A Moment with Jenny Blackford

How long did it take you to get your first publication, and what were some of the obstacles you had to overcome?

That's a surprisingly complicated question! I'll have to tackle it in layers.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said that my first publication was "Dave's Diary" back in 2002. It's a creepy sf short story for kids, in which aliens are stealthily taking over Dave's suburb. Dave realizes something is wrong when his hippie mother and heavily-tattooed older sister start going all Stepford Wives, but it's not long before Dave himself is taken over. I wrote it for a set of two-story paperbacks for kids that was edited by Meredith Costain and Paul Collins, who to my great joy accepted it.

So what obstacles had I faced? For a start, Meredith and Paul are by no means pushovers, even for old friends, and my story had to be at least as good as the stories submitted by real published authors. They'd kindly but firmly rejected a story I'd submitted for a previous project. But the main obstacle to the publication of this, my first published story, was that I had needed time and space to let my brain work creatively, so that I could actually write it. A lot of time and space. Basically, I needed to leave my job of twenty years.

I know that many people can work at high-pressure jobs and still manage to write two thousand words at the kitchen table before breakfast or after midnight, or a thousand words every weekend, or whatever works for them. Some even manage to sneak in a few hundred words while they're in the office. But none of those strategies ever worked for me.

I spent twenty years as a computer network specialist, at first with IBM then running my own consultancy, and during that time I didn't manage to write any creative words, though I was heavily involved with books and writing. I was a partner (with my husband Russell Blackford) in small press Ebony Books, which published lovely things including Damien Broderick's novel Transmitters; I was one of the founding members of the collective that produced Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series; and I wrote many reviews for the New York Review of Science Fiction and the Age newspaper – but I simply couldn't produce creative words during those twenty years. I could stare at a piece of paper, or a computer screen, for hours or days, but nothing happened. My brain was set purely to produce analytic thought, not for creativity. Even when I tapered down to working two days a week, the creative juices still refused to do their bit.

I gave up my day job totally in mid-2001, and spent a lot of time gardening, walking and generally decompressing. I almost despaired that it would ever happen, but eventually the creative words started to flow, and kept on flowing. So you could say that "Dave's Diary" took twenty-one years from when I started at IBM, or one year from when I gave up computer networking, or even longer, if you count in the absence of any creative writing during my four-year Classics (Greek and Latin) degree plus two years of my long-unfinished Ph.D in comparative ancient religion.

But I had in fact been published decades before that story came out. I had almost forgotten, because I'd almost forgotten about writing poetry until I started doing it seriously again, this last few years.

Back when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, my English class in a (fairly rough) high school near Newcastle, north of Sydney (in sunny Australia) was set the task of writing poems to enter into the Hunter Valley Research Foundation Poetry Prize. Mine won, which pleased my English teacher immensely, and emboldened me to submit the poem to my favorite magazine, Dolly – which published it and sent a gratifying check. (That was before the cult of celebrity took over the world, and even a magazine aimed at teenage girls included serious content.) I had no idea at the time how unlikely this publication was, so fear of rejection wasn't an issue!

So what were the obstacles to that publication? (Deep breath.) It was really, truly, seriously difficult, to be a poet in a rough high school in a working class town. It wasn't easy being anything much, at my school, unless you were one of the rough kids, and, preferably, a surfer. My life was rejection, scorn and mockery from everyone except a handful of like-minded close friends. In retrospect, though, it's hard to know whether the others mocked and scorned me any more for being a poet as well as a "brain", or whether being conspicuously clever was a sufficient crime – so maybe it wasn't as big an obstacle as it may have seemed at the time.

But even that long-ago glossy-magazine publication wasn't my first. There's one more layer in this onion. Back when I was a tween, I spent a lot of my spare time sending poetry and (very bad) artwork in to the kids' page of the Sunday newspaper. Most of the time I got cards denoting points; when the points mounted up, they could be exchanged for cash. At least once, though, one of my poems was actually published.

While I was looking for something completely different last year, I found a newspaper clipping of what I'm fairly sure was my first paid publication, a poem, "Viking", which even notes my age as twelve, and shows that I was paid $1.50 for it. (Once more, the major obstacle was increased opprobrium at school.)

My immensely helpful husband read the newspaper clipping with delight, when I showed it to him. I'd thought it embarrassing juvenilia, but he told me that the new-found poem was perfectly all right, and that I should send it to the School Magazine – our equivalent of the US Cricket. I did, with a note about its rediscovery – and it's going to be reprinted in the August issue of that marvelous institution of a literary magazine for kids.

Viking
Slender, clad in white,
with her golden plaits
over her shoulders, and
wearing a torque
of twisted silver,
she looks at the stars
and thinks of a Viking
in his longship,
tall and strong,
the light of sunrise
glinting on his helmet
and his sword.

– Jenny Blackford

Jenny Blackford's stories and poems have appeared in places as diverse as Random House's 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children and The Pedestal Magazine. Pamela Sargent described Jenny's historical novella set in classical Athens and Delphi, The Priestess and the Slave, as "elegant." Jenny's current major project is writing the violent, sexy life of Bronze Age princess Medea.

Learn more about Jenny Blackford on her website and blog.