Stephanie Jimenez is the author of They Could Have Named Her Anything (2019, Little A Books). Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, Joyland, and more. She lives in New York.
I feel like in my own experience and experience of many people I see, there is tremendous competition for narrative. For me, it’s interesting to see what pans out.
There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.
When I’m reading books that work within fantastic traditions, I find they’re able to hold more truths simultaneously and give me, as a reader, room to contemplate social justice and political issues and come to my own understanding of what’s what.