Hello, writer!

It's hard to believe we're at the end of June. Summer has truly set in here in Ohio, and my favorite way to beat the heat is to curl up in a shady spot with a good book.

That's part of why I'm so excited to introduce you to this month's Meet the Author interviewee, June Gervais! June is the author of the wonderful book Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (affiliate*), and she had so much great wisdom to share about her experiences with writing and publishing.

June Gervais's debut novel, Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (Viking Books and Penguin Random House Audio, 2022; Penguin Paperback 2023) is the coming-of-age story of a young queer woman apprenticing as a tattoo artist in the gritty, mostly male industry of the '80s. June's essays and stories have appeared in Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, Sojourners, The Common, Cordella, Big Fiction, The Missouri Review, Image Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. You can learn more about June on her website and Instagram.

Can you describe your creative journey? How did you come to write Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair?

I had always wanted to be a writer. I was just an obsessive reader, like a lot of us, and love being in the library. I always knew since I was seven that this was what I wanted to do with my life. The question is really how do you pay the bills and, you know, eat while you're doing it? I went to college for writing, and I started writing this novel and just continued to write it over the years while I was working on different jobs. I did a lot of work for nonprofit organizations. I did writing, editing, graphic design, art direction, speaking, I did whatever I needed to do.

This particular book came out of my love for tattooing as an art form. I had always been fascinated by it. So, I shadowed and interviewed a lot of tattoo artists in order to do the research because I'm not a tattoo artist myself. The book came out of my love of stories and having gotten so much pleasure out of novels and wanting to create that experience for somebody else. Wanting somebody else to feel less alone. It's kind of a quirky novel and has illustrations, and the character is socially awkward, as I often feel myself. I think a lot of us do. It came from a lot of different things.

You did a lot of the book’s illustrations, right? How did you get interested in tattooing?

I did all of the illustrations in the book, but I didn't do the cover. That paperback cover is from the tattoo artist Becca Genné-Bacon at Kings Avenue Tattoo in New York. She's amazing.

The illustrations came about while I was writing the book. I would find if I got stuck on a chapter, and I was trying to clarify, What is the central idea of this chapter? What needs to get accomplished in the story here? I would start to doodle and see what kind of image came, and that image would often give me some insight into the central image or emotional core of this chapter.

I began to think of these drawings as doodles that might appear in a sketchbook of my main character. She's 18 years old, she's always been artsy and quirky, and she's sort of grown up in the sanctuary of her brother's tattoo shop and has never been allowed to do anything but his grunt work. The drawings began to seem to me like things that she would draw in moments when she needed clarity, or needed to escape reality for a little bit or just was sort of stretching herself creatively. So that's where the drawings came from.

As far as my love of tattoos, my mom had a tattoo and it always fascinated me. She was artistic, and so was my dad. That's not what they did for jobs, but we were always making art in my family, so I got fixated on that particular art form.

What strategies helped you get words on the page?

I love this question because I think about this a lot. My writing process has been an arc through so many different phases of my life. I went from being a kid to a teenager to a college student to somebody who's working to then having a partner and children and all these responsibilities. Your writing process has to change to fit into whatever you need to do at that time.

One of my classic go-tos is to go for a walk. I have become such a believer in the connection between your brain and your body and that moving around is sometimes what you need. Taking a pause from your work and physically moving your body does the trick a lot of the time. Being outside is very helpful.

I'll pick up a novel by another writer that I know is good and just open it to a random page and read a few pages, and sometimes that'll click my brain back into fiction mode.

I'm working on a new novel and I realized that I needed a new process of writing. It's like two kids, you gotta raise them differently sometimes, and this new book needed something different. I have a big sketchbook and it's got blank pages. Before I write a chapter, I've started to make a practice of writing down notes about the chapter. Where does it need to go? Who needs to be there? What does this setting look like? Does a physical detail appear to me? Then I have a whole bunch of materials so that when I start to write it out, I’m not going into it cold.

Anything that makes the writing process less scary, any little incremental thing you can do so that you go in feeling equipped instead of like you're just cold and naked and lost. I could talk all day about this because writing is hard!

You mentioned that you started Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair when you were in college. What was the lifecycle of that project? What was the publishing process like?

It's a very different novel than it was when I began! It was a mother-daughter story. Gina, who's the main character, the 18-year-old protagonist, was actually a single mother in her 30s with a teenage daughter in the first draft. As the writing process went on, and I got to know her as a character and started delving into flashbacks of her past, I was like, I'm much more interested in who was this woman who was apprenticing as a tattoo artist in the ‘80s and what was her journey like artistically? What kind of situation did she come from?

That had more heat for me than the other stories, so I jettisoned that other half of the book. That was when it really came to life, but it still took many more drafts. If you put together all the drafts I did on my own and then going through grad school, then eventually getting an agent… I revised it several times just in the course of trying to get an agent. You get a certain number of rejections, and you're like, “Okay, what am I hearing? That's a common theme, how can I apply that?” Then I got an agent and revised it several times with them to get ready for publication. Once I got a book deal, I had to go through several revisions with my editor. I mean, this book probably went through 20 drafts, which is ridiculous. Books shouldn't need that many drafts. This one did. This is what this one needed. My next book, I'm not doing that again!

The publishing process required a ton of perseverance. I was raising kids. So, even once the book was finished and ready to send out to agents, it was in query after query after query and got a lot of positive responses, a lot of near misses. When I finally got an agent, we were together for a little while, it was about ready to go out on submission, and then she abruptly changed jobs. So I was back to square one. I don’t say that to complain—I love her. We're still friends, actually.

I had to keep going. I got my current agent eventually. The only quick part of this process was when my agent finally sent it out. It was like, “Okay, I've made my list. We've got all these different imprints, and we're going to go for the big five publishers and the imprints.” The book sold in about two weeks. I guess it was finally ready. My editor just snapped it up, and I got to work with Jeramie Orton at Pamela Dorman Books, which is an imprint of Viking, which is at Penguin Random House. That was just a dream come true. I love my editor.

It had fallen apart so many times. It went through so many stages of the process that I was like, Yeah, this is not going to come to be. There is no way the universe is gonna let me have this, but it did actually work.

How did you find the persistence to keep sending it out, and keep sticking to that process?

Raw obsession. There were so many times that I did give up. You realize you're putting so much energy into something and I mean, I didn't want to be like Miss Havisham sitting there waiting for my wedding day to finally come. You know what I mean? I gave it up a couple of times. But then I would gather some resources again, and take care of myself for a bit and take care of everything else. Eventually, I would think, ah, you know what I could do? I bet if I revise and do this, maybe I'll give it one more chance. There was one thing on my bucket list, and that was it. I couldn't quit again. I’m not proud of that—I think that's a little obsessive, but that was how it turned out.

What was the process of releasing the book like?

I am happy to have it out there and doing its own thing now. It's honestly a relief because I felt there was also a sense of mission for me in writing this book. I know it's a novel about a tattoo shop, big deal. But I also felt a real sense that this was a love letter to a certain kind of person. I wanted somebody, some reader, to feel less alone. I wanted this book to mean something to somebody. When it was published, I wanted it to have its best chance of getting out there.

The cool thing about being with Penguin Random House is that they do have publicists who help you. The book was mentioned in the New York Times, and there was an interview in Newsday here on Long Island, and it was on Shondaland. They did a nice job getting it there.

All these years, I had looked forward to celebrating with my friends. I put together a little book tour, and I went to my friends’ towns, and I would read at their indie bookstores, and we would have dinner. I made my own little merch and fake tattoos and things, and I would say yes, I said yes to anything anywhere. I went on any podcasts that wanted to have me on. It wasn't with any illusions of the book being a bestseller. It was like, some weirdo out there is a weirdo like me, and I wrote this for them, and this might be the strange channel that gets it to them. That was a real joy. It was amazing to finally be able to celebrate, to have the object to hold in my hand. It was so gratifying.

Now that that's done, I'm also very, very happy. Like, if this was my kiddo, it's off to college. I'm very happy that that cycle is complete and I'm in the cycle of a new creative project.

Where are you in that experience? What's happening with that new book?

How do we even begin? I suppose I'm at the stage in the process where I'm synthesizing a lot of thinking, research, and pre-writing. I've written about 100 pages of the first draft and probably another 50 messy pages of that first draft. It is partly set in the nation of Georgia in the Caucasus, the former Soviet republic of Georgia. I've traveled over there twice. One of my best friends in the world is Georgian. I'm doing a lot of reading. I've made a lot of notes. I have a pretty good sense of the plot arc and the structure.

I guess that's a way of saying I'm in the middle. I'm in the messy middle. It's given me a lot of chances to think about people's different phases of the process. I'm realizing that I don't love first drafting! I don't love the generative phase. I love the little fiddly, like let's move things around and figure out how the puzzle pieces fit part, but I'm trying to embrace that generative part.

What have you learned about your creative process along the way?

Oh, my goodness, so much. One of the most important things I've learned is that when I was younger and first starting out, I thought that mostly what I needed was sheer willpower and discipline. I just needed to read exhaustively and write obsessively, and I could do this on my own steam. I thought that if it got hard, then the answer was just to work harder.

Really, I think the answer is often not that. I mean, yeah, you have to work hard and be disciplined. I'm a big proponent of sitting down whether you feel inspired or not. But community is hugely important. You need to have writer friends because their existence and being with them reminds you that this is worthwhile because it can seem fruitless.

I also need the ability to alternate projects and work on something else that has quicker short-term rewards. With something like a novel, it takes a long time to get creative satisfaction. And there’s the importance of living life, so you have something to write about. I could talk all day about that.

If you had to pick one piece of advice to give to another writer, what would that be?

Community, it would be community. Find a couple of creative friends. They don't even have to be in the same field or genre as you. They can be visual artists. They can be musicians. But find a few friends that you love to be in their presence, and you feel filled up when you're with them, and at the end of the night, you think, “Oh god, I'm so glad I have them.” People who tell you about a book they've read or a thing they saw or an idea they had and they're similarly engaged in this weird thing we do, which is make a life making things. The best thing I can say is, get those people.

If you can live in a place where there's a bunch of those people around, that's even better. I'm in the suburbs of Long Island and in a bit of a place that can feel like a creative desert. You still have to find a few.

When my son was two, I was at the library and happened upon a couple of other moms who were also trying to revive their creative lives. None of us were wealthy. None of us had nannies. We were all like, “How do you do this when you have very tiny humans who are dependent upon you?”

We would do things called work bees where we would get together, and the children would kind of occupy each other and play. We'd be keeping an eye on them, obviously, but we would sit there with our laptops and work on editing, photography, or writing. I mean, there are scenes in this novel that were written with many small children running around. It was wonderful, it truly, truly was. We would meet every week for sort of a catch-up. What are your goals? What are we celebrating this week? What is your one next step? Next week we're going to check with you and see if you did it. And then, we would have these work bees, and the kids would play and we would do the actual work. I freely give this idea. I recommend it to anyone who is a parent and feeling desperate for creative support and time.

What's the best book that you've read recently?

Oh, love that question. I read The Vulnerables (affiliate*) by Sigrid Nunez. It is a novel that takes place in pandemic times, and it is hard to describe the plot because it doesn't have much of a traditional plot. It has a narrator with an absolutely wonderful voice, who has a lot of thoughts and insights about life and brings in a lot of literary allusions, cultural references, thoughts, and philosophy and it also involves a parrot and a stoner roommate. I would have followed this narrator anywhere. It made me think more expansively about what a novel can be.

With Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (affiliate*), I leaned on a very age-old coming-of-age structure. I tried to play and make innovations and be weird, and I used that skeleton to build that novel. The Vulnerables does not have a traditional skeleton. It's marvelous, and it made me want to be brave as a writer.

I loved getting to talk to June about her writing process, and I am eagerly anticipating her next novel! If you want to keep up with the writers featured in the Meet the Author series, you can find their books on Bookshop.org!

​
​