Interview
with Jeremy Jackson
By
Parker Morse
"Definitely
my favorite book! A beautiful tribute to all runners, and a reminder
that being true to yourself is more important than setting records."
That quote from Alan Webb will appear on the paperback edition
of "Life at These Speeds," the debut novel from Jeremy
Jackson. The book has created steadily increasing buzz in the
running community since Webb cited it as his favorite in an interview
with kidsrunning.com.
Kevin Schuler, Jackson's hero, is a talented middle-distance runner
who transfers to a new school when his entire track team (and
most of his class) is wiped out in a van crash. Schuler escapes
into running, producing ever-faster times, while searching for
a way to deal with the loss of his friends.
Q:
With most of the people we talk to, we can pull out a track annual
or something and find out where they went to high school and what
their best times are for the last six seasons. We were not able
to find out much about you at all beyond what's on the flyleaf
of your book.
Jeremy
Jackson: Well, I don't have much of a running history.
I'm not a record breaker or anything like that.
Q:
Where are you located now?
JJ: I live in Iowa City, near
the University of Iowa. I got my MFA here, I guess five years
ago. I was gone for a few years, but I came back. I grew up in
Central Missouri, in a small town, so I'm right next door to Missouri
where I grew up. But I like Iowa City, it's small, it's a college
town, it has a lot of activities and energy that I like. I came
here originally for the writing program; as soon as they accepted
me I knew I was coming here. It was definitely at the top of my
list.
Q:
What have you been up to since you graduated?
JJ: It's been a pretty short
career path so far. I got my MFA in 1997, and then I spent a year
writing. Then I taught English for two years at Vassar College.
I quit that job because I knew I could make a living as a writer,
which is what I wanted to do. That was a year and a half ago now,
almost two years, since I left teaching. So now I write, I'm happy,
I'm making a living so far. I do other things in addition to the
novel. I've done some screenplay work for Hollywood and that's
always nice.
Q:
Has anything of yours been filmed?
JJ: No, nothing has made it
to production. That's the way Hollywood is. They'll buy thirty
or forty scripts for every one that actually goes into production.
I could probably work my whole life and never have anything actually
hit the screen, but that's all right, it's a fun business. I haven't
done that much, but it's something I do every now and again.
I'm
also kind of a chef, and I have two cookbooks coming out. I have
a lot of things going on all the time! Screenplays, novels and
cookbooks.
Q:
You seem to have the high school track aura right down to the
smallest details. Did you run?
JJ: I did. I was even one
of those little ten-year-old kids who ran Junior Olympics and
all that. Then I ran in junior high and a little bit in high school,
but I ended up quitting in high school for a few reasons. I didn't
have time. I wanted to do all these other things, and they conflicted
with track. I was never, well, certainly never as good as Kevin
Schuler.
Q:
Not many people are.
JJ: No, exactly. I was one
of these people who didn't like the competition. I liked the running
part, but the competition and the pressure from everybody was
not... I didn't care for it. And so for a long time I didn't run.
I do now, I run on my own. I don't really race, I've done a couple
of races, but that's not why I do it. I run for myself now.
Q:
Do you have a favorite memory of high school track, a particular
race or event you remember?
JJ: Boy, that's an interesting
question. My shining moments were few and far between, and I don't
really necessarily have a couple of moments that stand out. There
is a certain, you used the word 'aura', the high school track
aura, there's something very... I went to this very small school.
There was something very cohesive and cozy about our track team.
It was almost like Kevin's [first] little school, where almost
everybody is on the track team because that's all there was to
do. There were no other sports in the spring, so you ran track,
even if you were bad. I remember going to track meets, and you
know that kind of tribal mentality. You hung out with your school,
and there's all these other schools, but you're all together.
We were never the best team, but I enjoyed that tiny community
of people on the team, hanging out. I don't really know how to
describe it, but I enjoyed those social, cohesive moments more
than I did the competition and things like that.
Q:
Like when you go to a meet, and you're excited about going to
the meet, but when the time comes for your race you don't want
to get up and leave.
JJ: Yes, in a way, the racing
was like, Oh, I've gotta go race now, whatever. I'm not gonna
win, but it's time to go, I'll be back in fifteen minutes, guys.
It wasn't that flippant, but it was just that feeling, I guess
it was one of my earlier feelings when I was growing up of really
feeling like I was part of something. Here I belonged, and we
were all a track team. It's difficult to describe. When we were
all back at school, just on a normal school day, we fought with
each other, and had our typical little cliques and our typical
little disagreements, but when we were out as a team, when we
were away, we came together. The things that I remember were a
couple of bad moments, like false-starting in the 800. Who false-starts
in the 800? Well, I did. And one false start and you're out. And
I remember a couple things like that. Maybe it says something
that I don't have that many fond memories of the actual athletics.
Q:
Do you still follow the sport at all?
JJ: Well, I admire running
a great deal. I think it's a great sport, a lovely sport. But
I don't really follow it. When the Olympics are on, I'm right
there, but everybody else is too. I don't have cable TV, so I
can't follow the European circuit, I don't even really know what's
going on. I hear about it when Alan Webb breaks the four-minute
mile, but other than that I don't even really go to local track
meets. I'm probably kind of a lazy fan. I enjoy watching it every
time I do, but I don't go out looking for it.
Q:
What feels good about running to you now?
JJ: There are a lot of facets
to it. Partly it's the realization, now that I'm an adult, that
I don't have to do it for the competition, that it isn't a competition,
that I can do it for whatever reasons I want to do it. There's
no pressure on me. I don't even race against myself, I just go
out for a set amount of time, and wherever I go, that's how far
I go that day. I don't even measure myself against my own times.
Q:
Timing your runs with the kitchen clock.
JJ: Yeah, kind of. But the
other payoff is that, as a writer, I spend a great deal of my
time focusing pretty intently upon very strange little quandaries,
and trifling my day away through writing and focusing and reading.
Then it's great to be able to get out in the afternoon, which
is when I usually run, and just run. It's a physical activity,
almost the exact opposite of what I do in my living, in my job.
And it's great to be able to spend my physical energy, and go
out there and not have to think about anything. I usually don't,
my mind usually kind of bounces around and zones in and zones
out. I like that part of it, it's a great contrast and a great
release from my career. It's also, because my mind is free from
any constraint, and from any particular task, my mind wanders
into some very interesting things. I often will come up for ideas
for whatever screenplay I'm working on, and I'll get home and
write them down, and they're good ideas.
Q:
Do you ever have trouble remembering them when you get home?
JJ: I do, but I'm pretty good.
I get most of them. A few slip by, but I manage to catch most
of them. As with everybody, I don't enjoy it every time, there
are hard days, and there are easy days. But by and large it's
been really fun to come back to it, several years later, really,
and fall into it. In fact, I think now I'd be a pretty good high
school runner. If I only had this body back then, and this willpower,
then... anyway. I probably don't have the leg speed, but I'm smarter.
And I have more endurance, perhaps.
Q:
What led you to use running as the vehicle for "Life at These
Speeds"?
JJ: That's a good question,
and I've tried to answer it before, but I'm afraid the answer's
really not that interesting. In many respects, this novel just
happened. I was still in college at the time I wrote the first
chapter in the book, the one where they're all at the away meet,
that ends with the van crashing. That story just popped up out
of nowhere, and I just went with it. It turned out to be a good
story, and turned out to be the genesis of something much larger.
And that story was about track. It just came to me, and obviously
I knew something about track and I was comfortable writing about
it. And once I realized it was going to be something longer, it
was pretty obvious to me that running would work very well for
Kevin, that it would be something that this whole novel could
hang on. I don't think he could have been a tennis prodigy or
even a basketball prodigy. Take the fact the running is, in the
end, a solitary sport, and he's out there. It's part of the reason
he's doing it, because it's a way of withdrawing. It's a way of
avoiding problems, and he's good at it, and he just falls right
into it. It was a good metaphor in a couple of ways. So it just
happened by accident, but I was happy to go with it, and it turned
out to work very well for me. I thought that it was a good choice
for the book.
Q:
Probably the classic dilemma of any book or movie about running
is that you always come to a sort of climactic scene that involves
a race. And you have to deal with a limited number of options
for how you resolve it.
JJ: I think I was lucky because
while I was writing, my mind was filled with so many other issues,
that yes, I realized I was coming up on The Big Race, where he's
going to try to break the four-minute mile, or the race at the
end of the book, of course, the completely climactic moment, I
knew that was how it had to be, and I knew it was tricky, because
what can you do with a race? You've probably read "The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner," or heard of it, and in that
race, at the end of the race, he's great, and he's winning, and
he slows down and lets someone pass him. And I thought, I can't
do that, it's been done. So I definitely knew I had to do something,
and it was going to be difficult because there are not that many
things you can do in a race, without giving up. I wanted him to
finish the race. So it was tricky. The race in the last chapter
was probably the most worked part of the book. I went over it,
I changed it, I think, three times. It was really the part of
the book that my editor and I worked on the most. The one that
made it was a third attempt. So I did two other attempts of the
last race, and they were both good and on the right track, but
then I hit on this solution. But that was definitely a tricky
part.
Q:
Did you read many of the other running novels?
JJ: No, I really didn't, partly
because I knew I wasn't really writing a novel about running.
It was definitely a novel with a lot of running, and it was very
important to the novel, but it was not a running novel. And the
other reason is a more artistic reason; I didn't want those books
to be in my mind when I was working on my own. I wanted to find
my own way, and whatever story was right for this novel to come
out on its own. If I were worried about, what did so-and-so do
in his book, it would detract from the focus I needed. I would
be worried about, am I copying him? Or am I copying this one?
So no, I didn't. Even now I haven't.
Q:
If it's not impolite of us to ask, how is the book doing?
JJ: They haven't told me much
and I don't ask. If I asked, they would tell me. It's a bit early,
and the numbers are so slow. The book selling and distribution
system is so wacky, it's hard to really tell what's going on.
It's had a slightly slow start, but I think it's warming up. It
was a selection of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers
series, that was really a big deal for us. It's a long story,
but our original publication date was going to be in the middle
of August. But when Barnes and Noble picked it, they wanted it
to come out much earlier, so we ended up bumping up publication
into early June, and that threw off some of the reviews that we
were going to get, and some of the media attention. That's just
starting to happen now.
Q:
They're sending you out on the book tour?
JJ: No, I'm doing some kind
of tour but it's nothing major, some kind of local stuff mostly.
I'm going to the USATF annual meeting in December, in Kansas City,
and a couple of things like that.
I
should probably ask my publisher how we're doing, but you've really
got to want to know that.
Q:
What do you think of Alan Webb's recent sponsorship deal?
JJ: I've been in touch with Alan a little bit, and he's read the
book. He's been really nice. I don't pretend to know what it's
like to be a professional runner, but I'm happy for Alan. If that's
what he wants, I certainly respect his skill quite a bit, and
what he did last spring was phenomenal. He's revived some interest
in high school running. I hope he has a great career. Maybe Nike
will offer me a contract then. I could write them more running
novels. In fact, now that I think of it, the only shoes I mention
specifically in the book are Nikes. That's got to be worth something
(laughs).
