And I noticed aspects of witchcraft in your memoir. I also read in your interview with Hippocampus that you cast a spell to get your book accepted by Belt Publishing. But as I write at the beginning of the book, the memoir is my version of my memory.īD: That’s an incredible testament to your memory. I do have photographic memories of some of those journal pages, so I definitely drew on very concrete memories of pages. My mom, as you read, moved around a lot, so I think my personal journals probably exist in a storage facility somewhere or a friend’s basement, but I didn’t have a ton of access to those. When I decided not to keep doing academic writing that I don’t enjoy, I just let myself start writing this book instead.īD: Did you have journals and old writing that you pulled from and compiled into the book? I realized that I enjoyed writing about myself by bringing in theory. My creative nonfiction really developed through LiveJournal and online blogging. This actually didn’t make it in the book, but I used to have a notebook that I would write stories in. I was a creative writer since I was a kid. It dawned on me that I wasn’t getting paid to research in the way that, in theory, professors have a salary and research is part of that.
Although I continued to adjunct, part of the deal in academia is that everything you write is academic research. So part of it was not having a stable job. I had short-term contract positions and never landed that secure, full-time position, which is increasingly rare in academia. Raechel Anne Jolie: Why the pivot: One reason is that many people with PhDs were pushed out of academia in any sustainable way. Why the pivot? What drew you to writing a memoir after working in academia for so long? Had you written personal essays or creative nonfiction-or just journaled-before? This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.īrianna Di Monda: You wrote your memoir after getting your PhD from the University of Minnesota. Jolie kindly agreed to an interview about her memoir, and together we discussed witchcraft, male care, code-switching, and common perceptions of so-called “white trash.” She navigates permanently altered relationships with her parents, grandparents, friend, and boyfriends, and finally finds a home in queer pop culture and the local punk scene.
Her story covers her experience growing up in poverty with her single mother after her father is hit by a car. The book was a winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction and an NPR Favorite Book of 2020. Raechel Anne Jolie grew up in northeast Ohio with her mom before receiving her PhD from the University of Minnesota and going on to publish her memoir, Rust Belt Femme.
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