Author Interview: Jake Bienvenue

Jake Bienvenue holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of CutBank Literary Magazine. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Moon City Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. He is at work on a novel about the Oregon wine country.

Jake's short story, "The Republic of Boys," was published by MoonLit Getaway in December 2024.

INTERVIEW

MG: What got you into writing?

JB: The first real writing I did was biblical exegesis. When I was in high school, I found myself in a leadership position in a sort of rogue, cult-like bible study my friends and I started. For whatever reason, this bible study exploded, and I became a sort of Trotsky figure within it—the in-house theorist and exegete, tasked with formulating doctrine and writing material for our weekly meetings. I was like 15 or 16, writing what were basically sermons for dozens of teenagers from all over the area. It was a trip. But I realized I was good at writing, that writing could be a form of power, and while I'm sure the work I was doing was sloppy and maybe even harmful, I was able to develop as a writer in front of an actual audience. I learned to notice what people responded to, and what bored them.

It wasn't until college that I started to write creatively. Poetry at first, but I had a sense that I was a fiction writer at heart. The Christian school I went to had no fiction instructor in the English department, so when I decided, at 21, that I wanted to get an MFA in fiction, my mentor, Bill Jolliff, asked whether I'd ever even written fiction. I told him no. He said you probably won't be accepted, then, but just in case he gave me two short story anthologies. That summer I ripped through the anthologies and wrote nonstop, and by the time grad apps were due in the fall, I had one competent story. Barely competent. I got lucky. Once I started the program, that was it, I was a writer.

MG: Tell us more about The Republic of Boys—what inspired it? What makes it unique?

JB: The Republic of Boys belongs to a suite of short prose called Four Griefs, which I compiled last June. At the height of every summer, I go kind of insane. I stay up late, looking out the window. I listen to a lot of Wagner. I go on walks at dusk, when it cools down, and I sit around in strange places. I write everything longhand. I read Rilke. I read old journal entries, old papers, old stories, and sort of give myself over to nostalgia and sadness. It's really melodramatic and embarrassing. But anyways, this past summer, I culled from old journals some bits of language and feeling and narration that I thought could be turned into short pieces, and these short pieces started to cohere. The Republic of Boys is one of these. I wasn't sure I liked it, at first. I was surprised when it got accepted, and even more surprised when people responded to it. I was worried it might be too diaristic or unclear, but maybe that is the story's strength: a vague piece for a vague emotion. 

Are you currently working on anything else?

JB: Yes, I'm working on a novel. It's very different from my other work. It's scaffolded like a Shakespeare play: two wine country families engaged in a decades-long feud here in Oregon's Willamette Valley. I think it's pretty fun. It's fast and plotty. Right now, though, I'm writing a short story about a Christian purity camp, part of a collection I'm putting together. And I have various other shorter projects I'm chipping away at as well.

What’s your favorite piece you've ever made? Why is it your favorite?

JB: I think the best thing I've ever written is a very short prose piece about the death of my stepsister. It's the most compelling, I think, in terms of polish and the strength of the language, and because of its brevity, it's much less unruly than a novel or even a short story.

MG: Are there any writers that inspire the way you make your pieces?

I have too many influences to name. In short fiction, it's Sherwood Anderson, without question. Winesburg, Ohio made me realize I had no idea how to write. Overall, in terms of concept and style, it's the poet Wallace Stevens. He's probably my favorite writer of all time. In terms of how I think about the world and the writer's place within it, I'll never get past the New England Transcendentalists: Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville.

JB: Do you have any social media you'd like to share?

I have a twitter I'm not very active on, @jake_bienvenue. I don't know. I probably should be more engaged. You're supposed to market yourself and all that, network, whatever, but I think that's all bullshit, honestly. Or it's all bullshit for me. There's just something inherently... uncool about it. I don't know. I can appreciate when magazines and journals engage in this kind of thing, I was an online content editor for a lit mag for a year, so I get it, but it just doesn't sit well with me personally. Anyways. Follow me, I guess.

MG: Do you have any advice for other writers?

JB Advice for other writers... It's the same things I would tell myself. Find a community. Share work. Stay up late, writing. Also the opposite. Stop writing. Leave. Fill your spirit. Nothing will satisfy you anyway, so be desperate, do everything fast, mad, without thinking. It doesn't matter in the end.

READ: "The Republic of Boys," by Jake Bienvenue