Hypertext Magazine asked Jessica Jopp, author of From the Longing Orchard, “There are several moments in your novel when a linear narrative dissolves, and rational thought drops away, as does precise grammar.  These indicate a stream-of-consciousness or altered mode of thinking for the protagonist, Sonya. What do you hope these moments give a reader?” 

By Jessica Jopp

These moments reflect the protagonist’s interior psychological wrestling, as when she is struggling to figure out what happened to the boy from her childhood, Andy Duncan. They also reflect moments when she is overwhelmed by emotion. These passages are meant to advance the narrative, as they show a reader the protagonist’s interior life; for instance how she perceives beauty in the natural environment. They are part of the articulation of what makes Sonya who she is.

I think we all have experiences like this in life, inspired by any number of emotions or situations, when we feel as if we are carried aloft in suspended time, when conscious and deliberate thinking pauses and we daydream out the window, staring at our neighbor’s forsythia bush exploding in April or at the way water ripples across the reservoir at the edge of town, and we are transported to another day and place entirely. This capacity for wonder or for a Woolfian awareness of the delicate ephemeral threads spun around daily life entwines us.

I would want a reader, no matter that person’s age or background or identifiers, to feel some kinship with the central character through those renderings.

Jessica Jopp grew up in New York State. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. From the Longing Orchard is her first novel. Also an award-winning poet, Jopp has published her work in numerous journals, among them POETRY, The Texas Observer, Seneca Review, and Denver Quarterly.  Her poetry collection The History of a Voice was awarded the Baxter Hathaway Prize in Poetry from Epoch, and it was published in January 2021 by Headmistress Press. Jopp teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University. She lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where she is on the board of a non-profit working to protect a community woodland.

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