All posts by Jackie Pick

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About Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

Gross and Fallible (Me). Brilliant and Difficult (Books).

Books, Humor, Reading, The Folio, Under 750

What I Read October 2025

I spent much of October being ill in the manner of a faintly tragic Victorian governess. Nothing grave, just an assortment of mortal inconveniences that showed my body is not so much a temple as it is a structurally unsound system of tubes and liquids, gross and fallible.

It should be noted that there is no angle from which this type of Camille-on-the-chaise illness is alluring. You cannot smoulder while blowing your nose.

By end of month, I expected some turn-of-the-century doctor with a pince-nez to prescribe a restorative stay by the sea. I would have gone. Gladly. I’d have even covered my pasty ankles for decency’s sake.

Still, between the tissues and the intermittent Byronic languor, I managed to read four books by people who are very good at doing the writing thing. (Also, SPOILER: Between illnesses, I GOT TO SEE COLSON WHITEHEAD LIVE! I’ll save that for another post when I have regained the ability to write about it in complete sentences that are more than “!!!!!!!!!!!”)

I haven’t written the individual reviews; those will eventually arrive (crosses fingers, appeals to the mercy of time gods). So for now, some thoughts on the books as a group. This is, by the way, not me asking the books to do group work. Group work is a scourge. I’m noticing what they did when they sat in the same room in my brain.

The books:

  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett
  • Missing a Beat by Seymour Krim

Wildly different in form and structure, but all perform the same literary judo: they force a reader to look at history, absurdity, brutality, and ego-masquerading-as-culture. Three of them probe indelicately at the grand American myth that everything is fine and glorious, which is to say, the bootstrapped bald eagle stories America tells about itself in order to sleep.

By far the most…important, I think I want to say…of these books (and the best, I definitely want to say) was The Underground Railroad. Whitehead refuses to euphemize our history and natures. Vonnegut satirizes. Pratchett pokes at our soft spots, and Krim interrogates his disappointments in some sort of New Journalism version of an Individual and Society 101 course.

All four share an obsession with the ideas of story-as-power and language never being neutral. Who gets to define things? Whose suffering counts? Who gets to say what happened? Whose foolishness becomes legend? Whose story gets believed?

Moreover, what do we gain and lose by accepting these myths?

Pratchett regards myth as something humans compulsively produce to keep us comforted in our belief that we’re terribly wise or terribly tragic or, at the very least, the Main Character. A sort of psychological bubble wrap. The other three books, though, scrutinize the rather large and rickety myth called America, one shaped by power, violence, and selective memory. Race is a central pressure point in those three books, and the authors address it with varying degrees of authority, clarity, and moral handholds.

Whitehead writes starkly about the historical and ongoing realities of systemic racism, refusing euphemism or safe distance. His work is both expansive and claustrophobic. Violence often arrives without warning, as it does in life. It is brutal and brilliant and essential reading.

Vonnegut has characters use racial slurs to expose and criticize racist American thinking, and it lands sharply. It was unpleasant. Intentionally so. Yet that intention does not make the experience easy. Also intentional. There is a lot to unwrap in this book about racism, free will, and people-as-machines.

In several essays in this collection, Krim writes about Black culture from the outside, with a mix of admiration, projection, and longing that reveal (and sometimes perhaps widen) the gaps in his understanding and the limits of his perspective.

So, yeah, if I’m slow on getting the reviews out, it’s because I don’t want to just toss off some half-baked take while my skull is hosting a demolition derby. These books deserve deep analysis. I want to show up for that like a person who still has a functioning cortex.

Both my health and this blog are back on track. *Looks at calendar, sees what’s advancing over the horizon at an impolite jog* Well. Right. Onward, then. Let’s just agree to continue to do our best with as much dignity as we can reasonably fake.

The Human Exclamation Point

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Under 750, Writing

This is, hopefully, the final installment in my (also hopefully extremely limited) series, “Why Am I Like This?”

Illustration of a white frosted cake on a wooden stand, topped with a bright pink-and-yellow exclamation mark. The cake appears inside a Zoom call window. Text above reads “The Human Exclamation Point,” and “by Jackie Pick” appears in pink at the bottom corner.

Writers are cautioned not to overuse exclamation points. If we must use them at all, we are told to ration them. No Serious Writer™ uses more than three exclamation points per novel. I use three before breakfast. No Serious Writer™ would dare rely on punctuation to do the emotional heavy lifting. No Serious Writer™ would employ exclamation points unless something truly calls for excitement. I have been alive for some time, and few things ever truly call for excitement. Except cake.

But some of us are Excitement Folks. I myself am a human exclamation point. Out of the house, my natural register becomes Jack Black impersonating Judy Garland while spinning plates. I greet people like we’ve survived a maritime disaster together. I smile as if paid by the watt.

Mind you, this is not my natural state, but it is often my public one.

I have long aspired to become awoman of repose. I have tried, truly, to be someone who radiates calm, who says “hmm” instead of “OH MY GOD, YESSSSS,” who does not tell your dog I love him the very first time I meet him.

Alas, my attempts at composure resemble Animal from The Muppets being shot out of a confetti cannon directly into a line of cymbals.

Women of repose give the impression that they read Smithsonian Magazine in the bathtub. I give the impression that I clap when planes land.

Enthusiasm is a peculiar human response to the otherwise bleak recognition of existence. It manifests as sudden bursts of unsolicited and often alarming cheerfulness. Enthusiasm is socially contagious but has an inconvenient half-life of twelve minutes and a regrettable tendency to startle normal people.

For a while, I managed something approaching serenity. My public self finally matched my private one. My resting heart rate was no longer espresso.

Then came Zoom, a technology that brought people together by separating them entirely.

Staring into a camera instead of human faces, it’s hard to catch social cues unless someone types LOL or You are a dork in the chat. Since we’re all deprived of feedback, I overcompensate as speaker and listener. I nod violently and try to show you that I’M WITH YOU AND I LIKE YOUR VIBE AND ALSO I’M TURNING MY CAMERA OFF BECAUSE I’M SHOVING AN ENTIRE COSTCO TUXEDO CAKE IN MY FACEHOLE AND YOU DESERVE BETTER BUT I’M STILL HERE NODDING PROMISE.

We can call that enthusiasm. Or nightmare fuel. Whatever.

Then the meeting ends, and I power down like a droid in Star Wars.

Is this growth or regression? Is my at-home, off-camera restraint maturity the real me, or just battery depletion? Am I even seeing myself accurately? Because, honestly, the only time I see myself is on Zoom.

Both versions of me feel real, but they can’t coexist. I’m trying to find the midpoint between “!!!” and “…”

Maybe an em dash, that modern-day punctuatio non grata.

Definitely not a period though, because I prefer to do things not with a whimper but (wait for it!) with an interrobang.

Projectile Figurative Language Use

Humor

For all of us who’ve ever asked, “Why am I like this right now?”

Header reads ‘Projectile Figurative Language Use’ with the subline ‘For all of us who’ve ever asked, “Why am I like this right now?”’. Centered brain image has a Spirit Halloween ‘Opening Soon’ sticker across it. Bottom-left box warns ‘This post contains metaphors. Mostly bad ones.’ Credit ‘by Jackie Pick’ appears bottom-right

This week, I wanted to write a funny post to be filed under “Life and Other Existential Crises.” You know, something relatable and semi-literate. The problem: everyone, everywhere, has chosen this exact moment to be an ass. This presents certain creative difficulties.

(Yes, excellent start. Let’s see where this goes, shall we?)

The world, at present, is too much. Everything is a little sticky and smells like pumpkin-spiced feet. Kind of like a Spirit Halloween that’s moved into an abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond space.

(Live. Laugh. Leave Me The Hell Alone. Wooden sign, $29.99.)

I brought my own too-muchness to a Zoom the other day. For reasons no one fully understands, I opined that the period between late August and mid-November is “the PMS of the calendar year.” Everything is slightly wrong and relentlessly demanding. My to-do list now qualifies as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I’m overwhelmed, overbooked, under-rested, bloated, irritable, hungry, dehydrated, and everything itches. I have no idea why I feel this way until I look at the calendar. Oh. Ohhhh. That explains why everyone is being an ass. Including me.

(Maybe that? Maybe leave this post at that?)

I have Projectile Figurative Language Use.

(Ah, I see we’re staying here and carrying on.)

Because ordinary English collapses in my hands, I resort to invoking metaphors, similes, emotional geometry, and a verbal Vitamix. If I can’t find the right word, I’ll invent one. Then, realizing no one else is in my brain, I over-explain the metaphor. Then apologize for over-explaining. And suddenly I’m talking about my eyelid eczema, which was not, in fact, the original metaphor nor the point of anything I was saying.

This, I’m told, is my charm. The metaphor thing, not the eyelid eczema thing. That’s not charm, that’s just sex appeal.

(No one has ever said any of that.)

The writers on the Zoom were kind. Writers often are. We traffic in mutual recognition, responding to each other’s weirdness with appreciative laughs or perhaps mercy mutings. Either way: respect for this collection of creative humans.

I imagine a collective noun for writers is “A Card Catalog of Writers,” or “A Procrastination of Writers,” or “A Syntax Error of Writers.”

The singular of all of these is “A Flinch.”

(Tip your waitstaff.)

Somewhere in all of that is a point. Maybe to keep talking even if the words come out like anguished verbal origami. Maybe to sit with your odd language instead of trying to translate it into something respectable, which is how good ideas can die of politeness. Maybe to trust that someone, somewhere, will hear your nonsense and send you a party-hat emoji in solidarity.

Were I a better personwriter, I would pivot here into something about gratitude or artistic discipline or the resilience of the creative spirit, but, truthfully, I just want to stand in the middle of that abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond (now Spirit Halloween!) andscream, “GET IT TOGETHER!”

Because…Autumn…the PMS thing. Remember?

(Yes, we get it.)

I want to be insightful, but maybe the humor/mess of language is the panic room I built for myself. Right now, all I have are half-finished thoughts and worries up the wazoo. Julia Cameron would suggest journaling through it, but I’m pretty sure she never had to navigate endless labyrinths of online portals while her dog threw up on the carpet and a kid yelled ‘Mom?!’ from somewhere inside a Common App essay draft while the entire world burned.

So these days, I spend a lot of time in my own head. It’s not exactly insightful or profound in there, but at least there’s parking.

(Don’t)

And yeah, part of it is that the world is kind of awful and falling apart, and I oscillate between feeling idiotic for making jokes and idiotic for not making them.

However, the only thing that feels truly dangerous and guaranteed to lock up my words is not saying anything.

So here I am: over-metaphored, under-hydrated, armed with a single, wobbly sentence about the itchy PMS-ish quality of autumn. Perhaps that’s enough to keep me from desperately clutching a package of Nutter Butters and insisting, “I’M FINE.”

Sometimes the best you can do is name the chaos and tack on a punchline.

And sometimes the best you can do is offer, without reasonable transition, Mary Oliver telling us quite firmly, “Don’t Hesitate.”

(That’ll do.)