Jazial Crossley

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I live in Aotearoa New Zealand and write mainly creative non-fiction and am developing my fiction. While I am childfree, my partner has a daughter from a previous relationship who lives with us half the time so I hold the two conflicting identities of childfree and step-parent. I began my career as a music journalist for magazines in the mid-2000s, and I like to weave music in to my memoir writing. I publish a memoir-by-playlist, 'Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them', in monthly installments on my newsletter 'All The Songs'.

For this project, I write 500 words on my memories of a song. These vignettes offer a glimpse in to the rich and varied emotions we all experience in our lifetimes through showing a brief slice of my life at a particular time, in how I relate to a certain song. What the music brings up might be shallow or it could be intense. The memory may be joyful or thick with sorrow, a reflection on pleasure or a heavy exploration of fear. Whatever emotions a song dredges up from the spectrum of human feeling, they are true. This project invites the reader to consider, where does this song take you? What does it remind you of? Where were you in your life when you last listened to this track?
 

As a writer, it gives me a creative challenge to say as much as I can with the limitation of 500 words per piece and the newsletter is a way to publish regularly, balancing out my other writing on longer form book-length projects that haven’t been published yet. I have a memoir manuscript out with a publisher currently and am writing a novel considering what drives us to look up to other people and turn to them for guidance on how to live our lives. It’s about learning to trust your own judgement and the dangers of idolising fallible humans.

Alongside writing, my professional life is a priority for me because, having grown up poor, financial security is incredibly important. I think that’s held me back creatively because I’m unwilling to take the time out from earning a full time salary to do a full time Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and I give a lot of my time and headspace to my paid work, but I chip away at writing in my spare time. I’m able to create space for my writing in a way that gives value to it and keeps it at the centre of who I am.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
Writing has been a focus for me since childhood. I was telling people I wanted to be an author from the age of five. I had a very difficult childhood with a teenage single mother who battled her own problems. I’m an only child. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid and would pass the time by writing, usually imitations of the Baby-Sitters Club books I loved - there were a lot of sleepovers and haunted houses in my childhood writing. I kept a diary I wrote in most days and I still have the ones I wrote from age ten. As a tween, I wrote fanfiction about the nineties pop band Hanson and published it online alongside my daily journals and short stories. I found community with other young women who published their writing online. Journaling and the art of women’s confessional writing has always interested me, I crave the honesty and intimacy of other women’s experiences.

Writing has always been the centre of my professional career, too - as a journalist I wrote about music, then became a business reporter, magazine editor, then worked in communications. Now I work more on the strategy and sustainability side of business but writing is still an important part of the job I do. It is my strongest skill professionally.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
I use writing to work through ideas. Because I’ve mainly focused on creative non-fiction until recently, I’ve often used the form of the essay as a way to explain how I feel about something to readers and therefore also to myself. I’m always thinking about how to frame what I’m experiencing in writing. Sometimes fiction is a more suitable way to examine and test an idea because you can put the thing you’re considering in a hypothetical context, push it to extremes, make things up and see what happens. You can test boundaries and trial things in fiction. As much as I love memoir writing, out of respect for the other people in my life I can’t put everything I’ve experienced out there on the page when it involves others - so fiction can be a better place to explore some of the concepts that are on my mind.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
I’m not precious about where, when and how I write - having worked as a journalist I’ve had to write well in a rush, on deadline in the middle of a loud busy room. I make notes in the Notes app on my phone and usually have a notebook and pen with me. If I’m driving, I record ideas in Voice Notes. At home I write on Scrivener software because I like the way it allows your text to fill the screen and continue on endlessly without page breaks. It’s immersive. The way it presents a project with different folders and the sections of a manuscript makes it easy to organise your ideas and plan out your work.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Writing gives me a deeper connection to myself, a way to connect with others, and space to examine how I think and feel about the world. It gives me a parallel way of living: my writing world is always there for me to help me process the real world. Writing gave me great escape from trauma as a child. Writing was a rest from stressful experiences. As an adult it has given me a way to explain to others what it feels like to experience what I have. I’ve explored some of the more traumatic things I’ve lived through in my writing including sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse and physical violence. When I’ve done that it has helped strangers who contact me saying they feel seen from me putting into words their own experiences, and it brings those in my life closer to me by giving them a window in to what I’ve been through. However, I don’t want writing about trauma to take up any more space in my work. I want to focus on using craft and skill to examine, explore and communicate other ideas in my writing - that’s why I’m enjoying fiction as a tool currently.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
I’ve seen my work in print for a long time through my professional work in the media and self-publishing online as a teen, so it is part of who I am. Having my essay ‘My Favourite Girl’ about my relationship with my step-daughter published in the Otherhood book, a collection of essays by people who are childless, childfree and child-adjacent, made me feel part of a community of people who are not mothers. I love how that book shows the immense variety of experiences in the grey space between having kids and not having kids.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
Sharing my story showed the people in my life what a huge impact it has had on me, being in a relationship with someone who has a child from a previous relationship. It is a big part of my life and the relationship with my step-daughter is one that challenges my identity as someone who is childfree by choice. Sharing my story encouraged people to reflect on how my step-daughter’s presence in my life impacts me which may have been overlooked otherwise. The child themselves is usually the focus in those situations.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
There are virtually no stories from childfree step-parents, so that perspective is one I continue to feel very isolated in. I don’t know many people in my personal life who are a step-parent currently, although I know several women who have previously been in relationships with men who had children from earlier relationships and they all speak negatively about how challenging it was. I am desperate to see more of the raw, confronting side of being a childfree step-parent (or any kind of step-parent) because it is a deeply complex situation, and I absolutely crave more positive stories about people who - as I am trying to do - accept the complexity and get on with living. The novel Lioness by fellow New Zealand writer Emily Perkins has a main character who is a childfree step-mother and we see the character butt up against distant, tolerant, tense, spiky relationships with her husband’s kids. She survives her own family by burying her true self.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
The voices of all perspectives are valid in writing. Reading about perspectives different from your own adds richness to life for all of us. I would love to see more work published that explores the uncomfortable, unflattering, ugly sides of childfree step-parenting, as well as more work that simply acknowledges what it feels like to live in a non-traditional family and the effort that goes into making it succeed. Whether you call it parenting or continue to refer to yourself as childfree, it takes a lot of work if you want to approach it with care. It requires you to be intentional about how you live and behave in a home you share even some of the time with another woman’s child. There are many more perspectives yet to be represented in publishing.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
I’m working steadily on my novel and planning the plot for my next novel, and continuing to publish 'Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them' in regular installments. I have a few essays on the go that I will submit to literary journals and magazines in due course. I hope to publish the memoir manuscript that I currently have out with a publisher. Perhaps I’ll write about the more complicated sides of childfree step-parenting myself one day, in fiction at least.