Tessa Yang

Tessa Yang is a reader, writer, and shark enthusiast from New York State. She received her MFA from Indiana University where she served as the Editor of Indiana Review.

Her debut novel is The Jellyfish Problem.

Yang's story collection, The Runaway Restaurant, was published by 7.13 Books in 2022. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Cincinnati Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere, and her flash fiction has been featured in Best Small Fictions 2024, Flash Fiction America, and Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2018 and 2019.

My Q&A with the author:

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

“Jellyfish problems” was the thoughtless title I gave the Microsoft Word file where I was writing. It evolved into the title of the book because, as it turned out, it was doing quite a bit to take readers into the story. What problem is being caused by a jellyfish? How will the characters solve it? The book actually sold as Clementine; or, The Jellyfish Problem, à la Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, and was shortened during edits to just The Jellyfish Problem. I appreciate that it’s a mysterious title with a touch of whimsy, like the story.

What's in a name?

I love a name with nickname potential. The protagonist of The Jellyfish Problem is named Josephine Ness, and in the first chapter, we learn that she’s been called Josephine, Jo, Josie, Jo-Ness, and Nessie depending on the context. I think you can discover a little something about the relationship Jo has with each side character based on what they’ve chosen to call her.

The name of the main setting is Shattering Point, which I came up with by drafting a list of 20 potential names and picking the least terrible. I wanted something that sounded ominous but believable, that would maybe have the reader thinking, “Hmm…that doesn’t sound like a place where good things are going to happen.”

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

I read mostly fantasy as a kid, so my teenage self would be surprised that The Jellyfish Problem is so grounded in realism. I’ve seen it on a few sci-fi lists, which makes sense, but no one’s going to shelve this book as straight-up fantasy. I was also still closeted at that age. I didn’t read a book with a lesbian character until I was in college. My teenage self would be like, “Why are you writing all this gay stuff?” Well, she’ll know the answer soon!

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

I changed both for The Jellyfish Problem, but the ending was harder. For the longest time, I had no idea how to solve the titular “problem” that Jo experiences. I was in the dark with the characters, trying to find my way out.

The beginning kept backing up, taking Jo farther from the island where the main drama takes place—the opposite of Vonnegut’s “start as close to the end as possible”—because I discovered there was important emotional backstory readers needed to absorb before they reached Shattering Point.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The earliest thematic inspiration for The Jellyfish Problem was the movie Jaws. I ended up rewatching it (also Alien and Nope) while I was revising; I literally mapped out the structure of all three movies into a sort of timeline, recording what major plot developments happened at 25%, 50%, and 75% of the way through and trying to mimic those beats in my book.

Because The Jellyfish Problem was so research-intensive, I also took a lot of influence from nonfiction: podcasts, lectures, articles, interviews, and reference books. I decided to have Jo working on her own book within The Jellyfish Problem, partially to give me a vehicle for sharing all the amazing stuff I was learning!

Visit Tessa Yang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue