Luck, Timing, and Persistence: A Review, and Interview with Daughters of Chaos author Jen Fawkes by John David Morgan
Debut novelist Jen Fawkes is the author of Daughters of Chaos, released in July 2024 by Overlook Press, an imprint of Abrams, in which a female Union spy discovers a secret society ofmagical women that spans millennia.The book opens in 1877 as Sylvie Swift’s dying partner, Hannah, makes a final request:“The girls. Marina and Brigitte. Tell them.”
Marina (named after Sylvie’s sister), and Brigitte (named after Sylvie’s mother) are the twindaughters Sylvie gave up to a wealthy couple the girls believe are their biological parents. Sylviehonors Hannah’s request and begins documenting her (and Hannah’s) story, in the form of apersonal history addressed to the twins. Fawkes calls the book a “braided alternate history,” of whichthere are three braids.
The first is the personal history—set down in a journal—that Sylvie iswriting for her daughters, which includes letters from her Confederate twin brother, newspaperarticles, and snippets from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The second braid is the text of theApocrypha, an ancient “lost” Greek comedy Sylvie translated from French into English whileliving in Nashville. The third braid is the biography of a 16th century Venetian poet andcourtesan, Gaia Valentino, who translated the Apocrypha from Greek into French. A commonfactor in all three braids is the Cult of Chaos, a secret society of fierce, magical women.
The degree of difficulty in weaving together these three braids is akin to juggling chainsaws, butFawkes pulls it off beautifully. Kevin Brockmeier says of the book, “Dazzling … a beautifulspinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the fourth century BC,and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inheritedfrom antiquity.”
Fawkes is the author of two short story collections, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil ToldMe. Mannequin and Wife was a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, the winner of the 2023Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award, and a Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Hersecond collection, Tales the Devil Told Me, was a Foreword INDIES silver medalist, one ofLargehearted Boy’s Favorite collections of 2021, and a finalist for the 2022 World FantasyAward for Single-Author Story Collection. Fawkes is a two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize forFabulist Fiction sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department of theUniversity of Louisville. Her work appears in Issue 9 of Miracle Monocle.
Her impressive educational background includes a BA in Anthropology from ColumbiaUniversity; an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA; and a Ph.D. inEnglish Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati.She and her husband, Bill, live in Litle Rock, Arkansas, with their two (cat) children, Tessio andClemenza.I was fortunate to connect recently with Fawkes, while she was in Louisville as guest author for theUofL's Axton Reading Series. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed forlength and clarity.
I noticed in your CV that you have a BA in Anthropology. Is there a connection betweenAnthropology with writing?
JF: Many writers I know studied Anthropology as undergrads. I guess the most obviousconnection between Anthropology and writing is a deep interest in human beings, humanbehavior, human history. Where we started, how we arrived at where we are now. Our history ismade up of stories, and we apprehend things in a narrative fashion, so storytelling is reallybaked-in to human behavior. Turning a blind eye to what we know of human history is bothdangerous and absurd, but we must always keep in mind that the “history” we’ve been handed isjust one of many stories from our past.
You said in an interview that you are rootless; that you grew up in several places. Can youtalk about that, assuming you aren’t in witness protection?
JF: Ha! My parents were both brilliant but troubled people. My mom is from a tiny town inSoutheast Arkansas—the single mostly deadly shot of the Civil War was fired from a cannonthat points at the house where she grew up—and my father was from Chicago.
How did they meet?
JF: After my mom graduated from the University of Arkansas, she got hired, through the post,as an advertising copywriter for Sears. So she packed up, got on a bus, and moved alone toChicago. My father’s older sister was my mom’s boss, and my parents married pretty young.Professionally, my father was an electronics engineer, but he was also a composer, a musician, apuppeteer, a magician—a Renaissance Man. We moved to California when I was one; when Iwas four, my parents divorced, and my mother took my sister and me to Arkansas. In theintervening few years, my parents kept trying to reconcile, so we drove back and forth betweenArkansas and California three or four times. My mom was always searching—for her place, herpurpose, the answers—and she moved us every couple of years throughout my childhood. Tothis day, I start getting restless every two to three years—to feel like it’s time to be moving on.
Are there other writers in your family?
JF: My mom’s fondest wish was to be a publishing writer. If things had been different for her,she absolutely could have been—if she’d been luckier, if the timing had been right. When itcomes to success as an artist, luck and timing are more important than anything, including talent,with the possible exception of persistence.
Luck, timing, and persistence. I’m going to quote you on that.
JF: I have vivid memories of waking up in the middle of the night to find my mom sitting at arickety card table, typing like the wind, working on her fiction. She wrote and published a fewstories, and she wrote at least one novel. I was in my early thirties when my mom’s dementia—early onset Alzheimer’s—began to become obvious, but because she was so brilliant, shedevised coping strategies, and no one but me understood that she was ill for a long time. Sadly,she was losing her ability to read when I finally started getting published, but she still tried hardto read my work.
How would you and your main character, Sylvie Swift, get along?
JF: Oh, famously! As an early-stage writer, I always wrote from a male perspective. It waseasier for me to analyze and represent what was going on inside male characters than femalecharacters. I now see that I was afraid of trying to represent the complexity and contrariness ofthe female interior landscape, and at some point, I realized I was shortchanging my work by notexploring female perspectives. In the University of Cincinnati PhD program, I met Dr. SarahStrickley, and she’s one of the writers who inspired me to begin writing more directly andforcefully about women. There are pieces of me in Sylvie Swift, as well as my mom, my sister,and other women I’ve known and admired.
I’ll be sure and pass that along.In Scene 5 of theApocrypha, Timon says “do you think if women ran things they would notmake war? Are women not complete people?” Those are Timon’s words. What does JenFawkes say? If women were running things, would there be war?
JF: Absolutely! In an online review of Daughters of Chaos, someone said, “I can’t believe theauthor didn’t credit Marija Gimbutas, as she’s clearly leaning on her theories.” Even though Iwas an Anthropology major, I’d never heard of Gimbutas, whose Goddess Theory proposed thatduring human pre-history, our societies were maternal and entirely peaceful.I mean no offense to Gimbutas, whose theories are as fascinating as any I’ve encountered, butshe had no idea what human pre-history was like, and neither do I.
We can only imagine amatriarchal world, because as far as we know, there hasn’t been one. There have been matrilinealsocieties, societies in which property and wealth were passed down along female lines. But how anyone who’s lived among human beings can believe that if women were in charge, violence andwarfare would disappear, is truly beyond me. Warfare and violence would look different in amatriarchal society, I’m certain, but they would be there.
Daughters of Chaos is a work of fiction, and in it, I’m not alleging anything about humanhistory; I’m attempting to tell the story of a woman. Women have always had to work “behindthe scenes” to get their needs met, and they’ve done so in ways that may not seem, today, to be“ethical.” But ethics are just rules we all agree to believe in until we stop believing in them, untila new set of rules comes into being and rises to the top.
This is a research question. One thing I particularly liked about the book was the Porpoise,the Civil War submarine. I call that the submarine sub-sub plot. Would it be fair to sayhistorical accuracy is very important to you?
JF: Yes and no. An advantage of using historically “accurate” elements is that such elementscan lend your fiction the sheen, or the illusion, of authenticity. But for me, history as we know itis merely a story—one possible version of our past. Some of my favorite books fictionalizeactual historical events, figures, and situations, like Beloved by Toni Morrison and ColsonWhitehead’s first book The Intuitionist. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which usesevents from Canadian history, was my main model in structuring Daughters of Chaos. I’m drawnto books like Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, and Moby-Dick, my all-time favorite book.
Here's a fun question. It’s about family helpfulness, and support of your writing process.On a scale of one to ten, with one being the least helpful, and ten being the most helpful,how would you rate your cat children, Tessio and Clemenza, in terms of helpfulness in yourwriting process?
JF: Ha. Ten!
A ten! Seriously?
JF: Well, okay, maybe an eight. It’s the joy, the inspiration, of having them in my life. Severeallergies prevented me from having pets when I was young, but now I take medicine that allowsme to function, and I am just in love with my cats. Our boy, Clemenza, does like to situatehimself between me and my computer. He spends a lot of time in my lap, and he will shove mycomputer out of his way. He’s more dependent on us than his sister Tessio, who, like hernamesake from The Godfather films, would sell us out in a heartbeat for some tasty treat.
Any advice for new writers?
JF: In the beginning, don’t worry about who your audience is, or might be. Learn to listen toyour own voice. The only thing I did correctly—and this was quite inadvertent—was that I didn’tstart thinking about audience as an early-stage writer, when I was learning to write fictionalprose. I wrote exactly what I wanted to, and in this way, I discovered my passions, my path, andI developed a writing “voice.” Thinking about audience too early can paralyze and/or sabotageyou. I recommend figuring out what it is that excites you, not some fictional reader, and workingin your own secluded space for as long as you can.
Last question. In this interview, or in any of your previous interviews, has there beenanything that you haven’t been asked, that you’d like to talk about?
JF: I haven’t talked about the Confederate submarine program as much as I’d like to. I amweirdly obsessed with seafaring, and the ocean, and I was excited to situate Silas, Sylvie’s twinbrother, in a submarine. Water supports us and sustains our lives; it can also kill us in a matter ofminutes. I’m pretty terrified of deep water, but I’m drawn to it at the same time—a feeling thatgenerally makes for exciting, complicated fiction.The Confederates were much more convinced than the Union of the importance of submarinewarfare. Their submersibles were made from used steam boilers, and the men inside carried asingle lit candle, which was how they monitored their air supply. Those early subs were sodeadly—something like ninety percent of the men who volunteered to crew them died—and Icouldn’t help but wonder, who were these men? This helped me build out the character of Silas,Sylvie’s twin brother, a character who would knowingly sign up for a suicide mission.No one’s really asked me about the submarines, and I appreciate the chance to discuss them.
You are welcome.One of the braids of Daughters of Chaos is the play Apocrypha, which ends with these lines:“We are all, Chaos, Mother. Happiness may be a myth, but contentment is not. If we ever hopeto know such balance, however, we must first learn to accept the changeable aspects of our ownnatures.”Good advice, indeed.
JOHN DAVID MORGAN is a former graduate editor ofMiracle Monocle.
