On the Experimentation of Failure: A Conversation with Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
I first came across Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross as a reader of this publication—known at the time as The Puritan—which published one of the short stories included within The Longest Way to Eat a Melon in 2021. Upon this revelation, I tore through a backlog of work, entranced by the author’s absurdist and surrealist fiction, the kind that I so infrequently had the privilege of unearthing.
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon is a labour of love, with an emphasis on labour. Zong-Li Ross’s debut collection of short stories navigates the journey of being and becoming artists: how creatives form, solidify, and stand firm in their sense of selfhood through the turmoil of daily life.
It is a rejection of industry standards and embraces techniques typically overlooked within publishing: hybridity, nonlinear narratives, and experimental genre writing. Zong-Li Ross refocuses the conversation of artistic creation by forming nontraditional narratives. Whether the story centres a struggling and disaffected artist seeking answers in a Mesoamerican jungle or an artist in a new city working in a hair salon to follow his dream, each character—each artist—has one goal: to make art for art’s sake.
I write to Jaquelyn Zong-Li Ross as she is traveling across Canada to promote the collection. Despite her busy schedule, she made the time to sit down and explore my questions surrounding genre, capitalist critique through experimental writing, and the absurdity of reality.
Casper Orr: I would like to start off by congratulating you on the success of The Longest Way To Eat A Melon, which must be both a thrilling and overwhelming experience. Several of the collection’s stories have appeared in publication prior to your curation, one of which was included here in a previous issue of The Ex-Puritan.
What was the catalyst for the creation of the surrealist and absurdist stories that now make up your debut collection? Does the collection take inspiration from real life?
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross: The oldest piece in the collection is a set of horoscopes called “Twelve Forecasts” that I wrote years ago, while musing about the kinds of psychic turbulence and atmospheres that had come to define, for me, a so-called “artistic process.” At the time I was still freshly out of art school and working part-time at an artist-run centre; I had a small studio space of my own that I would escape to to make paintings when I could. It was a time of great but inefficient energy output, a time on the brink of burnout. I remember my studio rent then was exactly $200, and in order to pay for it I had to get a second part-time job at a museum ticket desk, which quickly broke me. I also remember the work I made during this time was not very good, and knowing that, unlike some other possibly more straightforward jobs I could be doing, it wouldn’t simply get better by working harder.
Writing “Twelve Forecasts” was cathartic in the sense that doing so finally released something from my making body that I’d been holding onto for some time: ideas about the macro- and microscopic details of how real artworks get made as they collide with an artist’s private and public worlds. I’d been trying all along to make these conventional paintings, when really it was the thinking behind and around the making of them that was the more interesting material. This piece was the beginning of this realization for me. It was also the beginning of my turn toward writing as my primary medium.
I’m just as interested in how meaning can be arrived at, at all, and how writing can function to actively challenge the sorts of expectations we might have for the “easy” or straightforward reading. I’m interested in mess, and the depiction of false equivalences; in difficulty hidden in simple forms.
Casper Orr: The Longest Way To Eat A Melon offers an assortment of capitalist critiques in hybrid formats and genres. Why did these somewhat more obscure writing conventions feel like the best vehicle to deliver your message?
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross: Hybrid forms have always been an important part of my writing practice, not because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question, but precisely because I haven’t. Writing for me has never been about genre. Writing is just writing.
When a text delivers this magical fusion of material and fiction and craft essay and philosophical treatise and madcap fable—a chaotic but beautiful witch’s brew that I hope even a fraction of these pieces might succeed at delivering!—then I think it leaves the space of needing to be described or defined along the lines of genre and enters a new, third space that is closer to actual thinking and lived experience. I’m attracted to the kinds of organic shapes that can result in a piece when you make room for where they want to go.
I’m not sure that there are any true “messages” to be found in my work, though certainly there are various social critiques and lines of commentary I am engaging in throughout the collection, many with some comic relief (I hope) to offer along the way. But if the title of the book and the story it’s taken from are any indication, I’m just as interested in how meaning can be arrived at, at all, and how writing can function to actively challenge the sorts of expectations we might have for the “easy” or straightforward reading. I’m interested in mess, and the depiction of false equivalences; in difficulty hidden in simple forms.
I can’t help but retain this stubbornly innocent fantasy that my writing practice might somehow remain, at its core, a fundamentally subversive and anti-capitalist activity. That engaging with the open-endedness of the writing process, fully understanding that “it” may never work out or pay off, remains a very beautiful and worthwhile human endeavour.
CO: What relationship do experimental formats and genres have with capitalism, both in and outside of this text?
JZLR: Well, for one, this book almost didn’t get published, which would have been a pretty anti-capitalist gesture as far as writing experiments go! That this project took almost a decade of my life to come to fruition—and luckily did find a publisher in the end who believed in it enough to take a chance on this work and form it into a book—means that I did have a lot of time to brush up against the very real and persistent fear I had that my efforts would all be for nothing.
Even saying this, I realize how silly and truly capitalist it all sounds. I never wrote with any specific audience or motivation in mind, but of course I wanted something to show for my efforts. I like to think that the texts assembled here serve to confront or otherwise complicate these kinds of faulty effort-reward circuits.
In form or content, then, too, it’s no coincidence that money—by which I would extend to mean all the visible and invisible material conditions—is an ongoing preoccupation in my work. Like most people, I am well aware of the ways that money makes things possible or impossible, makes art possible or impossible, and what a privilege it is to make art at all in this system.
Experimental art practices have always benefited from this same privilege—if you don’t make a living from your art, at the very least the idea of cultural capital rings true here. Nonetheless, I can’t help but retain this stubbornly innocent fantasy that my writing practice might somehow remain, at its core, a fundamentally subversive and anti-capitalist activity. That engaging with the open-endedness of the writing process, fully understanding that “it” may never work out or pay off, remains a very beautiful and worthwhile human endeavour. I try to write with this sense of non-direction in my heart.
CO: Just as often as critiques of capitalism arise, we see them paired with themes of failure, frequently in regards to creative life. Could you speak on this dynamic a little bit more?
JZLR: Failure is such a huge topic in my work. I guess it has something to do with existential threat and the kind of all-or-nothing attitude I have toward art-making and receiving ... certainly toward my own writing. I immediately think of the final line in the list piece “Twenty-Three Versions of Disaster” where I say something like, “We got all the way to the end before we realized we had failed.” This for me is my biggest fear.
The idea that one might work diligently at something for years only to discover too late that they’d been on the wrong path, worrying about the wrong things, or working toward the wrong goal. The piece “A Journey, Some Riches, Some Castles, Some Garbage” draws explicitly from this fear through the setup of the flawed journey or ambition.
Another thing on the topic of failure: I think a lot of so-called “experimental” artists and writers—not to mention the many arts organizations that set out to support them—like to talk about this idea of “risk-taking” as if it is some perfect and valiant thing. The reality though is that for a work to be truly risk-taking, one has to be prepared for actual failure. Not performative failure, but real failure. Failure can mean different things for different people in different contexts, it can take different forms. I do feel I took some real risks in this collection, whether or not they are legible to anyone but me.
CO: This collection has multiple stories that act like Russian nesting dolls, or stories within stories. I’m specifically thinking about “A Brief History of Feeling.” What does this format allow you to explore that others don’t, necessarily?
JZLR: I would say that list pieces like “A Brief History … ” are where I’m really in my element, my comfort zone. After working out all of the headaches of the longer story pieces, with their convoluted plots and twists and hidden character motivations, the fragmented lists serve as a kind of pressure-release valve where I can suddenly relax into smaller units of language, into a more fine-grained attention to things like rhythm and diction and heat. I’ll always be more or less obsessed with the way words slot together to make something strange or confusing or wonderful happen on the page, in your mouth, in the air. These kinds of assemblages are at the core of my process.
CO: The act of naming things, places, and people in stories like “A Woman Suffering” and “Elementary Brioche” feels intentionally unintentional. What does the power of a name in your writing hold?
JZLR: The names and titles featured in many of these pieces play into my interest in the form of the fable as a narrative model. I often depict deliberately flat characters (the protagonist, A Woman Suffering from a Crisis of Faith and her love interest, Folk Art, in the first story you mentioned is one clear example of this) and excessively simplistic plots as a way of accessing satire—a kind of wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing approach to commenting on the obvious that is hidden in plain view.
Over time, the flatness and over-the-top naïveté built into many of my characters’ identities and worldviews build a healthy suspicion in the reader around what and how narratives are functioning. That’s the idea, anyway—that names are stand-ins for ideas, which in turn stand in for gaps in collective logic or fields of representation, showing how much or just how little we know. Of course, the act of naming also connects to my interest in language and play. I often start with a story’s title and write outwards from it to find the text.
[T]here is a playfulness and cheeky-exuberant energy about the images and styles of writing I’m most attracted to, an acknowledgement that works of art are only as good as the collective’s willingness to suspend its disbelief.
CO: Despite the heavy themes of the collection, the weight of those themes aren’t oppressive, which leads me back to the absurd. Do you think that genre plays an important role in creating an emotional equilibrium in The Longest Way To Eat A Melon?
JZLR: I don’t know what to say about the absurd, except that it feels closer to the right medium for describing real life than supposed realism does. You know that old saying about life being stranger than fiction, otherwise put as: “you can’t make this shit up” ... I do think there is a playfulness and cheeky-exuberant energy about the images and styles of writing I’m most attracted to, an acknowledgement that works of art are only as good as the collective’s willingness to suspend its disbelief. If some of the stories seem a bit far-fetched, it’s because they are; if some of the sentences do acrobatics on your tongue, it’s because words are strange and so is the world. You can choose to get into the car, or stay behind. Most of the time, the absurdist motifs that find their ways into my work are just me trying to say “yes” to the impossible in that way of trusting improvisation.
CO: If there’s one thing you’d like readers who may not be familiar with experimental genres to take away from this collection, what would it be?
JZLR: Put your expectations aside and allow yourself to be surprised—to move and be moved in return.
