Author: 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.

Writing is Like a Rice Krispie Treat — June 2019 Month in Review

· 1 Comment ·

Every spare moment when I’m not feeding little people or unleashing my fury (productively or otherwise) over some of the incredible injustices in the world right now is a moment spent on the first rewrite of my novel.

Hours upon hours are spent in the shop-prep-feed snack cycle for the little humans, so what is sacrificed is the time on the smaller pieces and/or time spent getting dog fuzz off the floor.

But the first rewrite is almost done. This process is like  Rice Krispie treats: messy and gooey and I’m working hard to put all the pieces together and also this is a terrible analogy.

In this first pass, I’m taking out what doesn’t belong and trusting my reader more. There were giant parts I skipped writing, and I’m skipping them right now as I just make sure I’m in the correct narrative voice and POV. Then before the next rewrite, I’ll add those scenes and characters. That looms large, but now that I’ve done the work this first rewrite, I see better what’s needed and can retrofit those sections more cleanly.

A large part of the work involves inquiry into the characters, plot, and theme. Deeply. It’s slow and I feel like I’m at my best as it volleys between creating and analyzing, left-brain and right brain. But it’s SLOW, man.

And…goodness, I don’t hate it. It’s just not what it needs to be yet. It will get there. I know how many drafts it takes for me to work a 2000 word essay into shape. This book is going to be 45 times that length. I have dozens of pages of “to do” based on this second go around.

Here are some great things I stumbled upon in the interwebs this month.

See you next week as I share more about Surviving Summer Funtimes

I’m in The Coachella Review

· Leave a comment ·

There are a few variations (wildly attributed) of the notion that writing is sitting down and bleeding on the page.

The last 24 hours have been wild. The Coachella Review, a phenomenal literary journal, published my piece in its Summer, 2019 issue.

My somewhat-lyric essay is about the tiny monsters we grapple with as we walk through life, especially as a woman. It was inspired by my complex feelings that arose from attending the Women’s March and all the indignities, great and small, that I’ve — WE’VE — suffered and stuffed down just to get on with the business of living.

It was a cathartic, brutal piece to write, difficult to send out, and terrifyingly rewarding to have published.

I bloodied the page like I’ve never done before.

I’ve heard from a lot of readers, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, both in public posts and privately. The piece is hitting home with a lot of women, which is wonderful and awful considering the topic.

Which means we need more of these types of stories told, shouted, whispered, sung, and cried.

Click here to read my piece, Into the Daylight, and the rest of the wonderful items in The Coachella Review.