Forrester, Jenny
WORK TITLE: Narrow River, Wide Sky
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jennyforrester.com/
CITY:
STATE: OR
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2017/06/jenny_forrester_memoir.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2016065081 |
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016065081 |
| HEADING: | Forrester, Jenny |
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| 010 | __ |a n 2016065081 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |e rda |
| 100 | 1_ |a Forrester, Jenny |
| 670 | __ |a Her Narrow river, wide sky, 2017: |b ECIP title page (Jenny Forrester) data view (has been published in print and online publications including Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama, The Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, and Columbia Journal; her work is included in the Listen to Your Mother anthology, published by Putnam; she curates the Unchaste Readers Series) |
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Colorado.
ADDRESS
- Home - Portland, OR.
CAREER
Literary writer and editor. Unchaste Readers Series, editor; Hip Mama Magazine, editor; Literary Kitchen, editor.
AWARDS:Richard Hugo House New Works Competition, 2011; Monkey Puzzle Press Flash Fiction Contest, 2012.
WRITINGS
- Narrow River, Wide Sky, Hawthorne (Portland, OR), 2017
Contributor of literary fiction to various publications, including Penduline Press, Unshod Quills, Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama, Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, and Columbia Journal.
Contributor of fiction to anthologies, including Listen to Your Mother, Putnam, 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
Jenny Forrester writes literary fiction and has been published in various magazines, including Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama, Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, and Columbia Journal. Her work has also appeared in the Listen to Your Mother anthology. She is curator of the Unchaste Readers literary series (Portland, Oregon) and edits for Hip Mama Magazine and Literary Kitchen. Explaining the term unchaste, Forrester told an interviewer on the Literary Arts website: “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, so we may as well be ourselves. We are Unchaste by default because we’re women. Let’s be that then and embrace our many ways of navigating our wondrous and frightening and complex experiences and our many realities.”
In 2017, Forrester published her memoir, Narrow River, Wide Sky, a look into her strict life growing up in poverty in a double-wide trailer in the conservative western Colorado town of Mancos. Her small rural town was populated by God-fearing Republicans, gun lovers, religious fundamentalists, rattlesnakes, ranchers, Mormons, and Native Americans. American flags flew proudly amid morally certain citizens, and schoolchildren learned by rote memorization without discussion. Forrester experienced sexual assault, abuse from her boyfriend, and condemnation from her sin-obsessed neighbors. When her mother died suddenly, as young adults she and her brother wondered where they could bury her when they didn’t know where they truly belonged. Using her family’s strained relationship as a microcosm of America’s political tension, Forrester provides a look into her search for identity.
Successfully escaping her environment to attend the University of Colorado on a scholarship, Forrester was able to express her feminist views and become a writer. “Forrester doesn’t gloss over the difficult parts of her life, but rather tells stories of how that adversity formed a stronger individual,” declared Jeff Fleischer in ForeWord. Fleischer added that the book is a moving memoir about the ways family can still be an influence even after they move apart. Forrester also describes her sometimes contentious relationship with her brother, her experiences with drugs, the effects of religion on her community, and her political awakening. Fleischer added that the narrative reads like literary fiction and that Forrester’s excellent sense of place makes the town into a character.
In an interview with Amy Wang online at Oregon Live, Forrester explained that she wrote the memoir so that her daughter would know her grandmother. She began the book in 1995 just after her mother had died. Forrester said, “It was just going to be a history. And then I started writing and met real writers and then I met poets and then I met a lot of political activists and the book just kept changing and changing until it became what it is now. It’s still for my daughter, but it’s also—I wanted it to become eventually a piece of art.
“The landscape and culture of west Colorado are vividly evoked in an accomplished literary debut,” noted a writer in Kirkus Reviews. As Forrester reflects on the culture that shaped and oppressed her, she has created “a modest, thoughtful memoir that traces hard-won liberation from the past,” said the writer. Describing her creative process in her memoir, Forrester told Ariel Gore in an interview online at Literary Kitchen: “I want to tell stories that matter, that could speak to power, that could tear down big men and bring up little women or show the truth that those men aren’t big and those women aren’t little and maybe gender is a fallacy, but patriarchy wants it not to be so it all seems to matter still.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
ForeWord, April 27, 2017, Jeff Fleischer, review of Narrow River, Wide Sky.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Narrow River, Wide Sky.
ONLINE
Literary Arts, https://literary-arts.org/ (November 2015), author interview.
Literary Kitchen, http://literarykitchen.com/ (7/27/2017), Ariel Gore, author interview.
Oregon Live, http://www.oregonlive.com/ (June 8, 2017), Amy Wang, author interview.
- Narrow River, Wide Sky Hawthorne (Portland, OR), 2017
- Oregon Live - http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2017/06/jenny_forrester_memoir.html
Author Q&A: Jenny Forrester of Portland's Unchaste Readers series discusses new memoir
Updated Jun 8, 2017; Posted Jun 8, 2017
Jenny Forrester reads from her debut memoir on Tuesday, June 13, at Broadway Books in Northeast Portland.(Author photo: Intisar Abioto; book cover, Hawthorne Books)By Amy Wang
awang@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive
Jenny Forrester wanted her daughter to know who her grandmother was.
That desire inspired "Narrow River, Wide Sky" (Hawthorne Books, 212 pages, $18.95), Forrester's recently published memoir and literary debut. In the book, Forrester, curator of Portland's Unchaste Readers literary series, looks back stoically on a western Colorado childhood that included her father's abandonment of her, her mother and her younger brother; financial deprivation and social isolation; drug use; and other challenges that helped shape her into who she is today. "I swore to be tougher, to stop crying, to be what Mom and Brian were," she writes. " 'Please, God, make me stronger.' "
Forrester will read from "Narrow River, Wide Sky" at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 13, at Broadway Books, 1714 N.E. Broadway. She spoke with The Oregonian/OregonLive about her book; here are excerpts from the conversation.
Q: What inspired you to write a memoir?
A: This memoir began when my mother died in 1995 and I wanted my daughter to know her grandma, who I thought was an incredible member of our family. It was just going to be a history. And then I started writing and met real writers and then I met poets and then I met a lot of political activists and the book just kept changing and changing until it became what it is now. It's still for my daughter, but it's also - I wanted it to become eventually a piece of art.
Q: A lot of memoirs follow a fairly precise chronological pattern. Yours has a looser, almost at times a nonlinear structure.
A: I had been writing it in a sort of circular manner, like, here's my brother and I when we were young, here's a story about what happened and here we are now, and I wrote it kind of like that throughout, from my first draft. It was a little too hard to swallow. And then I put it all in chronological order and it was super boring. The final structure came about after I met (Portland writer) Lidia Yuknavitch and she helped me break some of my own rules.
I also looked at other memoirs that had that quality of wanting to know what was next even though you knew what was going to happen. That was my big thing: how do I move through time, how do I slow some moments down because they're so significant?
Q: You wrote about some very difficult experiences, including an abusive incident during your childhood and your mother's death. Can you talk about what it was like to write those?
A: When my mom died, I had been writing with (author and literary coach) Ariel (Gore) for a little while, and I had been writing about it in kind of a telling way that beginning writers do. She gave this prompt one day and I just stayed right in that moment of when I was in the apartment (learning about the death) and trying to figure out what was happening. When I finished writing that scene, for the first time as a writer I had written a scene rather than an expository essay, and I had this huge lump in my throat and I thought, "I got it. This is what it's like." That was a stunning experience for me. Ariel said, "You've showed us."
I hadn't written that childhood scene. Rhonda Hughes, editor at Hawthorne Books, said I needed to write that scene, and I set my timer for eight minutes and I wrote it. And then I was done.
Q: You also reveal a lot about family members who are still living. How much did you talk with them about that as you wrote?
A: My brother, I sent him at one point Chapter 8 to show him what I did to him, with him, for his character. At first he said, "Can we call it fiction and can you change my name?" And then not 10 minutes later, he said, "It's OK, write what you need to write," and I thought that was an unbelievably loving thing, and generous of him. Because I opened that can pretty hard.
I really had this idea that my relatives would read the book, they would understand me, and all would be revealed and everything would be great. And art apparently doesn't always work that way with family members. It works better with strangers.
- Literary Arts - https://literary-arts.org/2015/11/interview-with-jenny-forrester-of-unchaste-readers/
Interview with Jenny Forrester of Unchaste Readers
@LiteraryArtsView All
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Youth ProgramsJenny Forrester is the curator of Portland’s Unchaste Readers series, which has its new home at Literary Arts! She is also an award-winning writer; she won the 2011 Richard Hugo House New Works Competition, was a runner-up in the Indiana Review 2011 Flash Fiction Contest, and won the 2012 Monkey Puzzle Press Flash Fiction Contest. She’s been published in Penduline Press, Unshod Quills, Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Small Doggies Press, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama Magazine, and Indiana Review. She edits for Hip Mama Magazine and in Ariel Gore’s Literary Kitchen. She is most recently published in Listen to Your Mother (Putnam, 2015).
Jenny graciously answered all of our questions about her work and the series, and you can read our interview below. We’re so excited to be hosting Unchaste Readers every third Wednesday of month in 2016 (click here for the full calendar) at 7:00 p.m. at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington St. in Portland, Oregon. Join us!
What was your inspiration for the creation of Unchaste Readers?
I’ve always wanted to be involved in a community of women artists, but I’d envisioned living on the land in yurts and having composting toilets. Running a reading series is a lot easier and just as fun. I’m also dead serious.
What has been challenging?
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by politics, squabbles, disagreements, and by the pain-filled realities of women’s lives. I mostly avoid political entanglements by simply doing the work of curating the series. I’m aware that at every reading there are cliques who usually despise each other, but at Unchaste, it’s impossible to tell from where I sit. That’s such a beautiful thing.
How do you stay motivated?
This is easy 99.9% of the time because I feel so fortunate to hear the word “yes” to my requests for people to read. Very few women have said no to reading at Unchaste, which is beyond blissful and deeply inspiring. I’m too grateful not to be motivated.
How can someone participate in Unchaste Readers?
Connect with me via the Unchaste Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UnchasteReaders/ or check out the blog: http://unchastereaders.com/wp/. You can send email via the blog, too.
What have been your favorite moments at readings?
When Melanie Alldritt read while her family was on the phone because they’d never heard her read. When Sara June Woods told us what it means to be a woman, and everyone cried. When Golda Dwass read about her sex life. When Ijeoma Oluo said, “White men ruin everything,” and some man got really angry and we laughed so hard at his expense. And maybe I shouldn’t have picked this question because I could go on more than 160 times which is how many women have read.
Why do you think reading work in front of an audience is important?
We hear ourselves. It’s another way to know our stories are real and true and we’re not alone and our judgment and perceptions can be trusted.
What do you envision in the future for Unchaste Readers?
To keep doing this work. But, also: Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay the readers? Wouldn’t it be great if we could put together a website that takes submissions and pays for the work accepted? Wouldn’t it be great if what I call “Unchaste University” took hold and provided the opportunity for author-teachers to connect with writers and clean money changed hands?
What part of the project are you most proud of?
Everyone reads at the series, including women who’ve just gathered the courage to share the work they’ve been doing for years as well as the published authors whose many works we all know and love.
Why “unchaste”?
We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, so we may as well be ourselves. We are Unchaste by default because we’re women. Let’s be that then and embrace our many ways of navigating our wondrous and frightening and complex experiences and our many realities.
What current projects are you working on?
I’d love to start a fundraising campaign to pay all of the Unchaste as a celebration of four years of the series in April, 2016. I personally am working mostly on a book I’ve been writing for a long time. I like it.
Any thoughts on the tension between being a writer writing (alone with desk) and a writer reading (performing with crowd)?
They are two different things, that’s true. Preparing something to be published for a lone reader and preparing something to be read for a group of listeners are different activities with many different elements to rearrange and pay attention to. The tension is in which direction to take with the artistic endeavor in question and how much time to spend writing for submission/publication and writing for performance. Some types of writing work better than others for the stage. For example, it can be tricky to read fiction for an audience because of the many elements the listener must hold in their minds for seven minutes, the time allowed each reader (with some exceptions). It can be done, but it’s challenging. Some writers are great on the page and not as strong at performing while other people read really well, maybe better than they write. I’m not naming names. I think we all need to decide where we’d like to focus our efforts. Some people can do it all, but we don’t all have to. That’s the beauty in that tension. I do think the goal (my goal) is to ultimately provide another place to make us stronger storytellers in whatever form we choose to use.
- Have Book will Travel - http://havebookwilltravel.com/?p=2009
Jenny Forrester
Jenny Forrester (CNF) | Portland, OR
Booking Fee:Negotiable
Will Travel:Anywhere
Contact:jenny_at_theforrest.org
Website:http://hawthornebooks.com/catalogue/narrow-river-wide-sky
Jenny Forrester has been published in a number of print and online publications including Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama, The Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, and Columbia Journal. Her work is included in the Listen to Your Mother anthology, published by Putnam. She curates the Unchaste Readers Series. Hawthorne Books is publishing her debut memoir, Spring 2017.
Narrow River, Wide Sky
Jeff Fleischer
ForeWord.
(Apr. 27, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Jenny Forrester; NARROW RIVER, WIDE SKY; Hawthorne Books (Nonfiction: Autobiography & Memoir) 18.95 ISBN: 9780997068351
Byline: Jeff Fleischer
Forrester doesn't gloss over the difficult parts of her life, but rather tells stories of how that adversity formed a stronger individual.
In Narrow River, Wide Sky, Jenny Forrester traces her journey from growing up in a trailer in a small, conservative Colorado town to becoming a college-educated, feminist writer, and how that changes her relationships along the way. This is a moving memoir about how the influence of family can remain long after people drift apart, and how one never truly forgets the circumstances of one's childhood.
Forrester's relationship with her mother forms the core of the story; the book starts with the reveal that the author lost her mother early in adulthood, then reflects back on their relationship during her early years. As a girl, Forrester grows up steeped in the mythology of the pioneers in a rural area where men hunt deer for food, neighbors concern themselves with who in the area might be sinning, and spanking is still a preferred parenting tool. These scenes truly read as if from a work of literary fiction, with an excellent sense of place that makes the town into a character.
Forrester brings narrative immediacy to the rifts between her parents that lead to their separation and her moving away with her mother and brother. She writes a series of scenes that tell a lot about her sibling relationship -- warm at times, but often a source of secrets or even casual cruelty. It's clear early on that Forrester was something of a square peg in her rural environs.
Forrester also shares her experiences with a number of men, from her dismissive and often
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abusive high school boyfriend to the more stable life she eventually finds with her husband. She writes of her experiences with drugs, with religion, and with her own political awakening. All of this ties back to how she and her brother grew apart in many ways and brings the memoir full circle.
Forrester doesn't gloss over the difficult parts of her life, but rather tells stories of how that adversity formed a stronger individual and a strong writer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fleischer, Jeff. "Narrow River, Wide Sky." ForeWord, 27 Apr. 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490947760/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3176b570. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490947760
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Forrester, Jenny: NARROW RIVER, WIDE SKY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Forrester, Jenny NARROW RIVER, WIDE SKY Hawthorne Books (Adult Nonfiction) $18.95 5, 16 ISBN: 978-0-9970683-5-1
The landscape and culture of west Colorado are vividly evoked in an accomplished literary debut."How do we settle with ghosts?" Forrester asks in her finely etched memoir, which begins when she and her brother try to decide on their mother's burial site. "Where do we bury our mothers when there is nowhere we belong?" The author grew up poor: her family lived in a double-wide trailer after their father's "all-time best construction business" failed; and then, after her parents divorced, in a single-wide trailer in the small town of Mancos. Narrow-minded churchgoers pitied her mother and the two children as a broken family. Forrester was bullied at school, where bored students "learned through textbooks, rote memorization, and discipline with strict rules, straight lines, the Pledge of Allegiance, moral certainty, no discussions, no show and tell." Moral certainty was widespread in a town peopled by assorted religious fundamentalists and strident patriots. Mancos seemed like a place from which Forrester never would escape. In high school, she was promiscuous, ending up with Paul, as bigoted and controlling as her father had been. As a scholarship student at the University of Colorado, she faced "uncharted social terrain." She struggled academically, felt alienated from the school's sorority culture, gained unwanted weight, and discovered that she was pregnant. She had an abortion without anesthesia because she could not afford it. Much of the memoir focuses on Forrester's mother, struggling to support her children, navigating her own uncharted terrain as she trained to become an ESL teacher, and finally showing her daughter the understanding and support that she desperately needed. Throughout, the author reflects on the culture that shaped and, in many ways, oppressed her: "an American flag waving from the bracket by the trailer door and ranchers and Mormons and Masons and a Christianity based in western pioneer mythology and guns under the bed." A modest, thoughtful memoir that traces hard-won liberation from the past.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Forrester, Jenny: NARROW RIVER, WIDE SKY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911837/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6a1ad8a6. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911837
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- Literary Kitchen
http://literarykitchen.com/?cat=11
Word count: 1053The Devil is Always Whispering
Posted on July 27, 2017 by
The Literary Kitchen’s Ariel Gore Talks to Narrow River, Wide Sky Author Jenny Forrester about Writing through What Haunts UsOn the Colorado Plateau between slot canyons and rattlesnakes, Jenny Forrester grew up with her mother and brother in a single-wide trailer proudly displaying an American flag…
The lyrical Western memoir she’s created from her memories has been called “an unsentimental portrait of small-town Colorado, a formative environment that both oppressed her and shaped her identity.”
Jenny Forrester knows how to write about place.
Forward Reviews says, “Forrester doesn’t gloss over the difficult parts of her life, but rather tells stories of how that adversity formed a stronger individual.”
Jenny Forrester knows how not to gloss things over.
Many Literary Kitchen writers know Jenny as a student here, as the quiet force behind Portland’s Unchaste Readers Series—and we’ll soon know her as a teacher, too.
Jenny Forrester is breaking ground.How long did it take you to write Narrow River, Wide Sky?
Twenty years to the final draft before publication.Was there anything in taking that time that, in hindsight, feels particularly valuable?
The most valuable part really does seem to be all those years – I had to live and learn and it all took all that time. I wish it hadn’t.
The notion of what a memoir can be has changed so much in recent years—is still changing. What are your thoughts on memoir versus fiction in terms of your own creative expression and the stories you want to tell?
Fictionalizing is kind of what memory does. I mean, I’m not a neuroscientist or anything, but memory is a tricky thing. Even vision is tricky.
Stories are tricky, so if we say it’s all fiction, maybe we’re more honest, but I also know the patriarchy loves for us not to believe our memories, not to believe our stories.
I want to tell stories that matter, that could speak to power, that could tear down big men and bring up little women or show the truth that those men aren’t big and those women aren’t little and maybe gender is a fallacy, but patriarchy wants it not to be so it all seems to matter still. There needs to be a certain amount of fiction involved to topple them and bring ourselves and others up. So I trust memory, too. I trust that putting memory to the page matters. So mote it be.
As a small-town girl who has lived in the city for much of your life now, and as someone who grew up in conservative country but writes from a progressive, feminist perspective, what do you see as your unique insight into the multi-layered America we’re living in?
I love this question. I’m always thinking of myself as a small-town girl, as someone who’s been, and been among, the conservative mindset. It never feels like I’m safely progressive, fully feminist—the edge is always so close. I guess that’s unique—that I stand on the precipice and never really see things are changing for Them even though I’m part of a different We now. If that makes sense.
I mean, How did this Trump thing happen?
Maybe we don’t progress. We learn, we grow. To go back to the source of my understandings of things—the devil is always whispering and hissing. He never ceases to speak in that slithering way. He never rests.
One really interesting thing you do from a craft perspective in Narrow River, Wide Sky is the way that you move through time. Did you outline those movements and transitions or do you work more intuitively?
I can’t outline. That might be helpful, but I draw a lot—maps and circles and pies. I learned that from you. The pie thing. Moving through time is like this—sometimes we’re flying along having fun but the horrors are time-slowing.
I gave more words to the slow movements and fewer when I wanted to speed it up—like running. When you sprint, you take many more steps. When you want to cover distance, you stretch out those strides— fewer steps between mesas and mountains to close up the distance.
Kirkus calls the book, “A modest, thoughtful memoir that traces hard-won liberation from the past.” How important is liberation from the past? Do you think it’s possible?
I don’t know. Maybe we’re so much a part of the past and the steps we’ve already taken—we keep looking back to see what’s chasing us because it does seem something always is.
We can grow, we can change, we can move and all, but we live where our imprisonments happened or where the imprisoners live, if you will make allowances for that metaphor.
The places that trapped us, the places we left and we keep looking back like, seriously, did you SEE that? That’s how it is for me. Maybe other people can move on without looking back. I’m not them. I just know shapeshifting is temporary. Mostly, we maintain the forms we were born to.
So do you think you’re more or less haunted by the past for writing about it?
I used to believe there was some true answer, some redemptive piece of information I could find. Now, though. I do feel less haunted by the things I wrote about. But there are so many things I didn’t include so I am still working on those hauntings. I’m haunted by so much. I suppose we all are. I’m for facing ghosts. I’m for seeking solace. I’m for seeking freedom. I’ll continue.
Jenny Forrester’s debut memoir Narrow River, Wide Sky (Hawthorne Books, 2017) is available wherever books are sold.
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