Jaclyn Gilbert
Jaclyn Gilbert's debut novel is Late Air.
From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:
I always want to know about process. I understand that this brilliant novel was a short story first. (That was my experience, actually, with my first novel!) How did you transform it into a novel? How difficult (and exhilarating) was that?--Marshal Zeringue
A very good question that goes right into the heart of the process. I started this novel as a story for my first fiction writing workshop as an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Around my class schedule, I began a habit of running along the Bronx River greenway. One October day, I ran past a park golf course and wondered about the possibility of a stray ball hitting me or another runner nearby. I thought suddenly of all my years of college running on the Yale campus golf course, and how never once I had considered these risks. Something about the terror of that hypothetical asked me to sit down when I got home to try and write it as a scene. I felt something lock in through the moment of writing—something about my past experience intersecting with my imagination as my pen scribbled over the page. When I shared the work with my class, I received several emails from readers wanting to know what happened—asking me what my plans for the story were. I began to consider the character of Murray as part of a larger work, or one that circled his own journey into his past around the inciting incident of a golf injury his star runner, Becky Sanders
At the time, I knew very little about traumatic head injury, but began reading as much as I could on the topic, studying regions of the brain, and the speed and distance required for a golf ball to incur severe damage. I also knew that the narrative felt too confined to the coach’s experience of his athlete’s accident, and I wanted to weave in a female perspective that could look at larger questions of...[read on]
