Jalen Giovanni Jones is a Black and Filipino writer from Los Angeles. His work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Lambda Literary Retreat, and the Kenyon Review Winter Workshop. A winner of the David Madden MFA Award for Fiction, his writing can be found/is forthcoming in The Offing, Electric Literature, Foglifter, and elsewhere. He is the Assistant Editor of the New Delta Review, an MFA candidate in Louisiana State University’s Creative Writing Program, and served as Director for the 2024 Delta Mouth Literary Festival. Find him on Instagram @jalen_g_jones, or Twitter @jalengjwrites.
JALEN GIOVANNI JONES: The Flat Woman is incredibly unique in its approach to form. I've never seen something with such a minimalist, succinct style. And the chapters are even scenes themselves. What inspired this experimental form for the novel?
VANESSA SAUNDERS: I started out with my MFA in poetry. That was what I was originally accepted for [at Louisiana State University], and I worked with Lara Glenum as my thesis advisor. She definitely works in a really hybrid style. And even when I was writing poetry, I was always interested in the narrative impulses in books of poems like Frank O'Hara’s, who often have recurring characters. Even when I was reading poetry, I was reading more into those narrative influences. I was also thinking about plays by Shakespeare and Sophocles, which are obviously also stories told in a poetic form. So with the inception of the project, I was definitely thinking about it through a poetic lens.
Even after it switched toward experimental fiction, it still had that poetic element where there's a lot that's left for the reader to develop or think through on their own, which is how a lot of poetry works. It was actually advice from a former agent to switch The Flat Woman to fiction. Weirdly enough, that was the right choice for me to do artistically. I might have ended up in poetry by accident—I'm probably better naturally as a fiction writer. It was like business practical advice, but I think, professionally, it was definitely the right move.
JGJ: I actually wanted to ask about that, how LSU as an MFA Program influenced the form. We have such a genre-agnostic approach to learning here, so I had an inkling that the poetry classes might have influenced you. But I didn’t know you started off as a poet!
VS: Yeah, and poetry ultimately helped me become a better fiction writer. Now, I wish I had switched over a little bit earlier.
It’s funny though because when I re-read Pop Corpse by Lara Glenum, I see such a connection to The Flat Woman. Lara Glenum was definitely very pivotal at the early, seminal planning stage of the project. And she was also the one that was like, “You're funny, you should try to be funny more,” which was good. I needed that push.
JGJ: This novel seems to really lean into a satirical and absurd quality. What made you realize that that was the right approach to take on topics like political scapegoating, and how women and femininity are often blamed for our societal shortcomings?
VS: I don't know if I was ever consciously aware of writing satire. I guess I probably thought of it as like, poking a little bit of fun. I was probably thinking about it from a humor and exaggeration lens, where often things become funny because something true is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and then it becomes ridiculous, and therefore funny. I was thinking more about the role of comedy as a social criticism and social critique, which then that is what satire is, right?
I have an impulse to be dramatic and then kind of laugh about it, and laugh at myself in a way. It's like an impulse that you have—I don't know where it comes from. I just like to be silly. Like, I like to be silly in real life, too. So the personality on the page is not so different from the one in real life.
JGJ: This story really confronts very pressing and challenging world issues, like climate change and women's rights. With these things constantly misappropriated or under attack, do you have any advice for those that are maybe searching for hope in regards to these issues?
VS: The answer to hope for me is in community. I feel like bell hooks was always saying how the secret to happiness is largely in the community. I started this book before the first Trump administration, in 2015. It saw me through the first Trump administration. Making art was a way to kind of escape. I think art can be a really good form of rebellion. I try to always be conscious about making projects that are saying something that I think is valuable and important. And if you do that, I think you can help find meaning in catastrophe. So my first answer is in building community, and then my second answer would be making art that is socially conscious, and probes questions of social responsibility. Ask: what is your responsibility to your community? It’s probably how I will get through the next four years, and how I kind of got through the last time. We need to come back to finding community wherever you are, and making art against all odds.
JGJ: Hopefully by inspiring this greater consciousness, then we can inspire more action beyond the art itself.
Did you have any books that inspired you to work on this book? Or did you think of any books that you saw your book in conversation with?
VS: The book that helped me start it was Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. That was the template. And then the book that helped me finish was Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble. The idea of social consciousness. I really liked Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (by Olga Tokarczuk). Obviously that's very character driven, and way more traditional, but I liked the idea of its environmental focus, and the element of “quirk.” My friend texted me the other day. She was like, “You were the one who predicted how cringy this moment is.” I thought that was such an interesting read, because yeah, it is cringe, these white men in power. It’s really ridiculous.
JGJ: It's just so cringy. And I can totally see that popping up in this book. Was it a natural impulse to represent that?
VS: I think that it was. I definitely was intentional of representing masculinity in a way that was grotesque. And at what point did that grotesque become cringe? I'm not really sure. I did work on it for a while, so every draft these different layers come in. And then when I read it for the last time, I was like, “This story is so ridiculous!” I think that there's an element of cringe that I think crosses political lines. And just like in politics, we have such a sick spectacle of a world, dominated by these primarily cringey white men. So, yeah, maybe it was subconscious. But now I'm like, “Oh yeah, that totally makes sense.”
JGJ: This is making me think of how cringe can be used as sort of a scapegoat. To be like, “Oh, he didn't mean to do that, he was just being cringe.” There’s a potential to misplace blame, in order to absolve [one] from being guilty.
VS: Right? It's like, “He's being cringe and ridiculous, he's not being hateful.” Humor is like a sheath, that helps protect someone from recognizing something that's painful. You can joke about it and deflect [with humor]. If someone is cringy, that hides the violence there.
JGJ: But in this book, you use humor as a vehicle to get those messages about climate change and women's rights, and make them more digestible.
VS: Yeah, humor was a way for my book to balance it out, because otherwise, climate change is pretty hard to talk about. You don't really want to read about it, because it's just super depressing and overwhelming. Humor was an important way to balance out the book. And then the cringe is a way to represent evil in a way where it's maybe not so deeply unsettling and disturbing. It's just kind of laughable. But then in real life, that can be, you know, not a positive thing. It can be hiding something really, really ugly and disturbing. It's been such a weird moment in history, because we have so much information now about the past, and it just feels like we haven't maybe been super responsible with that information.
JGJ: That's why we need more books like this one—to remind us of things that we've been dealing with, what we've been through before, and actually acknowledge the truth. With all that being said, what do you most hope readers gain from reading The Flat Woman?
VS: I would hope people think about themselves and their own actions a little bit differently. There's probably a lot of us who would make a similar decision, where it's like, “Okay, there's nowhere else to work. I'm gonna work for the company that is responsible for destroying the planet and incarcerating my mother.” I would hope that people would just think more about their own actions, in the context of a world that's eroding.
Reading Vanessa Saunders’ debut novel The Flat Woman, almost every other page confronts you with a new headline. Saunders’ characters are set in a strange world, where both the mundane and the absurd are equally deserving of breaking news segments—dead seagulls are falling from the sky, prison uniforms have become baby pink jumpsuits, and people are still impersonating Elvis. And, of course, women exclusively are to blame for the worsening climate crisis. Venturing deep into The Flat Woman, you’re forced to ultimately ask: who gets to call themselves a good person, when the world is constantly in catastrophe?
Following the publication of her striking experimental novel, Saunders—whose MFA alma mater, Louisiana State University, is where I currently attend—met with me over Zoom to discuss her journey from poetry to prose, and the loaded potential that comedy and cringe both have.
THE FLAT WOMAN. Vanessa Saunders, Fiction Collective Two , 2024. 159 pages.
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
Jalen GIOVANNI Jones
