It’s easy to fall into existential despair these days. To wonder what the role of art is. To be overwhelmed by all the social justice work to do. That’s why social novels feel extra necessary these days—and that’s what Jules Wernersbach’s stunning debut, Work to Do, is. It tells the story of an Austin food co-op owned by Eleanor, a sixty-five-year-old lesbian, and largely run by senior manager, Roz. Roz’s girlfriend Molly is a staff member and is sleeping with another coworker, Randy, a nonbinary dairy manager who is leading efforts to unionize. The novel begins during a hurricane and takes place over one week, a container of time offering both structure and tension.
Work to Do is an impressive feat of a novel: slim but propulsive, pulsing with page-turning tension. And it’s smart and political with much to say about power structures and union organizing while also leaving space for readers to draw their own conclusions. Tender and reflective, funny and empathetic, this delightfully queer book addresses the messiness of being human, in beautiful sentences that demonstrate skillful writing. I know it’s early to call it, but I think Work to Do will be one of the best books of the year.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Jules Wernersbach about the novel over Google Docs.
The Rumpus: Let’s start by talking about why you chose to set this in a co-op. You’re a bookseller, so you could’ve written about a bookstore. Why a worker-and customer-owned grocery store?
Jules Wernersbach: The co-op setting was a way for me to elevate the dissonance of working in a place that markets itself as invested in the community, but does not extend that sense of community care to its own staff. You hear “co-op” and think, “Oh, this is a more thoughtful, equitable form of capitalism,” when it winds up being a cover for the same old top-down management structure that seeks to squeeze as much labor out of its employees for as little compensation as possible.
Every bookstore I’ve ever worked for has used the word “community” in its marketing, with the inference that “shopping local” is “the right thing to do,” as though the “community” store is a different kind of capitalism. Meanwhile, those bookstores have often paid their employees as little as possible, given them zero input into how the store was run, and offered zero transparency about how the revenue those workers earned for the store was used.
I actually had a major publisher offer to buy the book if I changed the setting from a grocery store to a bookstore. That kind of classist response drove home for me why this novel had to be set in a grocery store. I’ve worked a lot of retail and service jobs, including as a cashier and produce worker at Flatbush Food Co-op, and a lot of those jobs have been viewed as unskilled labor. They’re the sort of jobs people presume you do only out of desperation, until you can find something better. There is not only obvious and real value to this work that absolutely requires skill and expertise, there can also be a lot of joy, satisfaction, and pride in it. That a publisher thought this book would be more successful if it was in a more “highbrow” setting—get out of here. Bookselling is service work, too. And plenty of people who do retail and service work read.
Rumpus: I’m glad you didn’t change it! Actually, on a craft level, the goods being groceries adds story tension that wouldn’t quite work if the store was selling something else, like books. I mean I’m a very devoted reader, but I’m not going out amid a pending storm to grab books—but people need to eat!
Wernersbach: Food is perishable! It’s high drama when the freezers go down! And yes, while we sometimes see rushes at the bookstore ahead of a snowstorm, it’s nothing like a grocery store before a potential hurricane. People are in survival mode when they’re grabbing that milk and bread. You’re not shopping for books when you’re in that kind of fear; it’s all about the cans of beans and jugs of water and (if you’re me) bars of chocolate. Though this does remind me of 2020, when some bookstores were petitioning to be deemed “essential” businesses so that they could continue to operate as bricks-and-mortar retail during Covid shutdowns. I couldn’t jump on that wagon.
Rumpus: I loved how all the food crises add to the chaos, but are also atmospheric. The sentence length variation added to the scene and tension. I’d love to hear how you approached the opening, down to the sentence level.
Wernersbach: Uff da, I worked on those opening sections A LOT. This novel started as a short story written the weekend of Hurricane Harvey. (That was a horrendous storm that hit Houston and the Gulf Coast, but the storm was so big we felt it, and its humanitarian crisis, up in Austin.) The opening pages of this novel are about all that’s left of that short story. As it transitioned into a novel, the challenge was introducing the right amount of character context and backstory to set up the book, while maintaining the tension of the storm, which had done a lot of atmospheric and symbolic heavy lifting in the short story.
I put myself in the visceral memories of my own rushes, at bookstores and in food service. You have the running litany of what needs to get done first, second, third, a list that’s constantly in flux as your body moves fast, grabbing upside books and cleaning up spilled cereal on the fly. You see every tiny detail in the mayhem, because that’s your job, to tend to every little detail to keep the store shoppable and operational. The language for that needs to be punchy, but also scrolling, an endless ticker of work to do that gets interrupted by other work to do. At the same time, there’s the mess of who you are rolling in the background behind it, which lends itself to longer sentences. That chaos, that person, is there no matter how many urgent work demands consume your frontal cortex. So you’ve got this rat-a-tat-tat of things to do riding the wave of your own internal nonsense. That’s the natural tension of being a human being at work. My challenge as a writer is to make space for both in a way that feels fluid on the page, which is the same tension we have in our lives, right? How do we make space and time for the endless to do list along with the mess of who we are?
Rumpus: The actual beginning of writing this novel was during a hurricane?! Was there something about it that fueled your creativity? Or was it more practical: you had a chance to hunker down and write?
Wernersbach: I live with a sense of impending doom that fuels all of my creativity, literary and otherwise. Mortality is never not on my mind. But that particular weekend, the mayor had advised everyone in Austin to stay off the roads, if possible, so, yes, I hunkered down in my apartment with my cat and laptop and watched the huge gray clouds roll outside my window and wrote. The day before, I had gone into H-E-B (the big grocery store chain in Texas) just to see the scramble of it all, how people were responding and what they were buying. Those details fed directly into that original short story. Everyone was on edge and I kept thinking about what would happen if the power went out with all of those people inside. I’m also a perpetual worker, even in places that don’t employ me, and just kept thinking about what a mess it would be if the freezers blinked out and they lost all of that product.
Rumpus: How did that short story become a novel? When did you realize this was a bigger story?
Wernersbach: I was in a workshop at the time and submitted the short story for feedback. One of the other writers said, “This feels like the start of a novel.” At the time, I melted into a puddle of despair. I’d been working on a novel that went nowhere for a long time and just wanted to write short fiction, damn it! But she was right. Around the same time, friends at the bookstore where I’d previously worked were starting to organize. When I was there, I’d seen firsthand the enormous gap between hourly floor staff and salaried admin staff, how poorly they communicated with one another and how much they missed what the other side was experiencing. And I saw firsthand how the floor staff was talked about and how wages were determined. Not pretty! I was interested in that gap where communication was lost, because that, to me, is where the struggle (or success) of a small business lives. For bookstores especially, there’s a natural tension between the tiny margins that produce a miniscule profit, and the cost of living for the employees who are expected to bend over backwards to create that profit. Austin is a town where “Shop Local” is everyone’s proud message, and, as a former marketing director for a bookstore that used that language heavily, I was really tired of how much those two words glossed over when it came to how employees were treated. There was so much I wanted to represent about all of that and it was pretty clear to me that a novel could hold it all and that, in fact, this was one of the things novels exist to do, is hold these conflicting perspectives. So, god help me, I wrote another novel.
Rumpus: I’d like to talk about the novel you wrote, which I consider a social novel. Do you?
Wernersbach: Absolutely. There’s certainly plenty of human emotional drama in this story. There’s a love triangle. There’s an ex-wife. There are regrets over old mistakes and long lost love. I want all of that emotional texture in a story, but what’s most interesting to me are the bigger cultural and economic forces at play. Without that, I get bored with a book. This novel in particular was written at a time when so many independent booksellers were unionizing. It’s been something of a sea change in the industry, and I know that isn’t true only of bookselling. So many people work in retail. A social novel for the service worker seemed in order.
Rumpus: Fights for justice must happen as we’re dealing with our own personal dramas. Was that something you were thinking about as you wrote the novel?
Wernersbach: Yes, definitely. I’m thinking right now about Dean Spade’s latest book, which has been a massive bestseller at our bookstore, Love in a F*cked Up World. It’s essentially a guide to how to manage relationships in a way that aligns with revolutionary work. We want different models for the world, but we are still very much human. And all of our flaws and quirks and libidos—the way we annoy each other and take advantage of each other—are all still there, right alongside our noble efforts to establish equity and take care of each other. There’s no dividing the personal from the political. That’s something that definitely came into play in the novel. The love triangle becomes a test: will this person use that person to get information, to achieve a political goal? Do they realize they’re doing it? Is all fair in the name of revolution? Are they talking to this person because they want them to support the cause, or because they want to get laid?
The other personal element that I thought about a lot, aside from just general human messiness, is how you maintain the energy for activism when you’re struggling to pay rent. A busy day stocking shelves and ringing up groceries and helping customers is enervating. That’s something I especially felt with the Randy character, who is leading the effort to organize, and is also fifty years old and working in the cold dairy fridge all day. By the time Randy gets home, their body hurts and they’re bone tired. (And I guess also horny, because they’re part of the love triangle.) It’s intentional, right? To circumscribe the majority of a person’s life to labor, so that they have neither the time, energy, nor financial resources to push back against the ruling class. We want to change the world and we are only human is maybe a good summary of most of the characters in this book.
Rumpus: The multi-POV feels central to the novel, but I’m wondering if that was always present or if you layered in additional perspectives later?
Wernersbach: The first draft of this novel was actually from the perspectives of several of the people on staff, and the owner, and the owner’s ex-girlfriend, and the manager’s ex-girlfriend. I am a maximalist. It was way too much. I had a vision of a chorus of workers telling the story of the Co-op, because that’s what a long-running small business like this becomes, a communal iteration of work and personality over many, many years. In the end, that draft wound up fleshing out the backstory of the secondary characters in a way that made them much easier to write once I relegated them to secondary status. That version of the book was less plot-driven and way more obsessed with how weather and storms work. There is a lot of relationship metaphor to be had in the science of a thunderstorm.
My wonderful agent suggested that we streamline it. The three perspectives that now form the book crystallized the core dynamic of the labor struggle: Randy, the worker leading the organizing effort; Eleanor, the grumpy lesbian owner and co-founder of the co-op; and Roz, the store manager caught between them, who is both exploited and exploiting. Those three characters naturally gathered even more depth and nuance as the drafts went on. With Randy in particular, I became interested in the age gap between them and their younger coworkers, and how that gap influenced their activist strategies. Risking your job is a different gamble at fifty than it is at twenty-five. With Eleanor, I had to really push myself to see past all of the personal gripes about old bosses that fed that character for me, to find the fear driving her. Roz is the manager I was always afraid I’d become, the kind of manager I think several bosses tried to groom me to be, but also the kind of manager I have always been, who feels compelled to work as hard as possible.
Rumpus: How many drafts were there total before it landed with University of Iowa Press?
Wernersbach: Oh boy, too many to count. I want to say there were two hardcore revisions before we sent it out to publishers. One revision is always a multitude of revisions, so those two felt like twelve, ultimately. But two real, big revisions. Then we sent it out to several editors and received lots of rejections that all basically said it still wasn’t plot-driven enough. So I did another big revision to tighten the plot and increase the stakes. Again, one revision is many revisions, so that lasted several months. Then we sent it around again and that’s when Iowa expressed interest. The editor there did not have many edits (so much work had been done on it already), but I did do one more revision myself. I let my girlfriend read it, finally, (she’s also a writer and helped me give it a gentle trim) and then I read it again one. last. time.) Then we shipped it to copyedits and to print.
Rumpus: Wait, your girlfriend, who is also a writer, didn’t read it until it was ready to go to print?! Do you hold your drafts close? Is that kind of protectiveness part of your process?
Wernersbach: Ha, yeah, we were together almost three and a half years, I think, by the time she read it. We write together all of the time. That was one of our primary activities when we first started dating, and we talk about our writing constantly. We print our drafts on the backs of each other’s manuscript pages (our household goes through a lot of paper. We are no friend to trees, but we do our best to mitigate the waste), so maybe she saw some of it before I shared it, who knows. Stylistically, we’re very different writers. She’s also been publishing and living a public life as a writer for many, many years, and I think part of me wanted to maintain my independence as an artist and not be influenced by her edits. Also, I’m an anxious-avoidant person showing up for duty every day and I’m sure some of those insecurities played a part in the withholding, too. But now that the seal has been broken and we have a relationship editing each other’s work (I’d shared feedback on manuscripts of hers already), I’m more comfortable with it. I’m looking forward to sending her a draft of the current novel I’m working on, but not until I’ve really figured it out for myself. I guess I am protective over it. I want the story to drive itself and find itself.
Rumpus: I’ve loved chatting with a fellow perpetual worker/ anxious-avoidant person! I wonder how many writers share these traits.
Wernersbach: Many, I expect. The whole, “See me, read me, know me” urge coupled with, “Also I’m going to sit here alone for hours writing, please don’t bother me.” And the perpetual work: the endless months and years of labor, writing requires it! All of those hours poured into sentences you wind up deleting. I think you’re right, these are qualifications for the job.
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