me over fifteen years before signing with the fantastic agent I have now. I learned a lot from that experience, not the least of which is... never query before you are truly ready. Let the competitions and querying wait until your work is, firstly, complete, and then also the best possible version of itself that you can make it.

‘How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House actually started out as a short story. I was on the bus on my way home from work and I heard Lala’s voice in my head. That’s the best way I can describe it, and it’s how many of my stories get started – I hear the voice of one of the characters in my head. The process of writing the story is almost like I’m trying to understand what I’m being told and then to craft it in such a way that the real story shines through. My characters don’t always tell me the whole truth.

‘I was initially doubtful about writing this story, for reasons which included my own experiences of domestic violence, but when I arrived home that evening I started it in a red Royal Mail notebook. I tend to write longhand from the last page of whatever notebook I’m using at the time and I write towards the first page. In a sense I write “back to front”.

‘Eventually the short story developed and I’d say it really started to take shape as a novel during a writing residency at VSC in 2015. The subject matter was difficult – I stopped several times and worked on other projects – but this was a novel I felt compelled to finish and I finally did in 2018.

‘I wouldn’t say I gave up on landing a publishing deal with one of the big publishers but there was a time in about 2017 when I decided to stop chasing the dream as hard as I had been. In the fourteen years before that, I’d quit my day-job several times (often coming back to it when I felt unable to financially sustain myself ) in an effort to dedicate myself fully to the writing life. I’d also moved myself and my children halfway across the world a few times to a place I perceived to have better writing opportunities, and tried to sustain student life as a single mom for the sake of writing time, tutoring and community.

‘In 2017 I was six months into my PhD when my Dad became very, very ill and I moved back home again. Then occurred a series of very challenging events which led me to decide that I didn’t need the tutoring and community of a PhD to write my novel. It certainly helped and I was having the best time of it, but I realised that PhD or no, day-job or not, I was going to write anyway, so I reasoned that perhaps I needed to be a little less heartbroken about being away from the PhD community and just focus a little more on the work.

‘It’s perhaps one of life’s many ironies that I landed a book deal within two years of that decision for How the OneArmed Sister Sweeps Her House.

‘Publication for me came pretty quickly with How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. I signed with my badass literary agent, Clare Alexander of Aitken Alexander Associates in March, 2019. She started submitting to publishers on Tuesday, 9th, and Thursday, 11 April, 2019. On the following Monday, 15 April, she called me with offers. It was a phenomenal, surreal experience and a day I will never forget.’