Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Poss.
Hi Jordan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My two primary interests are history and storytelling, and to me, these have always properly belonged together. I remember learning the story of the Trojan Horse from my dad and both loving the story and wanting to know if it was true and that pairing–the story and the truth of it–has been the basic framework of my personality and my interests ever since. Imagination has been an important way for me to learn about and “see” the world, since growing up in the northeast Georgia mountains seldom afforded opportunities to travel and luxuriate in faraway places.
I started telling stories even before I could write, by drawing picture books and narrating the stories they told to my parents and grandparents. I wrote all kinds of short stories and narrative poems throughout elementary school and high school, discovering and being influenced by many authors along the way–Poe and Tolkien still being two of my favorites. In high school, I started to get really serious about writing and actually completed a couple of full-length action adventures set in World War II. They were energetic and action-packed but very derivative and lacking in technique, but I was getting a feel for how to tell a long story the way my own favorite writers did.
I majored in History in college and minored in Creative Writing–the ideal combination for me since most of what I enjoy writing about is historical and I like historical writing that is well-crafted literarily. In my final semester, I took Novel Writing and had to submit a few chapters and a plot synopsis for a novel. I ended up completing it and published it several years later as No Snakes in Iceland.
Between graduating from college and publishing that novel I went to graduate school, got married, and began teaching American history and Western Civ at some of the colleges in the South Carolina Technical College System.
Right after completing the rough draft of my third novel, a Civil War story called Griswoldville, I got on full-time at Piedmont Tech in Greenwood, South Carolina, where I’ve taught for the last five years. Within two years of joining the faculty there, I published my second and third novels and completed my fourth, which I’m still revising and hope to have out soon.
It’s not a dramatic story, but that may be because my love of history and storytelling–not to mention my family, my wife, and now my children–have been the constants through the schools, moves, job changes, and other ups and downs. I’m grateful that I can still do what I’ve loved since childhood and that I can share it with others.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
With enough elapsed time and the benefit of hindsight, it seems smooth enough, but of course, there was never any guarantee I’d get to do what I’ve been able to do. I feel unaccountably and gratuitously blessed to have gotten the work I do and to have had the time and resources to do it.
If there has been any struggle it has been in finding time–that is, making time. But that’s a matter of self-discipline, which is a constant struggle. I somehow began and completed the rough draft for my current project when we had a two-week-old newborn at home!
Not an auspicious time to be starting time-consuming long-haul projects, but I stuck with it. Now I just have to get it out there.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
In addition to my day job as a college history instructor, I write novels, primarily “historical fiction,” for lack of a more specific genre. I’m keenly interested in the question “What was it like?” when looking at the past, at the people and events of not only faraway places but faraway times. Trying to get into the mindsets of people dramatically unlike me in times dramatically unlike ours, and then experiencing danger, friendship, love, heartbreak, song, work, home, and hearth, and man’s yearning for truth–all within some kind of revelatory adventure–is what I specialize in.
My two most popular books are No Snakes in Iceland, my first published novel, which is a ghost story set in late 10th-century Iceland, during the Viking Age, and Griswoldville, a coming-of-age novel about a Georgia farmboy who ends up in the militia facing off against Sherman’s army during the March to the Sea. Griswoldville seems especially to resonate with people since it’s not just a war story but a story about hardship, family, and growing from boyhood to manhood. It doesn’t hurt that, as foreign as the South of 1864 was even from the South of today, it’s still a recognizable and familiar place, much beloved by me and many others.
I try to take pride in all my work and complete it to the highest standards possible. I’m especially intent on basic craftsmanship, the nuts and bolts of writing that somehow produces the mysterious dream that the author and reader share across a printed page. I wouldn’t say I’m proud so much as humbled and gratified that people have enjoyed these novels.
I’m not sure how much it sets me apart from others, but my interest in the past is always in letting the reader experience it on its own terms, “from the inside,” so to speak, and non-judgmentally. Fiction set in the past that flatters the reader just for living in our time period and having our assumptions, that belittles or condemns long-dead people for living in their own times according to their own rules–that doesn’t do anything for me.
I relish the challenge of meeting and presenting truly different people to readers and understanding them. It stretches us as all good fiction should.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’m pretty phlegmatic about the idea of risk. Everything is a risk in one way or another. Life is a risk. But artistically, the kinds of risk-taking I must respond to are those that challenge the reader. This could be technical, by writing in an intentionally difficult style like Cormac McCarthy or with elaborate, arcane vocabulary like Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake, or in terms of content, theme, or tone.
Writers have really pushed the envelope in terms of what might happen in a story, so much so that I don’t really find that risky anymore. Readers expect it. They might even be disappointed not to get it. What is more interesting to me are novelists who challenge the reader’s modern assumptions rather than flattering or reinforcing them. This is subtler but more rewarding than even the most shocking content a writer might risk putting in a story, and may even help the reader grow.
With my latest novel, I’m taking a few calculated risks regarding style and tone, by using some deliberately alien vocabulary that will at first give the reader a sense of how long ago (1500 years) the story takes place but then draw them in with the musicality of the language, so that within a chapter or two they are tracking with foreign ideas and terms they might have chosen to avoid if I had included, say, a glossary.
It’s a risk, sure, but I think of it more as an artistic challenge–how to win over readers and introduce them, intelligibly, to a foreign time and place. It’s all part of that quest to help the reader understand the past from the inside.
Contact Info:
- Website: jordanmposs.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanmposs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordanmposs/
- Other: https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-M-Poss/e/B0786NVWTJ
Image Credits
Kevin Croom
