THE THREE with LaToya Jordan

An interview, a photo story, and Pop-Up Questions

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LaToya Jordan is a multi-genre writer from Brooklyn, NY. Her novella, To the Woman in the Pink Hat, was published in March 2023 by Aqueduct Press. Her writing has appeared in Anomaly, Literary Mama, Shirley Magazine, MER, Raising Mothers, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and more. Her flash story “Offering” was a spotlight story in Best Small Fictions 2021 and named in Wigleaf’s Top 50 2021. Her essay “The Zig Zag Mother,” appears in My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After and another essay, “After Striking a Fixed Object,” published by The Manifest-Station, was notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Thick-Skinned Sugar. She has an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BS in public relations and journalism from Utica University. She lives with her husband and their two children in her hometown. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan, Instagram @latoyajordanwriter, or visit her website at latoyajordan.com.

Editor’s Note- I’ve known LaToya online for years, and didn’t know until the past few years that she is a talented writer of many genres. When I saw that her novella, To The Woman in the Pink Hat, had been published, I knew I wanted to read it and have her interview for THE THREE. LaToya writes with expansive imagination and authentic passion, infusing this book with both another world entirely and yet one that is reminiscent all too clearly, of our own. I hope you buy and enjoy her book as much as I did!

POP UP QUESTIONS

The writer picks five out of ten pop-up questions and answers them.

What do you think about when you are awake at 3 am? 

When I'm up at 3 am, I'm usually thinking about the astronomical cost of buying a home in Brooklyn, pain (because sometimes I'm up late because my hip arthritis or IBS pain is really bad), my long to do list, asking myself if I'm a good mother to my children and how I can be better, remembering something embarrassing from my youth, or dreaming about an extended vacation both with and without my family.

What book do you wish you could read again for the first time and why?

I wish I could read Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf again. I remember reading the choreopoem in my women's playwriting class in high school and feeling an opening in my world about what was possible with writing and who gets to tell their stories. I felt like reading this book gave me permission to tell my stories the way I wanted to tell them.

What is a quote that has endured in your mind? 

i found god in myself  & i loved her/i loved her fiercely

For a long time this quote was my email signature. Again, this comes from Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. This quote continues to be an inspiration and reminds me of the importance of self love.

How has technology been a part of your writing? 

Technology is a big part of my writing, and has been since becoming a mother almost 11 years ago. I remember the nights I was up late breastfeeding that my smartphone would save me because I could sneak in reading time using the Kindle app on my phone. This led to me writing stories in Google Docs and making them available offline so I could write on my smartphone while I commuted to work. I've drafted a lot of stories, snippets of ideas, and revised on that little smartphone screen. My new favorite way to revise is to use my tablet. I bought a screen protector that feels like writing on paper and a stylus that looks like a yellow pencil. I no longer need to print for editing by hand or use five different journals for story notes. I can jot them down on my tablet which has a handwriting to text feature eliminating the process of me having to type up my notes from my journals and I save paper! 

What occupies your mind most often on being a woman in America? 

What occupies my mind most often about being a woman in America is raising a girl who'll be a teenager soon and eventually a woman in America. How my husband and I can figure out how to raise a woman who is prepared for misogynoir and sexism, ensure she has good self-esteem, protect her from the harms of social media and dating violence, and raise her to be a resilient and resourceful woman and advocate who lives in a country where women's rights are being taken away...but also how to make sure she experiences joy in the midst of all this bullshit. It's a lot to think about and it often keeps me up at night.

PHOTO ROLL STORY

The writer picks a photo from her phone and tells us about it.

I set out to try to find a photo of myself I liked and trying to find a photo in my camera roll that wasn't a picture of my kids, my husband, or food was hard. I'm usually the one behind the camera. This is a photo of me on Christmas Day wearing my comfy Mother's Day robe, standing in our small and cluttered Brooklyn kitchen, kneading dough for homemade cinnamon rolls for brunch. I saw the recipe on Instagram earlier in that year and it's now my go-to cinnamon roll recipe and it's the first time I've made a recipe using yeast. I love trying to create small traditions for my family. We usually have cinnamon rolls from a can for Christmas breakfast but now we'll have these. I think I had a nap after devouring a cinnamon roll with a mimosa and being pooped from late-night setup and an early morning wake up by our excited kids. When I look at this photo I think about how for a lot of families, moms are the magic of Christmas, and I feel magical.

THE INTERVIEW

The writer answers questions about her life and work.

Your novella is a totally different genre than other work of yours I’m familiar with, which I admire the hell out of. How did you find and nourish all aspects of yourself as a writer? 

A lot of my creative writing deals with the body and trauma, and often centers Black women and girls, so even though I started out as a poet, I’m still telling the same stories. I go where the writing muse takes me. For a long time the muse was journalism, then poetry, a little dabble in personal essays, and now I’m pretty much focused on short stories. I do love how all the genres I write influence each other, for instance my personal essays became better after I completed my poetry MFA. 

Without giving away too much of the plot, your book features a dystopian future where Black and brown women are forced into sterilization with the goal of profiting while reducing POC in the population. Can you talk about your experience as a Black woman writing this? 

I remember reading an article in 2016 about the first successful uterine transplant in the U.S. It’s an amazing medical advancement that is now helping many women born without uteruses or other conditions that prevent them from carrying a baby. But then, I started thinking about how this could be a bad thing because I’m a worst case scenario person. You know that urban legend about waking up in an ice-filled hotel bathtub with a kidney missing? I thought if anybody would be negatively affected by this, it would most likely be Black women. America has a history of medical racism, experimentation, and sterilization of Black and brown folks. And even though the story is set in the near future, writing it felt like writing reality. It made me angry to write some of the things my protagonist Jada experienced but it was also an outlet for me to discuss allyship, reproductive rights, infertility, and justice through the lens of racism. 

Your book casts the government in more of a secondary role than I’ve grown used to in this genre, while placing in more of a spotlight on greedy corporations and greedy individuals who profit from the stolen bodies and never ask questions. Was this a purposeful choice or did it grow organically from the story?

This was a choice I made early on. I knew the bad guys would be a group with the power and money to pull off this operation. The secondary bad guys are the people – women/couples who desperately wanted babies so they didn’t ask questions, even if they thought something sinister was going on. My story is set in NYC, but this group is just one of many powerful and rich groups who want to influence the country in some way. When you combine a sinister group like the one in my story with these so-called allies and spread them throughout the country, they become a large-scale issue. We’ve seen how much homegrown groups can wreak havoc.

Endings- of all kinds, but for writers we are talking about the endings of their work- are notoriously difficult, and writers approach them differently. John Irving has said that he always knows the ending, down to the exact last sentence- of his work before he begins writing. How did you approach the ending of TWITCH?

I didn’t know the ending of the story when I began writing and it definitely changed over time. I struggled with it because Jada’s story isn’t over at the end of the novella. I knew that I’d continue the story in another book, whether that’s a sequel novella or a novel. I wanted the end to be a cliffhanger that would leave readers wanting more but not make them angry. My publisher Aqueduct Press asked me to expand the ending because it felt too rushed so I added a flashback scene with Jada and her mother. I do have an idea about the ending for the next chapter in Jada’s life but I couldn’t begin to tell you what happens from the last page of the novella until then.

What was the writing of this book like as far as schedule and location and means? Do you use a laptop, pen, phone? 

I wrote this book on my laptop, by hand, and on my phone. I wrote on the subway, at home with my children distracting me, on lunch breaks at work, and in a couple of solo hotel staycations. It began as a short story and then after a suggestion from Mila Jaroniec (I took a writing class with her), I turned it into a novella. Sometimes I wrote to meet my writing group deadlines, or worked on revisions with other mother-writers through Cut + Paste ARIM. (ARIM stands for An Artist Residency in Motherhood and the Cut + Paste ARIM has been such a helpful group in helping me make time for writing).  

Were you inspired by any novellas or novels in writing this, and if so, what are they? What made them stick with you?

I will forever be inspired by Octavia Butler’s books, especially Parable of the Sower because it features a young Black teenage girl protagonist who is a brave leader despite the trauma and brutal circumstances she’s experienced. 

After reading the draft when this was a short story, Mila suggested I read The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir. It's the title story of a book of three short stories or novellas about a woman in a long-term marriage who learns her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. It’s written in the form of diary entries and guided me in writing in the epistolary form.

How did the pandemic affect your writing? 

From April 2020 to the beginning of December 2020 I couldn’t write anything for myself. My day job is as a writer and we had to produce a lot more communications because of COVID. I also couldn’t read anything longer than articles in the paper and short stories. It was so hard being home with my kids while my oldest was doing remote school and my son was a toddler, my husband was teaching remotely, and working from home with ambulance sirens as our constant soundtrack. But towards the end of that first year I realized I needed to get back to writing for the sake of my mental health. So, I set a schedule and also took a 12-week class to keep myself productive.

Are you working on anything now? We’d love a sneak peek into the subject!

I’m desperately trying to finish two stories that have been collecting dust for a couple of years. I can get a first draft out fast, but I’m a slow reviser. One is a ghost story about mom guilt and the other is my spin on dolls that come to life. I hope to finish revising both by the end of the year if I can get some alone time!