I’ve been a longtime reader of Emily St. James‘s work, beginning with her nonfiction and television criticism and extending to her debut novel, the excellent Woodworking. St. James’s dramatic work, in collaboration with Libby Hill, on both the podcast Arden and (as of season three) television’s Yellowjackets. This summer, we met a coffee shop in Long Island City and talked about everything from South Dakota to the literary influence of Tamsyn Muir.
As someone who has spent some time in the state in question, I’m curious: what are your thoughts on the literary footprint of South Dakota?
When I was in college I had a professor. I told him I wanted to write fiction of some sort; he looked at me very sincerely and said, “South Dakota has never had its William Faulkner.” I thought, “True. Seems like a lot to put on me, but okay.”
The Dakotas are a wonderful place to set stories, and yet because there are so few people there they don’t seem to have a really strong literary tradition. I know there are folks who have connections there who have written books; Anne Lamott has some sort of connection to the state, and Dan Simmons has a book called Black Hills, which I assume is about South Dakota. But there’s just not a lot set there to the degree that when my book was about to come out…there’s a GoodReads challenge along the lines of “read a book set in every one of the 50 states.” People were looking at it and saying, “Great! South Dakota!”
It feels to me like it is a big empty space that should lend itself to telling big-canvas stories, and it hasn’t. Though you do have Dances with Wolves and Deadwood.
I was going to mention Deadwood, but I think because David Milch’s work is so stylized, that feels more phantasmagorical than a more straightforward historical narrative.
And both of those are set, technically, in the Dakota Territory, and that’s a different thing altogether. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there’s a lot of Indigenous writing that comes from South Dakota, specifically.
You’re from South Dakota yourself, but haven’t lived there in a while. So when you’re writing about things like the support group in 2016, is that based on research you did or is that creating your own version of South Dakota in 2016?
It was a little bit of both. It’s hard to get a sense of whether it was specifically happening in 2016. I did find one that was happening when I was writing draft number one and it seemed reasonable to me, given the degree to which trans issues were prominent then. The bathroom bill in the book is based on a real bathroom bill, so it felt reasonable to me that there were overlaps there that people were dealing with.
It’s a combination of me writing about the real place; most of the businesses in the book are real — but also, there’s embellishing. I’m working on the second novel right now and there is a scene in the book where I squeezed geography, in a way that doesn’t exist and I’m so mad at myself, but I had to do it.
Woodworking involves a local production of Our Town, and the novel you’re working on now also references a canonical work of fiction. And during your time on Arden, there were also plenty of allusions to Shakespeare’s plays. Do you like to have another literary or dramatic work in the mix when working on a new project?
Our Town in Woodworking ended up being a choice in the draft that I submitted to my agent. It was really straining to pull Erica and Brooke and Constance into the narrative in a way where they were bumping into each other. I had seeded in there that Erica and Brooke work together in the theater; originally, I was going to have it be a high school play. But since Constance is an actress, I could make it a community theater thing. That helped a lot. So and then I just chose Our Town — it’s a play that I really love that I think spoke well to the themes of the book. It was very much in the background.
With Arden, we were more directly adapting the plays . My process there was that I never read the plays. We were a three-person team there, and so I knew that the other two would read them. When we went into season two, I said, “I’m not going to read Hamlet. I’m going to see what I remember about it from college.” That helped me. I think that helped keep us in a space where we were freed from thinking about it too much.
I did a very similar thing to Arden with Beth March Returns From the Dead where I didn’t read Little Women. I knew that this book would be in conversation with that one. This is a little different in that Little Women exists in the universe of this book in a way that Shakespeare kind of doesn’t in Arden. I was surprised how much stuff was in there that I just put in on a whim that ended up being stuff that was in the original Little Women. The book has a gravity to it that keeps drawing you back to it. It’s a very similar thing to Our Town in Woodworking; there are elements of that play that, even if you’re not consciously thinking about them, they suck you back toward them. I always feel like you can push as far away from you as you can get.
Reading about a production of Our Town in Woodworking gave me some flashbacks to my high school’s production of it. Though I loved the detail that in this production there are realistic sets as opposed to a very minimalist staging. And the way that its final act is all about regrets about the life one’s lived felt very resonant to your novel.
I think that Our Town is a story about realizing you’re a ghost, and that’s kind of what Woodworking is. I said this in another interview, but I would not be surprised if I got the name Emily from Our Town. That’s why I latched on to it so hard: Emily Webb is one of my favorite characters. The journey she goes on in that last act is profound and beautiful and It’s also the journey that Erica and Abigail are on, but they get to continue to be alive.
There is something about being alive and not really realizing it that I think is — not unique to the trans experience, but endemic to the trans experience — that Our Town speaks to.
Before we started recording, I saw your I Saw the TV Glow hat, and I feel like there’s some of that quality there as well.
In this other interview I mentioned, I talked about how in Our Town you have all these real people and the world is like a shell. In I Saw the TV Glow, you have a world but it’s populated by like shells outside of the two main characters.
It’s kind of amazing to me that Fred Durst had supporting roles in multiple A24 productions last year.
Listen, the man is a classic wonderful actor. His Oscar’s coming. I just know it.
This is getting into spoilery territory, but I wanted to talk about the way that you use both first and third person to reflect your characters’ alienation. I thought it was a fantastic, elegant way to convey that, and I’m a big admirer of structural choices in books that don’t feel like structural choices until everything clicks into place. Was that aspect of the book there from the outside? Or was that something that came up over revision and editing?
When I sat down to write the book I knew Erica was gonna be in third person and Abigail was gonna be in first person, and I didn’t entirely know why. I just thought, “This feels right.” In the first draft I got a couple chapters in and Abigail was in first person past and I realized she needed to be in first person present.
Before I realized any of the other stuff I did I understood the reason for this on some level is that Abigail occupies a YA novel which is often written in first person present tense and Erica occupies a lit fic novel, which is often written in third person. Obviously many many exceptions abound in both cases, but I was writing an urtext and that really started to speak to me. And then I thought, “How can I fuck with this, because it needs to mean something beyond its existence.”
I remember in the first draft it happened around the two-thirds mark that I decided that Erica would be in the first person. The same plot point has been in every draft, it’s just shifted around in the chronology of the book. When I knew what I was doing with the first and third person I started asking, “What does the second person signify within this world?”
I was pretty sure I wanted to do something in the second person because I’ve been reading Harrow the Ninth and it blew my mind. I love that book, and I wanted to do this as an homage to Tamsyn Muir. I had an idea of who would be in second person, which is why the book has the title it does. All of that was there in the first draft and then it was a process of figuring out how to make the craft reflect these gut-level decisions I had made. I think the kind of thing you could only do once as an author is have the book be secretly in first person the whole time. I can’t do that again. I’ve burned that bridge.
Were you always writing fiction in addition to writing criticism, essays, and screenplays? Or is this a more recent addition for you?
I wrote a number of short stories in 2013; I have always written. But I was always very focused on screenwriting and then criticism was my day job. As for those short stories, a couple of them have been picked up. I’ve reworked some of them. They’re all about being an egg. Or being an egg or being unaware of the trauma in your own brain that you’re like ignoring. I had not sat down and committed myself to writing actual fiction until Woodworking. I said, “Let’s try writing a novel, and did. The thing that I got from being a journalist for so long and writing for so many hours is that I’m a very good mimic of style. I had read enough novels that knew I could write in this style and that was not yet my personal voice. I could draft off other things that are happening, and I think there was a certain power to not knowing what I was doing.
I think that a lot of people who want to be writers — and this was me with screenwriting — think, “Here’s how it has to work,” and I was so scared to do it wrong. I didn’t know what I was doing in fiction. But there was a power to not knowing and now I know too much.
The juggling of all that is I think about Arden. We didn’t know what we were doing in that first season of that show and we did a whole bunch of things that if we were going to make it again, we would not make those choices, but I think they made the show good. Now when I think about doing podcast projects I think, “It needs to be two voices and it needs to be really pared down. But Arden is better because it’s a huge multicast show that’s very expensive to produce. And Woodworking is better because I’m doing a bunch of stuff with voice and tense that I probably would not do now.
Would you say that the new novel you’re working on is a reaction or response to Woodworking?
Somewhat. The novel I’m working on now plays with the form in different ways. I don’t think Woodworking is radical or anything, but it was taking big swings. This book is me trying to write a normal book. I’m always going to be interested in point of view and perspective. This book is all in third person past. It’s really me trying to play by the rules as I understand them and then break them around the edges. I try to make sure that I have a reason I’m writing in a voice or tense. I’m working on the second draft; I was wondering why it was in third person past and then when I was writing the epilogue, it landed on me why it was the way it was. I’m interested to see what of that sticks.
You wrote a book set in 2016 with a lot of characters that have reactionary politics. I would imagine that when you started writing it there was a sense of things getting better, and now that it’s out in the world we’re in the second Trump term and a lot of things seem bleaker. Did any of the larger circumstances happening in the world color the process of editing the novel?
When I started writing it, I definitely had the feeling that things were about to get better. But it was interesting for me to look back just four years and think, things have gotten demonstrably worse in this time. And then as I was working on moving towards having it come out, things kept getting worse, which I did not expect.
This is a book about a time when trans rights were under attack, but were not yet at the center of the conversation. Set the novel in 2022 and that’s a different situation. The book became more political as time went on without really changing. It is a more political work because of these circumstances that arrived. The book has changed and the world has changed; that’s a weird thing to realize.
In Woodworking, both Erica and Constance are of an age where they have fairly established lives and careers, but by the end of the book, they’re both interested in radically changing the professional paths they’re on. If those characters were in their late 40s or early 50s, that might seem a little bit more fraught than it does for them at that point. How much time did you spend figuring out where these characters were in their lives?
Erica and I are the same age, which was intentional. I think that there is something about your mid-30s feeling like the last stop to change anything. At the same time, I’m in my 40s and I made a huge career change and it mostly has worked out. I’m still freaked out all the time, but…
I think the act of transition is such a statement of faith in oneself that even people who undertake it in their 60s and their 70s are making a huge shift that then colors every other piece of their lives. I have a friend whose sibling came out recently in their late 40s. It’s a big deal. It’s the same as anything else. I think it’s easy to talk yourself into, “I’m a certain age and I can’t change anything.” At the same time, 35 just felt like a good age for them to both be. 35 feels like when you start to see middle age creeping in. Erica’s timeline is me imagining a different version of that. She beat me by a few years, the bitch.
As you write for other mediums, does that factor into your approach for fiction, or do you keep the parts of you that write prose and the parts of you that write for the screen siloed off from one another?
It’s interesting because I was writing the final draft of Woodworking in the mornings and then I was in the room on Yellowjackets in the afternoon. They were very different stories in a way that I think ended up coloring each other. The Yellowjackets episode we wrote, just by the luck of the draw, ended up having some of those moments of connection in it. And Woodworking ended up having a few darker tones because I was working on the show.
But I’m pretty good at siloing things off. I want to finish this novel before the room reopens on Yellowjackets because I think it is helpful to me to have one fiction project at a time. I do have this other nonfiction book I’m doing on It’s a Wonderful Life and my hope is to be done with the novel so I can be working on that at the same time as Yellowjackets.
All the things feed each other in my brain. The criticism always fed the fiction and now the screenwriting feeds the fiction and in the back of my brain, I’m always thinking, “This could be a podcast.”
You have a writing partner in your work for the screen, but not for your prose. How does that affect your process?
I am, by nature, collaborative. I didn’t get an MFA but there’s a part of me that wishes I had. I think the kind of writing I’m interested in would have been banging its head against the wall of a lot of MFA programs. I was always very interested in immediate, dialogue-heavy writing. I do think I would have loved being in a room with a bunch of people talking about fiction and pulling it apart. I love the writers room for that reason. It’s a bunch of people talking through what we’re gonna do. I love working with Libby [Hill] for that reason. We’re always bouncing ideas back and forth. At the same time, when you’re in a space like that, it’s never entirely your decision. In Yellowjackets, I’m a tiny cog in an enormous machine. I can pitch an idea and have it be the I think the best idea in the history of the world and then someone else says, “I don’t like that,they wouldn’t say that.” In a book I don’t have other people to bounce off; if I say this happens now it happens now. That’s a lot scarier, you know?
You’ve written in the past about wanting to work across a lot of genres, which I think is interesting; a lot of writers and filmmakers I admire have a similar ethos.
I sat down with my agent after Woodworking had been sold and I said, “I want to make sure that we build the space where someday if I release a really dark horror novel it feels like it’s part of the same career.” The impetus of book two was, what happens if you put a trans woman at the center of a Hallmark holiday movie? Obviously it’s taken on other things and dimensions have smashed into it, but the center of it was always the Christmas romance and the dysfunctional family coming together. This is a really kind of inaccurate descriptor of it, but it’s a cute one that sounds fun in articles; I started describing it as “Emily Henry writes The Corrections.” That kind of vibe is what I’m going for.
You’ve been living in LA for a while now; do you have a California story in the works?
There is a book I started work on in 2022 and then kind of abandoned that I always want to go back to that is set at Long Beach, California, and is about Evangelical Christians in that environment. Apparently the thing I like to do is write about people who are against the political grain of the place they live in. It’s my crime fiction book.
Is there anything you’re reading or watching right now that you’d recommend?
I am reading One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller. It’s a lovely trans YA novel that makes many of the same stylistic choices as Woodworking entirely independently of it, which is interesting to me. I saw the play John Proctor Is the Villain which I described sight unseen as “Emily-core” and it was so Emily-core. I’m obsessed with it. I bought the script. It got me thinking, “What if I just wrote a play?” Which is a thing that apparently I just have decided I could do.
Photo: Eliza Clark