jilltalbot @jilltalbot Twitter profile

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 months

What literary essay inspired you to rethink what the essay can do? Welcome to obscure essays and essayists.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

The tree from your childhood you remember?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My daughter told me a few years ago that her friends ask her why she tells me “I love you” every time she hangs up. She told them-“In case I never see her again.” I answer her, every time. Some of us are born with loss in our bones.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I turned in my first application for a writing residency! As a single mother, I haven't been able to attend conferences, retreats. But when I told my 17-year-old daughter about this opportunity, she said, "Apply. It's time. I'm old enough now." Even if I don't get it, I APPLIED.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

I want a New Age of Memoir. The memoir as essay, when not all is resolved, and the writer suspends us in the life and the unanswered questions and desires and failures they are living.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

Essays are very different from nonfiction. Essays don’t only tell what happened. They interrogate why it made such an impact. They wonder at the why of its lingering presence in the mind. Or they think about it. Think through it.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

Today I signed a contract with @ColumbiaUP for a book based on my Beginning Nonfiction class, The Essay Form(s).

jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I have identified over 20 essay forms. I would like to write a craft book with forms, elements of each form, and sample essays.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I have identified over 20 essay forms. I would like to write a craft book with forms, elements of each form, and sample essays.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

What an honor.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

This past year, my grief closed the door on my writing and my running. I'm three sizes larger, and each day I tell myself, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. The writing came back, and every night I dream I'm running. So here's to tomorrow. To everyone waiting for it. Whatever it is.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

I will always believe I wrote my best essays before I knew what I was doing. I see this brilliance in my beginning students. The abandonment of thought in the best way. After we learn too much, we get in our way. Would love to have a conversation with someone else who sees this.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Twelve years on the academic job market. One community college stint. One adjunct semester. One lost year. One Writer-in-Residence position. Six Visiting gigs.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I tried to describe this essay to my daughter the other night through trembling tears, so I texted her earlier: "My essay about you leaving home was published today. I love you." Thanks to @parisreview . And thanks forever to the girl, to Indie.

Soon - The Paris Review

Jill Talbot on the women she’s been, and the women she’s becoming.

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My daughter and I have started using the term “the kind gene.” The way some people have it. I know we are not alone in this beautiful seeing of kindness. Here’s to you, the ones who make us hold hands and weep a little when we find you.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

This semester, every time I teach an essayist’s work, I am going to let them know by an email or a postcard.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I think we harbor our longings for places we’ve left because we miss who we were in them, and what we don’t want to leave is who we found there.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Does anyone else read their writing from years ago and think, I wrote this? How do I get back to this? How do I write anything again?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Today I received a rejection from a journal that has published three of my essays. So I stepped into the shower to get ready to face classrooms of writers, feeling like a failure, only to think, Every piece you write stands alone. Every piece of writing must fight for itself.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

My daughter is in a wonderful nonfiction nature and environmental writing class. She often texts, ask me to be her memory. I remember her better than I do myself. Tonight she asks, “Was I born during a snowstorm?” Yes, I text back, I can still see it outside the hospital window.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

Sometimes it takes a long time to come back to yourself.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

Idea: I host a podcast in which I invite 3 guests to discuss an essay (with the writer’s permission). Each guest offers the question they think the essay is asking—The Essay in Question.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

This Fall my Advanced Nonfiction class = "Lyric Hauntings." We'll read essays about ghosts & other things (memories, lost objects, words said/unsaid, on and on) that haunt us. I have a growing collection of essays/excerpts—sure I've missed some. Have a recommendation? Thank you!

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

Since my twenties, I have run 3 miles on every birthday. I missed the last two years after my parents passed, when I felt like I couldn’t move. But today, at 50, I got back to it and ran 3 miles. I did a big hill at the end—to remember all the hills I’ve climbed.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

I have started telling every writer I teach when I teach their work.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

A line from a student draft: "I will never have an answer to the questions I am asking." This is the essay. And how I learn from my students. I will quote her in every class I teach from now on because she said it. (permission from student given, thanks, L).

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Please forgive all my self-promotion tweets. My parents died within fourteen months of each other, and I couldn't write for a long time, not even think of it, but I came back to write in the quiet, and it's all being published at the same time. Friends, the writing comes back.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the day my daughter’s father abandoned us when she was 4 months old. I took a moment to celebrate: I raised her on my own.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

My daughter has been awarded a fellowship by her university for a research project. When I called to congratulate her, she kept saying, "Today is so good." At the end of our call, she told me: "Thank you for calling me and thank you for being so proud of me." Today is so good.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

Received three rejections before noon today. I haven’t had an acceptance since October 2019. I haven’t been able to write for 8 months. Yesterday I opened a document and started a new essay draft. Today I did the same. Maybe this helps someone else to begin. Or to think about it.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

My short story collection, A DISTANT TOWN, won the 2020-2021 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and will be published in Spring 2022. Thank you, @TheFLReview !

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I received a rejection today that said my work was “too fractured, too fragmented, but maybe that was your point.” Yes, it was. Please do not respond to this tweet in a negative way. I only mean to share and say Rejections are writing. But I did mean the gaps, the negative space.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

What is the movie that makes you sob? I need a good cry.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Beginning today @parisreview : my column about the last year before my daughter leaves home.

All Our Leavings - The Paris Review

Jill Talbot’s first essay in a year-long series on her daughter leaving home.

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

An acceptance tonight from a goal journal. I started writing essays in 2003 and I still hesitated, questioned whether my work was ready, at the level of the journal. I consider this part of literary citizenship. Self-respect, along with respect for the writers who came before.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

Are all essays ultimately about grief?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Tonight my daughter left for prom, and I thought of my fellow single parents, single mothers, single fathers, single guardians. These moments, for me, are lonely AND lucky. I alone get to snap the photo, wave goodbye, see the smile. We earned this. She and I.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My mother would have been 74 today. I lost her a little over a year ago, and I celebrated her birthday by getting a Large Diet Cherry Limeade from Sonic, her favorite. Happy Birthday, Mom. I told you I'd miss you every day for the rest of my life. It's true.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

With all the talk and questions of form in the essay, and the fact that I have taught over 20 forms of the essay and consider myself a form-forward essayist, I am thinking it’s time to put together an essay form anthology.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I miss my mother. Thank you, @parisreview .

Running into My Dead Mother at 7-Eleven - The Paris Review

I was at the fountain drink machine, pressing my foam cup, when, suddenly, you were beside me, smiling, asking what kind of ice. Is it crushed?

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

Leaving August 5 to take my daughter to college (earlier than we thought—sob caught in throat). We are driving from Texas to NY so she can quarantine for 14 days (I taught 2 extra classes this summer for this). Would you follow a daily road trip tweet/photo?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Every birthday, I run. Two years ago, the beginnings of loss after loss leveled me, and I stopped. Today I am 49. And today, I ran. A walk between streetlights then a run between the next ones. I came back to myself, a runner. My gift to me. Tomorrow, for me, is here.

jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

This past year, my grief closed the door on my writing and my running. I'm three sizes larger, and each day I tell myself, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. The writing came back, and every night I dream I'm running. So here's to tomorrow. To everyone waiting for it. Whatever it is.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

As a single mother, I can feel lonely at big moments in my daughter's life, but today I sat in the passenger seat as she merged onto the highway for the first time. For hours, the two of us talking and her driving, driving, driving. Here's to the roads we make our own.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My 17-year-old daughter & I have never had a cross word. No silence, no slamming doors. I ask her to do something, she does it. We laugh, say, "I love us." We sit on the couch, share our days. Is it the single motherhood or the girl? Would anyone want to read about this?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

The moment my very brief essay showed up on @parisreview , I cried, shaking, because it made my loss and missing more real, but your RTs, replies, and emails have been a gathering. So many of you writing to say: I miss them, and I see them, too. Thank you.

Running into My Dead Mother at 7-Eleven - The Paris Review

I was at the fountain drink machine, pressing my foam cup, when, suddenly, you were beside me, smiling, asking what kind of ice. Is it crushed?

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

It's inspiring to watch and listen to you: strong, smart, and sure, not once but twice today, and we're of different parties. So thanks, and a deserved morning rest to you tomorrow, @NicolleDWallace .

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Received my first publication acceptance of 2018. For fiction.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

In teaching writing, I ask students to focus on what’s working, not what they think is wrong. Find the pockets of possibility.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Today I said to a class, "I started graduate school four months pregnant, and I graduated a single mother." I am always surprised by the flinches of recognition in the room. My @parisreview essay, inspired by @NPR .

Radio Silence - The Paris Review

I am driving west on Highway 51. It’s Tuesday, the day before Indie’s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the...

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

I've always believed in fallow periods as a writer. It's been a shorter period this time, a month, but lines have begun to follow me around my apartment, to show up in grocery store aisles and flash at traffic signals. It's amazing how, writers or not, we come back to ourselves.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

I woke early to drive to the cemetery to talk to my Momma today. Today. 5 years. To everyone who runs into their own ghosts. So much love.

Running into My Dead Mother at 7-Eleven - The Paris Review

I was at the fountain drink machine, pressing my foam cup, when, suddenly, you were beside me, smiling, asking what kind of ice. Is it crushed?

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I wrote the first draft of this essay 2 years ago. 15 rejections. Countless revisions. I kept at it, believed in it, then cut 2 lines when an editor I admire said, it could be better without them, what do you think? I said, yes, you're right.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

What name were you supposed to have or who were you named after or what’s the reason for your middle name or what name do you wish you’d been given?

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

My manuscript, I'VE ALWAYS STAYED GONE: ESSAYS, earned Honorable Mention in Seneca Review's Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize Contest.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

When I'm moved by a writer's work, I send an e-mail. Most times I share the work here, but sometimes I tell only the writer. I was introduced to a writer this week I know the rest of the world knows. I sent an e-mail anyway. What wonder.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

I've been afraid of overpromoting The Last Year: Essays—but here's the thing: I don't nor have I ever had an agent, PR team, marketing. I do it on my own, everything, which is how I got the Paris Review column. And how I raised my daughter. Onward.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

In honor of Winona Ryder's 50th birthday, I'm watching REALITY BITES directed by @RedHourBen . I was 25 & had the soundtrack & called people from pay phones & didn't have a dentist & laughed at the Mr. Roper reference. That brilliant parallel editing of the cigarette up & down.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

After my father died, my mother asked me to help clear out his cabinets. Inside one, a pile of his black walking socks. She told me to take them, "You'll get back to running someday." Only one pair fits, but I wear them every time I run. Sometimes I say, "Come on, Dad."

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Every semester I think about e-mailing my students this syllabus the night before class begins just to see who shows up the next day.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

Each semester that I teach beginning nonfiction, we study the current issue of @brevitymag . We look at the essay forms, opening lines, and craft elements that students recognize and experiment with in their writing. And we discuss what's being published now. This week, Issue 68.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

Tomorrow I send my craft book manuscript, The Essay Form(s), to my editor. I love celebrating and sharing the work of other writers. It makes me giddy and proud, like I am sharing the best secrets of being a human with strangers. To the personal essay!

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I'm sitting in a corner booth sharing "A Corner Booth," an essay I wrote in this corner booth. Thank you, @parisreview .

A Corner Booth - The Paris Review

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college.

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I want to renovate an abandoned motel and host writers. I want used bikes at every door..Every night readings. Each writer teaching how to knit, to paint, to share their best knowledge. I keep dreaming. I could teach how to kick a field goal. Or punt. Or write.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Writing about people I miss lets me spend time with them. Even the younger versions of myself.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I loved a boy in high school the way we so brazenly love before we ever consider love could be lost. Since those years and the loss of him to another, every time I dream of him, over thirty years now, signals a new man in my life. A new love. I dreamed of the boy last night.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

For every dear person who dreads the question, “Are you going to AWP?” I avoided the question or answered with apologies for 18 years. Single mother, finances. I am going this year because 1) My daughter will be 18 2) I am driving 5 hours south, driving back. Keep writing.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Great news: I just had an essay accepted by @The_Rumpus . It will the fifth essay of mine they've been kind enough to publish, the first one in 2012. Hooray!

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

I was a finalist for this @theFLreview award last year and a finalist with another journal the year before. If you believe in your work, keep submitting. I haven't won a writing contest since high school (I'm 51).

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

My daughter is home from college. I will sleep better tonight than I have in months. When she was little and we shared our only bed, I only had to put a hand on her arm to fall asleep. Same with her now in her room. I will get up in the night and check the locks. Always have.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I finally got the nerve to move my father's stereo console from storage yesterday, because each shift is another letting go. But this is a keeping, an honoring. This morning, I played one of Dad's favorites. The speakers a bit fuzzy, but Cash's voice—and my memory—still sear.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I have a flash essay in @parisreview about the years behind me, the years ahead.

Soon - The Paris Review

Jill Talbot on the women she’s been, and the women she’s becoming.

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

11 months

I had a beer with a fellow essayist today. We agreed we had not written for years because we have nothing new to say. We cheered to the living we need to do.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

I loved a man who checked out a book from a library. He loved the book, a memoir, one I never read. I always think about driving to steal that copy from that university library, to find that date stamp from 20 years ago and turn his pages. I bought the book today. To finally see.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

I've kept this photo of my daughter on my refrigerator for decades now. My mother took it. Indie is looking at me. I keep it there as a reminder that as a single mother, I am the only one to catch her. It's still on my refrigerator. It will always stay.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 months

Literary Essay Tip 1: If you don't feel the urgency to write the essay, the reader won't feel the urgency to read it.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

When I write my self in essays, I stand across the street, usually on a corner, and watch a self who is not me, a me I was once. A girl or a woman removed. That way, I can write her more closely.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Years ago, I wrote a poem and taped it to my bedroom wall. #SummerSolstice

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

As this will be my first @awpwriter conference—I'm going to every table of every journal and press that has published my work. I may be overwhelmed. There may be hugs or tears or simply, a THANK YOU. #AWP20

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

On this date (June 21) in 2001, I found out that I was pregnant. On this same date in 2023, I received the @trailtotable1 print proof of my book, the essays I wrote for my daughter during her last year at home before leaving for college

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

3 years

When I'm stuck in a really complex draft, I think, "How would I teach this essay?" And that does the trick for me—I figure out the imbalances, the guiding craft choices, the form, the unnecessary pieces, the what-are-you-thinking?s, the connections I need, but have yet to make.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Trust in your talent. Give it time. In the meantime, do what you do and celebrate others who have reached the line you strive to cross.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Today I received an invitation to give a reading and then teach a class introducing students to the essay at a high school. I responded immediately. YES. Imagine—someone shows you the essay at that age, when you most need to know it exists.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

Hello, non-AWPers! I've never been to AWP, and I celebrate AWP, but I would like to invite essayists who aren't able to attend AWP to a Skype session with three other essayists and me each day of AWP. Let's talk essaying. DM me.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

I struggle to write the final month of the Paris Review column. Am I allowed to say this? I folded the writer in me in an an envelope months ago to live these days and their surprises. What do I share. What do I keep. What helps others know their own-ness? I am trying.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

I have a Meet and Greet on Saturday morning in hopes of adopting this sweet girl. I think we could have good conversations, good walks.

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@jilltalbot

5 years

If you've read my @parisreview column and wondered, What if her daughter doesn't get into college? Indie was accepted by her dream college this week(!). I'll write about where she's heading when the column returns in March. For now, here's the first essay:

All Our Leavings - The Paris Review

Jill Talbot’s first essay in a year-long series on her daughter leaving home.

www.theparisreview.org

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

In case you want to read along with my Advanced Nonfiction class this semester as we study Lyric Fragmentation.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Sometimes I write a sentence and imagine a reader's eye-roll, and then I imagine the reader who does what I do when I come across a certain line: I stop reading and stare out a window into memory, nodding yes, that's it. That's exactly it. That reader is my reader.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I am sorry that I didn’t tell a student today that I still talk to my dog that I put down last October. I am sorry I worried it would be too personal. I teach personal. I will tell her next time,

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

1 year

My mother used to tell me: “Just call the university where you want to teach and tell them.”

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@jilltalbot

9 years

I want to see women stop being "nervous" or "scared" to share their writing. BE THE VOICE another needs to hear.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

I’ve been sharing recent publications as if they were something easy. No. I wrote for years until I hoped I had something worthy of the writers I read in those places. I thought it best to be cool here, but with each acceptance-I want to tell you-I dropped to the floor in sobs.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My daughter, head drum major, donning her sash and crown as Homecoming Queen while she conducts. She loves this photo, she told me, because she is laughing.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

4 years

At the beginning of my daughter's senior year, I started keeping fresh flowers on her nightstand as a way to celebrate the year. When everything shut down, the flowers turned to an offering of apology, grace. Today I bought the last ones before she goes. She picked them out.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

My mother was always after me to get a safer, more reliable car. It took me over a year after she passed to get a new (used) car. Today I picked up the plates. My mother’s maiden name was Martha Jo Stinson.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Today I found one of my grandmother's vases that she painted, and inside, a locket with a photo of me. A note on the back reads, Jill, 1976. I was six.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

8 years

@Morning_Joe Ask women (me) who have been sexually assaulted call in or be on your show every day until the election. cc@ @NicolleDWallace

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

Tuesday is the third anniversary of my father's sudden death and my writing deadline for Paris Review. It's tough writing these essays, though I'm grateful and astounded I get to do it. I'd love good vibes as I write this one about my Dad and his influence on me and my daughter.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

5 years

A student e-mails, "So if a journal says they won't be publishing my essay, it doesn't mean that the essay isn't good, right?" Answer: No, not at all. Also part of my response: "I had two rejections this morning. Onward."

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

2 years

I went to the cemetery today. My mother has been gone four years. I used to stand when I visited my parents. After a couple of years, I sat. Today I sang. My mother loved my singing. I sang classic country. My father’s favorite songs. I picked at the grass like a child.

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jilltalbot

@jilltalbot

7 years

I have not written in 10 months for fear of the writing of it, so it hovers above a draft I began yesterday. It will not remain, but it's there now: "My father died in a hotel room in McKinney, Texas."

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