UC Davis Web Journal #2
Issue 2 : Summer/Fall 2005
If You Mean ‘Shit’, Say ‘Shit’
The History of Vegas
Jodi Angel
Chronicle Books. July, 2005.
178 pages. $19.95
In her fearless debut collection, The History of Vegas,
Jodi Angel leads her readers into heat-scorched deserts in cars without
air-conditioning, cheap motels with jailbait hookers, and filthy trailer
homes with pet ferrets. Her adolescent protagonists live in dirty
worlds of booze, smoke, drugs and fear. Manipulation and abuse at
every turn, adults have failed these young narrators, and though inexperienced
and lacking guidance, they attempt to make the right decisions in
an environment designed for them to fail. Jodi skillfully portrays
the immense responsibility and very real danger her characters face
in simply trying to survive.
These ten stories are intense. Jodi’s concise, descriptive,
and often chilling prose exposes scenes of horrible violence, misguided
assistance and the last ditch efforts of the desperate. She writes
about exploitive teenage sex and sexual confusion; encouraged and
enforced bulimia; smoking formaldehyde and torturing dogs; and incest.
You might want to look away but Jodi won’t let you. “I
am going to write even if it’s uncomfortable,” she says.
“Even if it’s explicit, even if it’s a subject that
people don’t want to talk about.” “It’s my
truth,” she says. “I get to speak my truth and I’m
not going to edit it.”
I had the opportunity to sit down with Jodi at the Naked Coffee Lounge
in Sacramento, a Friends-esque atmosphere complete with couches,
giant mugs and tables too small for anything but two cups of coffee.
Plus, I think, an appropriately named venue for the discussion of
Jodi’s new book with its extreme subject matter and graphic
depictions. “I try to be careful,” Jodi says. “I
am dealing with things that could be perceived as shocking and I don’t
ever want them to extend into that shock value thing.” In her
third story, “Supplement,” seventeen-year-old Jaycee has
romantic moments with a forty-year-old Basque farm hand who splits
lamb’s testicles with his teeth rather than a knife during castration;
his beautiful, sensual, twenty-five year old wife; and Jaycee’s
own younger brother. Each encounter is artfully rendered as both sweet
and disturbing, even if startling. “’Supplement’
is really a story about misdirected nurturing, and nurturing and sexuality
get confused a lot,” says Jodi. “I thought it was justifiable
that [those events] could happen—how easily that line of sex
can be blurred.”
It’s the writing that allows Angel to avoid the trap of shock
for shock’s sake. Her honesty lacks a self-pity that could make
some of these stories seem melodramatic; the tone is just right. These
are observational, strong voiced narrators simply sharing their stories
of abandonment and hopeless futures and revealing their lives in lonely
apartments. Jodi tends not to spend much time in the minds of her
characters, instead trusting her readers enough to let the actions
speak volumes, and they do. Excellent dialogue, vivid attention to
seedy locations, and a calm resignation to the genuine every day dreadfulness
of these worlds gives the writing a subtly built tension without the
affected staginess of tragedy.
Another of Jodi’s strengths is the force of these stories, the
insistent forward momentum. This powerful movement might be in part
due to Jodi’s writing process. “I like to throw it all
down in one sitting,” she says. “I don’t like to
work on it.” The opening story, “Portions,” was
written in one late night session. “I wrote from 11pm to 4 am
one night and it was done,” Jodi says. It hasn’t been
changed since. “Minor adjustments, that’s it.” Most
of the other stories were done the same way. Part of why Jodi writes
her stories in one sitting is, she says, “Because I’m
too lazy to want to do revisions. Pam [Houston] always told me I’ve
got to learn to revise, she said it’s the best part of writing,
but I don’t believe that at all.” She smiles. “I
really hate revising.” Another cause for the one session narrative
is that Jodi writes much of her stories beforehand in her head. By
the time she physically sits down to write she’s already formed
the trajectory of the piece. “A lot of the time I know how it’s
going to end before I start,” she says. “It doesn’t
always work out that way, but pretty close.”
Jodi starts with a character or an opening paragraph and shapes much
of the story from that foundation. Armed with these building blocks
in her mind, when she gets to the actual page, it becomes a matter
of “filling in the details.” Each event in these stories,
even when unexpected, retains the organic quality of emerging from
the characters and/or their circumstances, rather than reading like
a conscious choice of the author’s. “They were just supposed
to be there somehow,” she says of the surprising turns some
of her stories take. And though she may know how the story will end
before she begins to write, she’s learned to be careful not
to race to that moment, or to get there “by the straight path.”
“That racing to the ending thing,” Jodi says, “everyone
picks up on that in workshop.”
Jodi credits workshop and the writing community at UC Davis with helping
her grow and mature as a writer. “Just being a community of
people doing the same thing you’re doing,” she says. “How
often in life can you say ‘I’m really stuck with my main
character in this situation’ and somebody can empathize with
you?” Through workshop Jodi also learned how to be a better
reader, and “how to see when something is working and when it’s
not working,” and perhaps even more importantly, being able
to hear that in her own work. “Because once you’re out
of the workshop…” she lifts her hands. “Now, I can’t
hand my story to twelve other people and say, ‘Can you give
this a read and send me some feedback?’”
After graduating from the UC Davis MA program in 2003, Jodi submitted
her thesis manuscript “The History of Vegas,” to Jay Schaefer
at Chronicle Books at the suggestion of Pam Houston. “She told
me that if he didn’t like it, he’d at least give me some
really good suggestions for how to fix it.” But that December
he called and asked Jodi if she had any more material. “I told
him, ‘Of course,’ and then I wrote ‘Whistle Pig’
that night,” in one sitting, of course. Only four of the original
thesis stories made it into the collection and after writing more
than half of these stories alone, Jodi was nervous about sending them
to an editor without any outside comments. “This book was really
hard for me because I had no one to bounce these stories off of,”
she says. The worry was unnecessary however; having learned to hear
the successful moments in her own writing, Jodi’s collection
was officially bought by Chronicle books in January of 2004.
Jodi’s advice to young writers is, “Write your truth.”
She continues, “When I taught 100F (the undergraduate fiction
workshop) the one thing I wanted to pound into my students’
heads was: write your truth. Don’t back away or be afraid to
say something. If you mean ‘shit,’ say ‘shit.’
Don’t say poo-poo.” She smiles. “I guess I’ve
just reached that on a grander scale.”
Jodi’s truth is often apparent in these ten stories. Her willingness
to step into dangerous territory, her courage in writing through the
uncomfortable moments shows she takes her own advice. “Sometimes
it’s hard,” she says. “You put that stuff out there
like that and it’s an opportunity for people to judge you for
it,” and that’s probably true. But despite the explicitness
and horror of some of these stories, Jodi seems relatively average.
She’s friendly and mellow, and completely gracious to the nervous
girl asking her questions. “I’m pretty normal,”
she says and shrugs. “I have a house and a family. I have two
dogs. I mow my lawn once a week,” she says and it sounds so
suburban. This woman writes about skinning deer; about girls who stomp
rats to death with their boots; about abusive teen boyfriends, finding
babies in alleys, robbery, drugs, molestation and cancer with amazing
ease and yet on a Tuesday afternoon she sits in shorts and a T-shirt
next to her daughter on a couch in a coffee shop, drinking an iced
Chai and talking to me. She says, “Hopefully people realize
that the writer is not the story and the story is not the writer.”
graduated
from the UC Davis MA program in 2003, where she is currently a guest
lecturer. Her first collection, The History of Vegas was
released by Chronicle Books this July. The story “Portions”
appears in the summer issue of Zoetrope: All-Story. In October,
Jodi will be reading and appearing on a panel at the Tomales Bay Workshops.
In addition, Pam Houston will be teaching The History of Vegas
to both her fall graduate workshop and her undergraduate seminar.
Since graduating, Jodi says her biggest challenge has been to persist
in writing frequently. “Even now that I have a book, I still
have a really hard time being motivated to write,” she says.
“I don’t have a deadline, I don’t have a workshop
due date.” And while she misses other aspects of the MA program
as well now that she’s out, “It’s really hard to
stay self-motivated,” she says. “I think it’s the
hardest thing.”
is a second year fiction writer in the creative writing program at
UC Davis. She was born and raised in Sacramento.
Melanie can be reached at msthorne@ucdavis.edu