Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut novel Without You Here tells of family love, complicated by circumstances, mental illness, and powerful, difficult emotional inheritance, exemplified by the profound connection between Noreen and her aunt, Nonie. Like the author’s acclaimed short story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, the novel takes place in and around Charlottesville. Jody lives there, writing and teaching at WriterHouse. We first met at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and caught up this time by phone.

Jody, just a year ago your debut story collection appeared, and now your novel. Talk a bit about why you write both short and long.

Well, when my children were little – they were 22 months apart – I could only write in brief nap periods. So, I wrote short-short, a thousand words, two thousand, experimenting with the form out of desperation. Once my youngest was in pre-school, I had time to work in longer increments day by day and wrote a book that never fully got birthed into the world…Eventually I finished it, and that felt good, but I learned I didn’t like just working on a long-term project. I really itched for a new project while in the trenches of revising. So, I do what I call “cross training,” and keep a novel and stories going simultaneously. Right now, I’ve arrived at the end of another novel and am shopping another story collection. I like sitting down to something else if I’m stuck, and then have energy for returning to the other project. It’s good to be able to get to the end of a story draft in an afternoon.

Built in reinforcement, being able to get your arms around something with a more immediate beginning, middle, end.

That’s why I also do book reviews and love it when local publications reach out to me to do a story on something cool happening in the community. It’s nice to have a cut-off date, using skills for good.  And nice to get a little check, too.

You’re a very interactive person. With your collection of stories out in the world and now the novel, what’s it  like for you of hearing from readers? 

Too early to say really, about the novel. But with the stories people come to me with personal reactions to specific stories. For me, that’s what the stories are for, creating connections, creating relationships. I hope that with the novel, specific moments will touch people – and that they’ll share specific scenes that touched them.

They will! I’ve remembered Noreen falling from the swing since hearing you read the scene at VCCA, and reading an early draft of the novel back when the book was called Little Angel. I love the new title, Without You Here. How did the change come about?

Well, “Little Angel” was Noreen’s nickname and evoked the innocence and connection of her childhood relationship with her aunt Nonie. I liked that, but it also reminded me of those Hallmark angel figurines, cute but saccharine. There’s a scene now where Noreen says to Nonie, “without you here I feel like I belong to someone else’s family.” Their relationship is freighted with intimacy. When I wrote that line, I knew I had the title.

I love how the cover of the book is a partial image of a child on a swing — conveying absence, loss just beyond the frame, a part of the child missing. 

And I like the sense of motion in that cover photograph, like the emotional swirl of the novel.

Emotional swirl, that’s a great description of the a-chronological structure of the book. 

It’s non-linear, a spiral. And for finding that structure, here’s a shout out to Jane Allison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. I liken it to throwing a pebble in a pond, the pebble starting ripples. I want time in the novel to function like that pebble. Noreen loses her aunt Nonie to suicide early. I didn’t want the impact of that to get lost, and I wanted to keep the freshness of Nonie’s presence alive. But how to do it? I’d been keeping track of my chapters on index cards, and I shuffled them around. My kids jumped in to help. One created a spread sheet. One suggested an order of chapters. In the end, I threw the suggested sequence away, but their help gave me confidence to not be afraid it wouldn’t make sense. To trust the reader to make connections.

And it does closely reflect circuitous way life experience, memories, conversations go.

Yes. In my short stories, I flash back and forward. We exist in the present, but the present exists in the past and the past in the present. Very important.

Without You Here is not a novel in stories, but the chapters could almost stand alone.

Maybe a bit like short stories stand alone, but at the same time each chapter had to do the work that its position in the novel required.

Seems fitting that the children who napped while you wrote your short-short stories are now grown and helped you complete this long work. As in your writing, it’s about relationship, connection.

Character and relationship, that’s what interests me as a writer. Characters struggling against disconnection, yearning for connection — often wanting to do “the right thing.” Some do a terrible job of it but mean to follow that path.

Wanting to do the right thing, connection and disconnection, that surely plays out in Noreen’s actions and choices over the years.

And that friction plays out and sparks what she finally does.

And with Noreen, part of the tension, the friction, part of her obstacles, is the issue of money and dependency. Your work is often sensitive to this.

Money. I notice the absence of talking about money on various literary sites, no mention of what supports the writing lifestyle. It’s expensive to have an arts lifestyle. I’m privileged to have the luxury of doing what I love, and that my husband loves what he does – and it pays the bills. Growing up my parents divorced in the ‘70’s when it was not usual for women to have their own bank accounts, credit cards – dystopian but a little close now. So, my mom and I went from security to insecurity. We were fortunate where we landed, middle class, some of us clinging to the lower rung, some going up the ladder. I went to school with everyone from kids of dentists to men in jail. I’m glad I had that exposure then, now the wealth gap is larger. It permeates what I write, awareness of inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. I see it from the inside.

And see it from inside your characters. And speaking of where you landed, where you grew up, I’m always struck by the sense of place in your work: the South, Virginia. 

My whole life has been lived in Virginia, and in Charlottesville for more than thirty years. There’s so much history here, including displacement of Native Americans, and slavery. Complication, contradiction, suffering. Specific setting is important, for example exactly which street. Though I do take the liberty of perhaps creating an intersection…

Almost time for us to say goodbye.  Jody, I first met Noreen years ago, a character in progress, in a novel in progress. Now she’s grown up and makes a big choice at the end. No spoilers, but are you done with Noreen? Or will she reappear, along the lines of Elizabeth Strout, say.

Well, never say never, but I’m not even sure how a sequel would work given the a-synchronous structure…but of course there’s Noreen’s child… But Noreen and Nonie have been with me for more than ten years, worked through so many formats, finding the structure – it feels like this is their story. Even though there is a beginning, at the end. I’m very fond of these two… I was going to say I’ll miss them, but they’re still here.

Which takes us back to your title. Without You Here…

Yes, absence that has a huge shadow of presence.

And as you said, Nonie is absent due to suicide. I know that you and your publisher, Flexible Press, have a unique service orientation, in the interest of suicide prevention. 

Yes. Flexible Press grew out of a writing group that met down the street from a bodega that burned down. The writing group created and sold an anthology to raise money to help rebuild the bodega. Now, Flexible Press selects work of social relevance and donates a portion of proceeds to the author’s cause of choice. I’ve chosen suicide prevention. The book includes a resource list and hotlines for people contemplating suicide, as well as their family and friends. And book club questions drafted with the help of mental health professionals.

Sounds like a great fit of author to press.

Yes, I’m very grateful to have such an enthusiastic publisher.

Well, I know you’re just back from a community meeting on the problem of homelessness in Charlottesville, and ready to write up your notes on the next steps to help. I’ll leave you to it, but thanks so much for chatting with me, and thank you for Without You Here.   

Ellen Prentiss Campbell‘s collection of love stories is Known by Heart. Her novel Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Campbell’s debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for The National Book Award. Her column “Girl Writing” appears in the Washington Independent Review of Books. For many years Campbell practiced psychotherapy. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. She is at work on a novel set in southwestern Pennsylvania. 

Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.