A Review, and Interview with Daughters of Chaos author Jen Fawkes by John David Morgan

Luck, Timing, and Persistence: A Review, and Interview with Daughters of Chaos author Jen Fawkes by John David Morgan

Debut novelist Jen Fawkes is the author of Daughters of Chaos, released in July 2024 by Overlook Press, an imprint of Abrams, in which a female Union spy discovers a secret society of magical women that spans millennia. The book opens in 1877 as Sylvie Swift’s dying partner, Hannah, makes a final request: “The girls. Marina and Brigitte. Tell them.”

Marina (named after Sylvie’s sister), and Brigitte (named after Sylvie’s mother) are the twin daughters Sylvie gave up to a wealthy couple the girls believe are their biological parents. Sylvie honors Hannah’s request and begins documenting her (and Hannah’s) story, in the form of a personal history addressed to the twins. Fawkes calls the book a “braided alternate history,” of which there are three braids.

The first is the personal history—set down in a journal—that Sylvie is writing for her daughters, which includes letters from her Confederate twin brother, newspaper articles, and snippets from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The second braid is the text of the Apocrypha, an ancient “lost” Greek comedy Sylvie translated from French into English while living in Nashville. The third braid is the biography of a 16th century Venetian poet and courtesan, Gaia Valentino, who translated the Apocrypha from Greek into French. A common factor in all three braids is the Cult of Chaos, a secret society of fierce, magical women.

The degree of difficulty in weaving together these three braids is akin to juggling chainsaws, but Fawkes pulls it off beautifully. Kevin Brockmeier says of the book, “Dazzling … a beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the fourth century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.”

Fawkes is the author of two short story collections, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me. Mannequin and Wife was a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, the winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award, and a Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her second collection, Tales the Devil Told Me, was a Foreword INDIES silver medalist, one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite collections of 2021, and a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Fawkes is a two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department of the University of Louisville. Her work appears in Issue 9 of Miracle Monocle. 

Her impressive educational background includes a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University; an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA; and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. She and her husband, Bill, live in Litle Rock, Arkansas, with their two (cat) children, Tessio and Clemenza. I was fortunate to connect recently with Fawkes, while she was in Louisville as guest author for the UofL's Axton Reading Series. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity.

I noticed in your CV that you have a BA in Anthropology. Is there a connection between Anthropology with writing?

JF: Many writers I know studied Anthropology as undergrads. I guess the most obvious connection between Anthropology and writing is a deep interest in human beings, human behavior, human history. Where we started, how we arrived at where we are now. Our history is made up of stories, and we apprehend things in a narrative fashion, so storytelling is really baked-in to human behavior. Turning a blind eye to what we know of human history is both dangerous and absurd, but we must always keep in mind that the “history” we’ve been handed is just one of many stories from our past.

You said in an interview that you are rootless; that you grew up in several places. Can you talk about that, assuming you aren’t in witness protection?

JF: Ha! My parents were both brilliant but troubled people. My mom is from a tiny town in Southeast Arkansas—the single mostly deadly shot of the Civil War was fired from a cannon that points at the house where she grew up—and my father was from Chicago.

How did they meet?

JF: After my mom graduated from the University of Arkansas, she got hired, through the post, as an advertising copywriter for Sears. So she packed up, got on a bus, and moved alone to Chicago. My father’s older sister was my mom’s boss, and my parents married pretty young. Professionally, my father was an electronics engineer, but he was also a composer, a musician, a puppeteer, a magician—a Renaissance Man. We moved to California when I was one; when I was four, my parents divorced, and my mother took my sister and me to Arkansas. In the intervening few years, my parents kept trying to reconcile, so we drove back and forth between Arkansas and California three or four times. My mom was always searching—for her place, her purpose, the answers—and she moved us every couple of years throughout my childhood. To this day, I start getting restless every two to three years—to feel like it’s time to be moving on.

Are there other writers in your family?

JF: My mom’s fondest wish was to be a publishing writer. If things had been different for her, she absolutely could have been—if she’d been luckier, if the timing had been right. When it comes to success as an artist, luck and timing are more important than anything, including talent, with the possible exception of persistence.

Luck, timing, and persistence. I’m going to quote you on that.

JF: I have vivid memories of waking up in the middle of the night to find my mom sitting at a rickety card table, typing like the wind, working on her fiction. She wrote and published a few stories, and she wrote at least one novel. I was in my early thirties when my mom’s dementia—early onset Alzheimer’s—began to become obvious, but because she was so brilliant, she devised coping strategies, and no one but me understood that she was ill for a long time. Sadly, she was losing her ability to read when I finally started getting published, but she still tried hard to read my work.

How would you and your main character, Sylvie Swift, get along?

JF: Oh, famously! As an early-stage writer, I always wrote from a male perspective. It was easier for me to analyze and represent what was going on inside male characters than female characters. I now see that I was afraid of trying to represent the complexity and contrariness of the female interior landscape, and at some point, I realized I was shortchanging my work by not exploring female perspectives. In the University of Cincinnati PhD program, I met Dr. Sarah Strickley, and she’s one of the writers who inspired me to begin writing more directly and forcefully about women. There are pieces of me in Sylvie Swift, as well as my mom, my sister, and other women I’ve known and admired.

I’ll be sure and pass that along. In Scene 5 of the Apocrypha, Timon says “do you think if women ran things they would not make war? Are women not complete people?” Those are Timon’s words. What does Jen Fawkes say? If women were running things, would there be war?

JF: Absolutely! In an online review of Daughters of Chaos, someone said, “I can’t believe the author didn’t credit Marija Gimbutas, as she’s clearly leaning on her theories.” Even though I was an Anthropology major, I’d never heard of Gimbutas, whose Goddess Theory proposed that during human pre-history, our societies were maternal and entirely peaceful. I mean no offense to Gimbutas, whose theories are as fascinating as any I’ve encountered, but she had no idea what human pre-history was like, and neither do I.

We can only imagine a matriarchal world, because as far as we know, there hasn’t been one. There have been matrilineal societies, societies in which property and wealth were passed down along female lines. But how  anyone who’s lived among human beings can believe that if women were in charge, violence and warfare would disappear, is truly beyond me. Warfare and violence would look different in a matriarchal society, I’m certain, but they would be there.

Daughters of Chaos is a work of fiction, and in it, I’m not alleging anything about human history; I’m attempting to tell the story of a woman. Women have always had to work “behind the scenes” to get their needs met, and they’ve done so in ways that may not seem, today, to be “ethical.” But ethics are just rules we all agree to believe in until we stop believing in them, until a new set of rules comes into being and rises to the top.

This is a research question. One thing I particularly liked about the book was the Porpoise, the Civil War submarine. I call that the submarine sub-sub plot. Would it be fair to say historical accuracy is very important to you?

JF: Yes and no. An advantage of using historically “accurate” elements is that such elements can lend your fiction the sheen, or the illusion, of authenticity. But for me, history as we know it is merely a story—one possible version of our past. Some of my favorite books fictionalize actual historical events, figures, and situations, like Beloved by Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead’s first book The Intuitionist. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which uses events from Canadian history, was my main model in structuring Daughters of Chaos. I’m drawn to books like Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, and Moby-Dick, my all-time favorite book.

Here's a fun question. It’s about family helpfulness, and support of your writing process. On a scale of one to ten, with one being the least helpful, and ten being the most helpful, how would you rate your cat children, Tessio and Clemenza, in terms of helpfulness in your writing process?

JF: Ha. Ten!

A ten! Seriously?

JF: Well, okay, maybe an eight. It’s the joy, the inspiration, of having them in my life. Severe allergies prevented me from having pets when I was young, but now I take medicine that allows me to function, and I am just in love with my cats. Our boy, Clemenza, does like to situate himself between me and my computer. He spends a lot of time in my lap, and he will shove my computer out of his way. He’s more dependent on us than his sister Tessio, who, like her namesake from The Godfather films, would sell us out in a heartbeat for some tasty treat.

Any advice for new writers?

JF: In the beginning, don’t worry about who your audience is, or might be. Learn to listen to your own voice. The only thing I did correctly—and this was quite inadvertent—was that I didn’t start thinking about audience as an early-stage writer, when I was learning to write fictional prose. I wrote exactly what I wanted to, and in this way, I discovered my passions, my path, and I developed a writing “voice.” Thinking about audience too early can paralyze and/or sabotage you. I recommend figuring out what it is that excites you, not some fictional reader, and working in your own secluded space for as long as you can.

Last question. In this interview, or in any of your previous interviews, has there been anything that you haven’t been asked, that you’d like to talk about?

JF: I haven’t talked about the Confederate submarine program as much as I’d like to. I am weirdly obsessed with seafaring, and the ocean, and I was excited to situate Silas, Sylvie’s twin brother, in a submarine. Water supports us and sustains our lives; it can also kill us in a matter of minutes. I’m pretty terrified of deep water, but I’m drawn to it at the same time—a feeling that generally makes for exciting, complicated fiction. The Confederates were much more convinced than the Union of the importance of submarine warfare. Their submersibles were made from used steam boilers, and the men inside carried a single lit candle, which was how they monitored their air supply. Those early subs were so deadly—something like ninety percent of the men who volunteered to crew them died—and I couldn’t help but wonder, who were these men? This helped me build out the character of Silas, Sylvie’s twin brother, a character who would knowingly sign up for a suicide mission. No one’s really asked me about the submarines, and I appreciate the chance to discuss them.

You are welcome. One of the braids of Daughters of Chaos is the play Apocrypha, which ends with these lines: “We are all, Chaos, Mother. Happiness may be a myth, but contentment is not. If we ever hope to know such balance, however, we must first learn to accept the changeable aspects of our own natures.” Good advice, indeed.