Writers’ workshop graduate shines light on three generations, cultural differences

Naomi Jackson's first stab at the book that would become her debut novel featured a first-person narrative. Phaedra, a 10-year-old girl uprooted from her Brooklyn home to live with her grandmother in Barbados, was the original narrator of 'The Star Side of Bird Hill.”

'I wasn't getting very far,” Jackson says in a phone interview. 'It's pretty hard to write from a 10-year-old's perspective when you haven't been 10 for 20 years,” she says with a laugh.

She decided to shift the perspective, bringing each of her major characters to the fore in different portions of the now third-person narration. 'It's a book that I hope is really shared by the protagonists,” the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate explains. She found that the new approach opened up more possibilities. 'I think it's a richer book for that decision.”

'The Star Side of Bird Hill” has its origins in Jackson's personal history. She grew up in Brooklyn and spent some summers in Barbados and other Caribbean locales. Her novel is set in 1989, in part she says, because it struck her as a 'pivotal historical moment,” with political drama in New York, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the continuing AIDS crisis. It was also an important time in her personal history. 'It marked a tumultuous moment in my family,” she says.

Her fictional family is swept up in tumult, as well. Jackson chronicles the struggles of two sisters to come to grips with a whirlwind of changes under the watchful eye of their grandmother. She brings not only the characters but Barbados itself to life, plunging the reader into the culture of what may well be an unfamiliar place.

'I wanted the reader to experience some of the disorientation” that immigrants to the United States might feel on arrival, she says. 'I wanted to flip that usual subject position.”

Citing her great respect for readers, she said she felt confident about the decision, but the copy editing process brought home to her the potential challenges.

'That's when it got tricky,” she says, referring to the various questions her editors raised as they read the book. 'I realized these are really big choices I'm making.”

Jackson wrote much of 'The Star Side of Bird Hill” while attending the Writers' Workshop, a program she applied to three times before she was accepted.

'It was an incredible honor to be accepted to the Workshop,” she says, praising her instructors including Samantha Chang, ZZ Packer, Ayana Mathis and Marilynne Robinson. 'I consider them some of the foremost literary heavyweights in the nation.”

She calls her time in the Workshop a gift that allowed her to dive deeply into her writing, a pursuit that had shared time with her work in the non-profit sector for 10 years. 'I thought of it as an extended writing residency,” she says. 'I just got a lot of writing done.”

Some of that writing included work on what will likely be her second novel, tentatively titled 'Behind God's Back.” Readers who savor 'The Star Side of Bird Hill” will no doubt eagerly await that book. Jackson is eager to get back to work on it when her current book tour winds down.