CORPOREAL CAMERAS: A CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA JACOBS, AUTHOR OF UNALONE: POEMS IN CONVERSATION WITH THE BOOK OF GENESIS

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jessica Jacobs, the author of unalone: Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis. It’s a beautiful collection that takes the reader through a sustained lectio divina, bringing them into the text through unique touchpoints of empathy and memory. While reading, I found myself experiencing the range of primordial, cosmic, etiological, and mundane motifs of Genesis in a refreshed way, with a conversation partner whose social location and imaginative sensitivity helped bring me closer to the text than I had felt in a while. 

Here is a condensed version of the insights and reflections that Jacobs shared with me. unalone will be available to everyone on March 15, and I hope it will be a blessing to you as it was to me.

Terry: Could we start off with you telling me a little more about yourself and your background?

Jessica: I grew up in a secular Jewish home in Central Florida in the 80s and 90s, and I was raised culturally Jewish—that was very important to my family. But they weren't religious, and there wasn't a real engagement with the tradition or the text. So I walked away from Judaism as a teenager and didn't look back. And then I lived many different lives, as many of us do, and had a corporate career for a while, which I quit to get my MFA in poetry and write my first book, which was largely about the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, over the course of a month alone in the high desert of New Mexico.

O’Keeffe spent the bulk of her later life in New Mexico; so I wanted to be in that environment. There was a woman with a tiny cabin in a private canyon where she grew heirloom vegetables and raised cattle. The cabin had no indoor plumbing, no electricity—it was built for the ranch-hand moving the cattle through the canyon to have a place to stay overnight. The only other person who’s had an extended stay there was an Episcopal priest who felt she’d lost her calling and went out there to try to find it again. It’s a sacred place.

As I was alone in that quiet, some really big questions came up: Why are we here? What could make my life meaningful? What does it mean to be good? And I couldn't find satisfying answers in literature, which was where I had always looked. Instead, I wanted a wisdom that was more ancient, more tested, and I found myself reading the Torah for the first time. That was in my early thirties and I was just—I mean it's funny I'm sure for anyone who's religious—but I was just totally blown away by how this ancient text was speaking to my life. And so I spent seven years of study–teaching myself the basics of Biblical Hebrew, and reading a ton of Midrash and commentary and scholarship, and then I couldn’t help but write poems in response.

Terry: Was your practice of spirituality mostly private from that time on, or did you also seek out communal spaces to begin to flesh out some of these new experiences?

Jessica: I’ve visited synagogues and churches and I've had beautiful moments there, but that's not where I feel most connected to the divine. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, where the mountains are spectacular and I often feel most connected outside—I love to be on the water, out on the trails–or when studying and writing.I also began teaching classes on writing about spirituality and religion, and to me that felt like praying. 

During that time, I also founded Yetzirah, a national organization for Jewish poets, whose programs are open to people of all traditions and none, which feels like a sacred communal experience.

Throughout this time I’ve been trying to see which prayers feel right and enrich my life. There’s a beautiful Jewish prayer called Modeh Ani, which means “I'm grateful.” You say it as you're waking up. You’re thanking the divine spirit, which I translate as ruach or breath, for giving your breath back to you. Beginning my days that way has been a beautiful, transformative practice.

Terry: Could you talk about how the tradition of Midrash influences your interaction with the text of Genesis?

Jessica: I was coming to these texts as an outsider, in my thirties, outside of the formal tradition, not learning through a synagogue or rabbi. Yet once I was introduced to the tradition of Midrash, I was given permission. It permits a transgressive approach to the text. Israel—Jacob's name after he wrestles with the angel—has as one of its meanings “one who wrestles with God,” and I love the idea that I get to wrestle with the text. I feel like this is one of the reasons these texts still speak to us— there’s space for us to enter and to ask questions and argue and see ourselves. 

Terry: I want to pull out a quote from “Imposter Syndrome Among the Thorns and Thistles.” You say towards the end,

And now, decades on, I’m trying to grow a lawn

on me, to zip myself into Judaism

like a patchwork parka of grass, hoping it might take

hold, might one day fit snug as a golf course greenway.

And that’s following a reference to being young and encountering sod as transplanted grass that looks like a typical lawn but is actually transplanted. How did the process of writing this collection help you in transplanting yourself into Judaism?

Jessica: I think the beautiful thing about sod is eventually it becomes indistinguishable from what's around it. It sews itself into the Earth. 

I really did feel like an imposter—I started teaching these classes exploring religion and spirituality through poetry when I had just started this study. Looking back, this was pretty audacious, especially as I had a few ministers, a rabbi, and a former nun take some of my earliest classes, which was intimidating. But the best way to learn something is to teach about it. It allowed me to say, “I have some expertise on the poetry side of this, but you’re going to help me with the religious material. And we can learn together.” 

That’s how this study began to take hold. It’s been beautiful to say to people who also feel shut out and also feel like their tradition isn’t theirs (even if it’s a tradition they were born to), “Welcome. I’m also an outsider. And we can learn together.”

Terry: Speaking of solidarity, you approach a lot of the characters in these stories with an empathy that often leads to insights that I, having grown up hearing these stories, have never considered. One example is how you say of Lot’s wife,

No matter what her husband said—or even what God commanded—what mother wouldn’t look back and wish that burning hers instead?

What is your process of cultivating empathy for these characters?

Jessica: When I was doing the deep dive into each portion of Genesis, I would take notes on what memories or questions the text triggered from my own life. And I think because I didn't know these stories very well, I wasn't passively receiving them. 

Yet one of the most helpful things for me came from St. Ignatius. His practice of imaginative prayer, composition of place. I would try to build the stage set of whatever was happening in my mind and then spend time there as its own form of prayer and study. I feel that's when you start to have empathy—when Lot’s wife is not just a flat character but a three-dimensional woman whose two daughters are going to die [trapped in the city of Sodom]. 

Terry: Speaking of spiritual imagination, your collection does a lovely job of seeing these various primordial, cosmic, etiological moments in Genesis as continuing to take place today in the world around us. Could you say more about that?

Jessica: In mystical Judaism there's this idea of the breaking of the vessels. Rabbi Isaac Luria said that at the start of creation God poured Godself into vessels. But, of course, what can contain God? So the vessels shattered and the shards rained down as divine sparks. Here enters the idea of tikkun olam as the repair of the world; gathering up the sparks to reunite them in some way and make them whole.

I love that idea that everything is sacred, everything is of the Divine, everything is an opportunity for contemplation of beauty and divinity. Most of our life is not going to be spent in the most transcendent places, so in order to not miss the divine we have to practice seeing and hearing it everywhere.

Terry: Appropriately, the phrase “And God speaks” is the title of several poems throughout the collection. Could you talk about why that phrase is so ubiquitous?

Jessica: In Genesis, the conversations with God feel very intimate. So as I'm still trying to figure out exactly what my conception of God is, I’m considering, what could be more astonishing than to be in that presence and hear the voice of God, whatever “a voice” could mean in that context? This was my attempt to even begin to imagine what that would be like, to receive that type of energy.

Each time that phrase comes in, it's responding to a specific moment in the text and often a different name of God, which then to me has a very different feeling. For example, there's the name El Shaddai which could mean the great almighty God, the great Mountain of God, or it could mean The Great Breast, this beautiful nurturing feminine figure. 

In earlier drafts I used the phrase “And God spoke,” but there's an idea in mystical Judaism of continuous, participatory revelation—that God is constantly speaking and breathing and choosing the world into being. And that anything that happened in the Torah is always happening, if you only take a moment to listen. And I love that idea, that the conversation is always happening—which is why the title of these poems had to be in the present tense.

Terry: The last piece I wanted to mention was your photography motif in “Prayers from a Dark Room.” It’s one of my favorite metaphors from the collection. Could you expand on how this metaphor came to you?

Jessica: If there's a poet that I really love, I'll read every book they've ever written, and I'll see little obsessions or little images that keep coming up all the time–it's almost like picking up a stitch from collection to collection.So I really appreciate that you're calling out that image [of the dark room] because this is absolutely calling back to my first book. I spent a ton of time learning about the art of photography in order to write about Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. 

I love the idea of us as corporeal cameras. I love the idea of being opened to light. We constantly have stimuli coming in, and where we are most vulnerable, most exposed, that's what makes the print. For me, part of becoming a writer and teacher is not turning away from vulnerability, but leaning into it, asking, “How can this become an opening to the world?”

Terry: Thanks so much for your time, Jessica, and for helping me revisit these stories in a life-giving way. I know this collection will serve the same purpose for so many others.