The Interview with Julia Phillips

Greetings to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, a newsletter for writers, readers, and thinkers. The interview is an ongoing feature of the newsletter. I love talking to writers about inspiration, craft, and life. They never disappoint. So, from time to time, you’ll find these intimate and enlightening conversations in this space. This issue’s conversation is with the brilliant Julia Phillips.

Julia Phillips is the author of the international bestseller, Disappearing Earth, which was a National Book Award finalist. The book has been a smashing success, and Julia’s fans are vocal on social media about their love for her work. Julia is also a friend. As mentioned in the interview, Julia is one of the most positive, energetic authors I've had the pleasure to meet. We also both work in the Randolph MFA Low-Res program. It’s always a hoot to see Julia lecture and present. And I feel especially fortunate to hear her works in progress.

As always, thank you to the premium subscribers who make this newsletter possible, especially those who just signed up. I appreciate your support. This would be much harder to do without your help. Lastly, for anyone going to AWP, look me up and say hi!

Now, for our interview.

Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing stories?

Julia: My mother says that my second-grade teacher made me a writer. I remember coming into her class, at age seven, already loving to read – I remember my older brother teaching me vowels, and my parents taking me to church sales where you could buy a grocery bag full of donated books for fifty cents, and my own obsessions with the Brothers Grimm and Roald Dahl – but this teacher turned fiction from something you take in to something you make up. She gave us the homework of writing short stories. I always went bleak, bleak. I wrote about kids shrinking, falling down sink drains, and getting chopped up into dog food, and she applauded my imagination and encouraged me to write more. I came to her at lunchtime to read for too long from the "book" I was writing, a notebook filled with crayon illustrations of a girl who lived in the woods with wolves, and she said I had to go on. My mother was right, I think, in what she did for me. This teacher, Mrs. Fine, showed up at the earliest and most pivotal moment to prove the power of literacy. How storytelling could make you feel – what it could do.

Maurice: How fortunate you are to have had Mrs. Fine! Teachers are such wonderful guides for young people with big imaginations. I find it especially touching that your mother appreciates how the experience changed you. And, yes, I can see you loving Dahl and the Brothers Grimm haha Was that when you knew that you were a writer? Or was it later on? 

Julia: I knew then that I wanted to be a writer, but I was seven, so I also wanted to be a painter and a fashion designer and an opera singer and...I don't know, a marine biologist and the president, too. Over time, those other dream adulthoods dropped away. "Writer" stuck. I wanted to be a writer, a novelist, very badly when I was growing up. Still, it took until I was in my twenties, with one novel manuscript already tucked in a drawer, to feel confident enough to shift my understanding of myself from "wanting to be" to "was."

Maurice: Julia, for what it's worth, I think you'd make an amazing president! You're such a positive person. We could use a vibe shift in your direction one day! Your novel, Disappearing Earth, is incredible and has been rightfully well received. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award. Congratulations, again! But before we get to that, I think most writers have a "novel in the drawer." Can you talk about what that earlier novel was? What were your intentions? And when and why did you move on from it? Full disclosure, my novel in the drawer is called City of NO about a young man who goes searching for his missing police officer father in a world where many people have superhuman abilities, but the main character doesn't. It's a bildungsroman with a bit of a Stephen King feel in parts. I wrote that from 2004 to 2006. It's still in my drawer. All 481 pages of it. I have a couple of other unpublished books, now that I think of it...

Julia: Ha! I'd definitely be a no-good leader, but I'm VERY ready as a citizen to vote for President Ruffin. That's the vibe shift this country needs. I'm also so eager to read 481 pages of City of No—can we get these early Maurice manuscripts to make a leap out of the drawer?! 

On my end, the first novel I put away was a very plotless, moody project about a girl's changing relationship with her brother after he goes to college. I had big ambitions for how beautiful and impressive I wanted the writing to be, but no understanding of what the story itself was actually about. Uh oh! I ended up querying 100 agents with it over two or three years—I think it was 60 agents, a revise & resubmit process, then another 40 agents. At the end, I realized that I'd taken that work as far as I could go and I no longer had any appetite or vision for its further development. It was done. Frankly, it had been done for a while. Putting it away and moving on ended up giving me great relief, and providing huge clarity for what I wanted to focus on in my writing in the future.

Maurice: I'm a big fan of clarity. Speaking of which, who are some of the writers you came up reading? Did you ever get to meet any of them? What was that like and how do you feel when you meet people who have read your novel?

Julia: As a teen, I was super into Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood and Anne Rice (what a combo!), and then as I came into early adulthood I got pretty obsessed with Alice Munro and Louise Erdrich and Haruki Murakami. The most dream-come-true author I've gotten to meet in real life is Tayari Jones. I met her at a conference two years ago and fully cried because I was so excited. I love her writing so much. She's a literary hero.

How I feel when I meet folks who have read my work...god, it's hard to wrap my mind around, honestly. It's been almost four years since my own novel came out, but the fact that it exists in the wider world is still a little hard to believe. I fantasized about having a book for so long that now, if someone says, "Oh, I read that," it sounds more like fantasy than reality to me, you know? Even when they're standing right there and looking in my eyes.

Maurice: Yeah. I totally understand that about readers saying they've read my work. My first book came out in 2019, same as yours. But I finished it long before that, so it felt kind of distant by the time it came out. I never really know how to respond to readers in real life! Should I say, "good for you" or "good for me"? I guess both are true. I'm so awkward! All I know is that I'm grateful for them. 

Speaking of gratitude, the first time I met you was at the Mississippi Book Festival. I remember thinking, "Julia is one of the most energetic and positive people I know." How does that energy affect your writing, if it does? Does it motivate you to write? Does it have an effect on the world of the story?

Julia: Ah, I remember our Mississippi meeting so well – sharing a signing table and being totally blown away by you! I can't tell you how much it means to me to hear you had that impression, because that will always be the exact thing I think of YOU. Very often, I feel slothlike and blue, but I will try to live up to your good words here. I do often feel motivated to write by...perhaps not positivity, but a feeling of determination, a kind of single-minded I-have-got-to-do-this vibe. It's easy for me to get obsessively absorbed into a writing project, so that I then return to it over and over, and can't imagine letting it go. My first drafts, as a result, are often very obsessive-feeling, claustrophobic and tight, and I have to work in later drafts at opening them up to admit more characters and create a richer world. Is that positive energy? Ha! Well, it's energy for sure, and it's mine, I can't seem to shake it, and so I will go where it fuels me and not question the process too much.

Maurice: Our introduction to one another was certainly a meeting of the minds! I know that feeling of determination you're talking about. People always ask published writers why we write. Does anyone really know? Or do we do it just because? Can you talk about the writing of Disappearing Earth? What was that journey like for you? If you're like me in that respect, my first published book only happened because I was so obsessed with it. Lastly, name anything that gives you joy. 

Julia: Yes, totally, obsession absolutely fuels my writing. Disappearing Earth took about 10 years from conception to publication. I started the project as a way to learn and think every day about two topics that consumed me – first, violence against women, and, second, Russia – and the decade that followed was in many ways so satisfying because through the book's writing I kept getting to push further into those subjects. When I think now about what projects lie ahead, I think about that experience. What do I care about so much that I want to spend ten years digging into it? What am I obsessed with these days?

And what brings me joy?! I'm in a new-parent phase of life, and I have to say that hanging out with my toddler is the most joyful experience. As his language skills grow, his observations about the world get sharper and zanier, and listening to him makes me look at the world in a totally new way. Oh, it's the best. Fingers crossed I can somehow channel that quality of fresh observation onto the page!