Jac Jemc lives in Chicago. Her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc Books.  In the meantime, she’s the poetry editor for decomp, a fiction reader for Our Stories, a member of the editorial team at Tarpaulin Sky Press, and a regular contributor to BigOther.com.  She blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com. Her piece, “The Grifted”, appears in the April 2010 issue of The Collagist.

Her piece “Women in Wells” was originally published on Juked magazine in July of 2009.

It’s taken him a moment to figure it out, but this girl reminds him of someone. She reminds him of that woman in the well when he was a child, just up the road. That woman he told no one about, who’d spoken to him calmly, who’d seemed, not happy, but certain of her place all the way down there; that woman who’d just stopped speaking to him one day, and no flashlight could shine far enough down to see if she had gotten free or if she was just being quiet, and he couldn’t tell anyone she’d stopped talking to him because they’d wonder why he never tried to help her out. This girl who answered the door? Who said just a few words as she let him in? This girl whom he’s known forever, but not for a while? The voice this girl grew into is the voice of that woman in the well.

-from “Women in Wells” by Jac Jemc

What was your inspiration for writing “Women in Wells”? Was there anything about its writing—your process, any challenges that the piece presented you, your approach to editing and revision—that you’d like to share with our readers?

I wrote this story originally for a reading series here in Chicago, called Quickies.  You have to read your full-story in under five minutes or they drag you off stage.  I’ve realized that I often write about people entering other people’s homes unexpectedly and then both of them navigating that interaction.  I’m not sure what my obsession is with that event, but this definitely falls in that category.  I don’t generally get “ideas” for stories.  What happens is I start making sentences that have nothing to do with each other and then I try to tie them together.  That was the process for writing this.  I always have trouble with endings but then that’s always the part I like the most.

Something that intrigues me about this piece is the projection of characters onto other characters, and how the areas of overlap and mismatch define them. The boy’s memories of the woman in the well, who may or may not be real, affects his perception of the girl, as well as the reader’s. Could you speak a little to this affect, and your approach to creating these characters?

I think we define a person by the other people we know, for the most part, and we define them by some past iteration we knew of them, whether it was an hour ago or a year.  It’s like that Mitch Hedberg joke: “Someone handed me a picture and said, ‘This is a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture of you is when you were younger.”  So the way we see a person is always a little out of date, always approximate.  And then there’s the idea that knowing someone involves imagining yourself through their eyes, and understanding them in relation to yourself. I can’t stop thinking about that line from Kathryn Regina’s poem, “the sky is not a good place for careful observation”: “it is difficult to know my mind without other minds/ knocking into it.” Context is the key.

What work by another writer would be part of your own personal Best of the Web?

Joe Aguilar’s ‘Beneath My House’ that appeared in elimae.

An Interview with J.W. Wang, editor of Juked magazine:

Please introduce us to your publication: How did it get started? What kind of work do you publish?

Juked began in 1999, originally as an online magazine publishing mostly articles by a group of volunteer staff writers.  We were a group of friends who wanted only to put out fun, smart writing for others to read.  Over the years we’ve shifted focus, and since about 2004 have been publishing primarily fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction chosen from unsolicited submissions.  We don’t have any particular themes we stick to; we still like fun and smart, of course, but in the end it’s really about the quality of the writing, whether it piques our interest or not.

What was it about “Women In Wells” that initially spoke to you? What set it apart from the other submissions you were reading?

A good short story title is crucial, of course.  It’s the first impression for a reader or editor.  We’ll look at every submission no matter what the title is, but it goes quite a ways in terms of setting up our expectations; the story will have to work much harder to rescue itself if the title is something mundane or silly.  “Women in Wells” caught my attention immediately.  It has an inherent poetic rhythm: four syllable counts, consonance and assonance.  It also presents a striking literal image (another poetic quality) while suggesting some kind of mystery or otherworldly phenomenon.  How do you get women in wells?  What kind of women, in what kind of condition, and what kind of wells?  Who would say or think that?  It’s not a simple non-sequitur—which usually fails to draw interest because you need some kind of connection for people to relate—but an enticing opening into the world of the story.  There is the suggestion of trouble, of need.  There is the suggestion that something is not quite right, of the world being askew.  All of which come into play in the story, set up deliciously by the title.

“Women In Wells” can be found here, where it was originally published.