By Julia Diorio

On Mother’s Day, we chose to honor one of our authors Kelly Ann Jacobson — a mother of two, creative writing college professor and fairy tale reteller. Jacobson is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lynchburg, in Virginia and also adjunct faculty for Southern New Hampshire University’s online Creative Writing MFA program. For 3RP, Jacobson has published two modern day retellings: Tink and Wendy, a queer dark reimagining of Peter Pan, and Robin And Her Misfits, a found family queer feminist reimagining of Robin Hood.

In this interview with Jacobson, she highlights how she balances all of her loves while parenting her two young girls positively and openly.

Julia Diorio: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your kids?

Kelly Ann Jacobson: I started writing when I was five years old. I’m one of those classic writers who’s just like, always wanted to be a writer. I’ve wanted to be like other things. In addition to being a writer for a while, I thought it’d be like, I was a Women’s Studies major, they didn’t have gender studies, and I thought I was gonna do that. I thought it was related to environmental lobbyists, or like all kinds of other jobs. But I was always writing books.

In the meantime, you know, I’ve always been writing and so that’s my number one love and I studied writing. I’m an academic, I teach writing now and I also have two kids both which I had during my Ph. D. program, studying creative writing. I’d basically been trying to get pregnant and I had been trying to get into PhD programs for years, in both cases, and they both happened to have been in the same month and I found out both at the same time. It was kind of like, well, these are both things I really want in my life. And so I’m going to do both. That, I think, it has driven me to, like, try really hard to succeed in both, because I wanted to go so bad. You know what I mean? And so when that happened, it was like, Well, I’m just gonna make this happen.

And so I flew to Florida State, you know, I was living in DC and I started my PhD pregnant. I left my second semester to have a baby and then my second baby I had during my prelim year. I basically went to write my prelim exams, eight months pregnant, and then I ended up defending online because COVID happened and then my dissertation year was a year when like, my kids were home because of the virus for a while and it was a crazy time for everyone but definitely with two small children and a PhD for me.

JD: Why do you choose to work with classic fairy tales like Robin Hood and Peter Pan for your young adult fiction work? How do you decide which one to focus on?

KAJ: I honestly don’t know. It’s like I feel gravitated towards it. I think because I’m writing stories that I would have wanted when I was 18. And I think a lot of young adult authors do that by writing the stories they wish they could have read. So in my case, what I wrote were queer reimaginings especially like bisexual or pansexual reimaginings. And so that’s what I write.

I’m writing these books that I would have wanted to read if they existed and it’s fine because one of the most common things I get besides ‘Aren’t you nervous about retelling things,’ which I’m like, ‘no.’ But also is just this idea of aren’t there so many reimaginings and you’ve heard this from agents a lot and you know, people in the publishing industry, oh my gosh, there’s too many reimaginings and I always say like until there’s one for everyone there aren’t enough. So, there’s space for as many more as it takes till everyone feels represented. And so I think that’s why I just for some reason feel drawn to it, whereas in my adult work, I write like, totally differently. I write a lot about my kids, like real life and contemporary life in my adult work, but my young adults, just kind of what I would have wanted to read when I was 15. Right?

JD: Has your experience raising your children contributed to your reimagining of these classic fairy tales?

KAJ: Yeah, I mean, I like the idea of them. Kind of only knowing the retellings, especially with really problematic stories. I’d really rather them, you know, something like Tink and Wendy instead of something like the original Peter Pan, you know, when Tink is like I will come back and clean your house for you. I don’t want them to know that. I want them to know the reimagined version.

And it’s funny because you know, when I dyed my hair red, my kids were like, Oh my gosh, you look just like The Little Mermaid. And I’m thinking like neon red, right, the original Little Mermaid. And then I realized, that’s not their little mermaid. They only know the reimagined Little Mermaid. And so it was just really interesting to think about what their vision of these stories is. And so I do love that and I talked to them about it a lot. And it’s cool to think about them reading these books. I mean, they’re only three and six right now. So they aren’t ready yet. But hopefully, pretty soon, right?

JD: How do you balance your writing with your family and also your teaching?

KAJ: I have so many jobs, it’s just too many jobs. But I love them all. As I said, like it’s because I love everything that I do so much. And I am somebody who has trouble picking between things that I like, I just want to do all the things that I like. So something that I tell people is basically like ‘you can do everything’ and they say like ‘you can’t do everything.’ I think you can do everything but you can’t do all of everything. So it’s like you compare it. You can’t go to like every single event if you’re also writing and you can’t go to every single writing event. You know, today was supposed to be a writing day and then it turned out I had to like go bring a gift to my daughter’s teacher because she was about to spoil the surprise about her birthday gift and so this morning became school instead of writing.

I’ve just learned to kind of let that happen and that there are periods when I have to say ‘no, I’m sorry. I know you’re sad. I’m going to be away for a day’ but I need to go talk to this queer high school group about, you know, retellings or something. And my kids just kind of have to accept that and then sometimes I have to say I’m sorry, I can’t go to this because I have something with my kids. And so I sort of have to just balance it and make those decisions kind of on a case by case basis and just learn to be okay with it. Sometimes my idea of the writing life doesn’t always look exactly like what maybe the movies make it seem like it’s gonna be but yeah, you can do it all. It’s just you can’t do all of it all. You can’t write every day. You can’t necessarily go to every kid activity. You are sometimes gonna have to put the TV on while you answer your agent emails or whatever. Like it’s, it happens.

So I just try and balance it as much as I can, but they definitely know. It’s funny. They do a really good impression on me. They’ll be like, blah, blah, blah, writer blah, blah, blah, author and that’s like their impression of me. And I’m like, that’s actually accurate. That’s my job in a nutshell. And then sometimes they do actually have to come to school with me. I’m so lucky I work in an institution that’s really supportive of parents. A lot of us are parents, and, you know, schools close for holidays and I’m an academic, there’s nobody to cover for me. I’m the only full time creative writing instructor, there’s another instructor, but I’m the only full time one and so when I have to be there, they come with me and they put their headphones on and they watch their iPad and they just kind of make it work. I almost think they should have a degree by now because of how much they’ve been to college.

JD: What are some of the things you do to share your love of reading and writing with your daughters?

KAJ: Well, we read, obviously, every day. My daughter likes to write — one of them can write so far — but actually my three year old is really the storyteller, which is so interesting, like my older daughter is like, I’m going to write about this thing that I’m looking at because I’m directly looking at it and it’s in front of me, whereas my three year old is like talking to a wall about how she’s a princess. And so it’s interesting, kind of like they are sort of writing very different kinds of things. And they’re interested in different kinds of things. And I feel like a lot of writers are like that, because when we have genres of writing, right, some people want to sort of take what they see and write it really, really realistically and then other people like me kind of want to live in a dream world. And so it’s cool to see them kind of express themselves in really different ways. But yeah, I do read and write with them a lot.

JD: Do you make an effort in your parenting style to be more gender neutral and LGBTQ+, as so many of your books center around those themes?

KAJ: ​​That’s something we talk about all the time. I mean, I actually talked to my kids about a lot of things that maybe people don’t really think I was talking to with their kids. I’m on the board of a political organization. I’m guessing you could guess which one. They actually go door to door with me. And we hand out pamphlets and we talk to people and then sort of as we walk from house to house because, I’m like the neighborhood captain as well for that group, we just kind of talk through like all the political issues and the sides of the issues. Sometimes they agree with mine and sometimes they don’t and we talk about that and so yeah, I think I’m somebody who’s just like relatively open I think with my kids about everything and so like they definitely know you know, my sexuality and you know, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, they know all about it seems normal to them. Kids kind of, you can just tell them anything and they’ll understand what they’re capable of understanding and everything else just goes over their heads. So I’ll talk to them about really intense debate issues and taxes and whatever and I don’t know how much of it is sinking in or not but I know that like in the back of their minds, they’re sort of gathering knowledge and learning this idea of like, what it means to take aside and sort of that there are two sides of things and so like learning sort of those lessons pretty young, I think, but because I’m just an active person, you know.

JD: What’s one piece of advice that you find yourself giving to a lot of your students?

KAJ: This is advice I give my students and my kids and everybody really which is just to have fun with writing. I always say, like, my first year students, especially in my intro to creative writing students, I feel like I’m basically helping them unlearn everything they’ve ever learned about writing. Because most of what they’ve learned about writing is fear and terror, and they’ve had these English teachers that tell them they’re not good at writing. Which I’m like, You were 12 at the time, like, have you been good or bad, right? You’re just writing, like we’re all writing. I’m still learning how to be a writer.

I feel like I’m always learning and so basically what I do is just make my classes really fun. I say like, if you’re struggling with something and put it in crazy ridiculous prompts that’s impossible to write well, because you’ll just give up on it being good immediately because it can’t be like instead of that it’s a dragon. The dragons on a beach it’s trying to get its boat to float like who knows what something that’s going to be horrible. And then it’s like, okay, now focus on setting and they’re like, Well, okay, I can focus on setting I could focus on this craft element, because I’ve stopped thinking I’m going to write the next New Yorker story about this dragon and or whatever. And it just kind of takes the pressure off of them because they’re so anxious and scared. I feel like really everyone feels that way about writing although a lot of it is just teaching them like it’s okay. And then as they build through the program, we have a minor, and as they build through the minor, I challenge them more and more and they start finding their own voices and they start like using those craft elements in particular ways but at first is just experimentation, fun, just enjoying yourself with writing and unlearning that writing is like this scary, horrible thing that you have to do and are bad at or whatever.

JD: Thanks so much for speaking with us. Happy Mother’s Day!