Jennifer Sears
Photo by AFQ Photography
Bio
Jennifer Sears writes fiction and literary nonfiction. Her work is published in literary journals including Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Series, Witness, Guernica, Ninth Letter, Fence, Witness, the Subway Library, the Emerson Society Papers, Mennonite Life, and the anthology Lost and Found: Stories of New York. She has received awards from the Money For Women Fund, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and distinction in Best American Short Stories 2016. After many years of teaching and performing dance, she is Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York.
Receiving this Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts came as quite a surprise. I feel such gratitude and honor for what this award represents. During this time when resources for writers and artists are vulnerable, I am aware that the generous support I have received is increasingly rare and that there are so many who deserve recognition as members of this country’s diverse and necessary creative culture. I am also aware that in many other countries, such support for artists is even rarer.
Practically, this award means I will be able to travel, conduct research for a new project, and dedicate more time to concentrate solely on writing. But just as important, this award encourages me to trust my particular vision and voice and to persevere, difficult practices I try to foster in my students at the public university where I teach. With this grant, I hope to pass on to them the sense of possibility that sustained personal effort can bring.
Excerpt from ”What Mennonite Girls are Good For”
Swiftly, silently, they continued west through fields that stretched beyond Hutchinson and Kansas, toward the horizon and enormous cities, those glittering escapes where people had possibilities and could take charge of their lives and weren’t so haunted and hunted like people she knew. People like Raúl, whole families even, forced to uproot their lives and seek “refuge” again and again. People like Peggy, driving her husband from one VA doctor’s appointment to the next while disappearing with an occasional trucker to “feel a little less dead.” People like her father, so haunted by other people’s hurts, by pains he couldn’t reach, his love for this world poured into sermons he offered each Sunday morning to half-awake souls, slipped into manila folders, ordered by date, and filed inside drawers marked DELIVERED, the oldest pages yellowed and crumbling, returning—like so much available love—unused, into air.
The roar of a train engine blasted Larissa from her trance. She shoved on the brake. The truck jolted to a stop. Raúl slammed his hands on the dash but made no sound. She’d shamed him with her silence. She’d made him feel invisible, but she would not apologize.
The engine blurred past followed by a sequence of freight cars, each yanking the next. No cross gates fell across that unpopulated stretch of highway, but Larissa should have seen the train crossing the wide plain.
She remembered a similar near disaster, another train streaming out of nowhere, only that time it had been night. She’d been driving back from the women’s health clinic in Wichita with Peggy asleep in the passenger’s seat, months after her husband’s deployment to Kuwait. Larissa had loaned Peggy money she needed for the procedure. Larissa had given her a ride. But instead of thanking her, Peggy only said that even though they made the same pitiful wages and cheap ass truck stop tips, she knew Larissa would have money saved. And she knew she could get Larissa to offer it to her. Nice.
“You’re one of them,” Peggy said, “no matter how much you think you’re not.” Then she gave into her body’s exhaustion and slept the rest of the way to their town where Larissa nearly got them both killed.
That time, no whistle blared. There was only a single light sweeping across the track. It was the first Larissa saw of those night trains, swift and silent with wheels that flashed like silver as they pulled shipments of military equipment and vehicles. In the path of her headlights, the tan and beige camouflage designed to infiltrate the Gulf’s desert terrain looked pale and sickly, like ghost versions of those familiar jeweled greens made to invade jungles in Vietnam. There were reasons, she supposed, why military trains traveled at night. Rites of passage. Lower temperatures. Less visibility to communities, like hers, that might stage protests. And even as that war ended, those trains kept coming, carrying midnight loads from manufacturers to southern ports and military bases.
What dark genesis spawned the first war? Had her father posed the question one Sunday morning, or was it some unspoken darkness hovering over generations? For from that war was begat the next, and from that war was begat the next, and on and on—no exodus—only ghost trains and railroads forever cutting through the heart of the country, delivering the next war, already begun.
The last car passed. Larissa crossed the track. They continued toward Hutchinson, its low silhouette etched onto the western horizon.