Joanna Pearson

Joanna Pearson’s debut novel is Bright and Tender Dark. Her second story collection, Now You Know It All, was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards. Her first story collection, Every Human Love was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and many other places. Pearson has received fellowships supporting her fiction from MacDowell, VCCA, South Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the North Carolina Arts Council/Durham Arts Council. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Originally from western North Carolina, Pearson now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Bright and Tender Dark works in an oblique way to introduce some central thematic concerns—and paradoxes—of the novel. Bright conjures Karlie, the brilliant and charismatic young woman found murdered in her college apartment in the early days of the year 2000. Tender is the sore spot, tender as a bruise, left in Joy, Karlie’s freshman roommate, who both envied Karlie and yet also misses her, and who still has questions about what really happened. Dark is the space of uncertainty, where questions turn to urban legends, myth, or Reddit threads. Karlie’s absence becomes a void into which people who knew her, or hardly knew her at all, whisper their theories.

What's in a name?

I love that you’ve asked this question! One cannot name a main character Joy, particularly as a writer living in the South, without it being a little nod to Joy/Hulga in Flannery O’Connor’s much-venerated story, “Good Country People.” I’m someone who is never not being haunted by O’Connor’s stories, which were formative for me. I love how they grapple with questions of belief and interpersonal connection, exploring the ways in which we flawed humans have capacity for such grace and yet can also be so petty, vain, and short-sighted. It should be no surprise, then, that Joy in Bright and Tender Dark is a disaffected preacher’s kid. Her own reckoning with faith and organized religion, her sense of what faith means to Karlie in her own short life—I think these are powerful elements in the book. Much like Joy/Hulga in the O’Connor story, my Joy is someone who also feels she wears her own name poorly—or at least, with ambivalence.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Ha—I think she wouldn’t be surprised at all! Spooky lit fic? Urban legends? The weird liminal spaces where doubt starts to shift into belief, and belief into doubt? She’d be into all that!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Landing an ending is always tougher—and the ending for a novel like this presents an interesting challenge. On the one hand, I feel I owe my readers some specific answers (namely, who dunnit, and why). On the other hand, because I never set out to write a beat-by-beat mystery/crime novel, I’m playing with genre conventions, subverting them, and even abandoning them. The feeling I want readers left with is a complicated one—hope is a part of it, but I also want the reader to walk away with a shiver of recognition, a feeling of implication. I hope there are flashes of all our best and worst selves in these pages.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think when one is writing truthfully, there are always pieces of one’s self in every character, “bad guys” included! One of my abiding principals as a writer is that I must write with empathy, even when writing about characters whose actions I might never condone. I want to understand even when I don’t necessarily agree.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Two things come to mind. The first is season one of the podcast In the Dark, one of the smartest, most thoughtful investigative podcasts I’ve ever heard. It’s about the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling, but it’s also about the rippling impact of this tragedy on an entire community. The second is that wonderful television series High Maintenance, which started as a web series, then aired on HBO from 2016 to 2020. It follows a pot dealer in New York City delivering his product to clients, so you get these little, prismatic glances into many different lives. What I loved about it—and what I found so inspiring—was the way each episode functioned as a beautiful, contained story, and then how the entire series wove into a larger tapestry, capturing the ways in which we are so profoundly interconnected and yet also often oblivious to those connections. The show is both moving and funny, as precise

Visit Joanna Pearson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue