Jessica Hollander grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she spent winters trudging down icy sidewalks, digging her car out from three feet of snow, wrapping a scarf around her face, and believing that suffering not only made her stronger but also sharper, funnier, and more interesting. Her sense that suffering (albeit mild, suburban suffering) could be positive and even enlightening was deepened by her bachelor’s degree in English and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she was introduced to hundreds of writers who maintained that sadness not only drives people to higher, tangled, complex thoughts but is also a more honest emotion than happiness. Emily Dickinson wrote, “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it’s true.” Poe’s characters drove themselves to madness because it was more thrilling than rational thinking. The woman in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” ignored her domestic responsibilities and chased her wild, spiraling mind across the walls of her room.
Jessica left those Midwest winters when she graduated college, worked at a bank in North Carolina for a few years, and then moved further south to earn her MFA at the University of Alabama. While embracing southern Gothicism and pushing herself as an experimental writer, Jessica also got married and had her first child. Writing through those years allowed her to explore and problematize many of the conflicting social and domestic pressures she experienced and witnessed around her. Her short story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place (University of North Texas Press), which won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, spotlights characters who view domestic life and its trappings as both desirable and problematic, offering security, partnership, and the rewards of parenthood while limiting freedom and individuality.
Jessica spent the next decade raising three kids with her husband, a fellow academic nomad, and teaching as a professor at the University of Nebraska in Kearney and then as a visiting professor at San Jose State University. In addition to her short story collection, she published the chapbook Mythical Places (Sonder Press) and over sixty stories in literary journals, including The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, WebConjunctions, The Florida Review, Nimrod, The Journal, The Normal School, Sonora Review, and more. After three years in San Jose, her family relocated again, and she now lives in the Chicago area.
As a writer, it is Jessica’s nature to feel conflicted, unsettled, and curious about living different lives. Having moved so many times, Jessica makes use of her position as insider/outsider to pay careful attention to place in her writing, utilizing setting to drive mood, atmosphere, and larger aesthetic, while characters’ perceptions of place shape and give insight to their states of mind. She is attentive to the way new and strange places become familiar and stabilizing. It’s thrilling to move; it’s also stressful and lonely. There is so much to miss and so much to look forward to. As she slogs through more midwestern winters in Chicago, Jessica reminds herself of the lessons she learned as a child in Michigan: that suffering is good for you, happiness is fleeting, change is illuminating, stability is uninteresting, and she might as well embrace the doubt and anxiety she’s bound to have no matter how or where she ends up living. Study it, write about it.
Jessica’s novel The Between Time, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, shows a woman torn between following her husband to a prosperous, safe life in Chicago and staying behind with her three kids in sunny, dilapidated California. Writing with sparse lyricism and quiet humor reminiscent of Deborah Eisenberg and Lauren Groff, and as psychological as Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Jessica’s novel shows a woman turning away from the strains of domestic pressures, embracing the city she lives in, and becoming fascinated by the deterioration of her own mind, all against the rich backdrop of the housing and mental health crisis in the Bay Area.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Jessica Hollander’s The Between Time in the summer of 2027.
