Writing the human condition in fiction is no easy task. It requires a deep dive into everything vulnerable and raw, empathetic and emotionally taxing, beautiful yet sometimes brutal. Novels that capture these complexities in their characters and plot always catch my eye. When Jess Taylor’s latest novel, Play, started floating around #bookstagram and the literary circles of Toronto this past spring, I was drawn to find out more about it. My unspoken wish for the haunting and compelling novel I’d been itching to read was heard just down the block at Book*Hug Press’s Toronto headquarters, scoring me first a review copy and then an inspiring conversation with the author.
In Play we have two main characters exploring trauma in past and present timelines, together delivering a compassionate story of the painful path to healing—or, in the antagonist Adrian’s case, the path to destruction. Paul (Paulina) loves her cousin Adrian—so much that they are inseparable as children. They play together in The Lighted City, an imaginary world where they pretend to live together and escape the more difficult moments of childhood. Yet their play leads to difficulties of its own, that will follow Paul and Adrian throughout their lives. In writing their stories, Jess Taylor was growing and playing, too.
Born and raised in Caledon, Ontario, where much of the novel takes place, Taylor is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing MA program and is a well-established Toronto writer and poet. She is the author of the 2019 short story collection Just Pervs and her 2015 debut collection, Pauls, whose title story won Gold in the 2013 National Magazine Awards. In speaking with her about her writing, her upcoming work, Play’s debut, and publishing with Book*hug Press, I gained the utmost respect and admiration for Taylor’s craft and her moving new novel.
She’s been writing since eight years old, scoring recognition for her creativity and skill in contests for fiction and poetry as a child and young adult, always finding inspiration for her work in the world around her. For Taylor, it’s been about observation and lived experience. Applying to an MA in Creative Writing just made sense, especially as she learned to collaborate with her peers from the program and mentors along the way. These lived experiences naturally found their way into her work, especially the themes of growth, childhood, and adulthood that lie at the heart of Play. She noted that, “When you’re in your 20s, you’re really bringing whatever you’ve gone through in childhood, whatever traumatic experiences you might have had, into adulthood. They’re still fresh and clinging to how you react to things.” Over the course of ten years, Taylor drafted many versions of Play, and while the book draws on her lived experiences, Taylor explained that she doesn’t write autofiction. She often calls her work a “patchwork quilt,” blending everything together to create something new. Play travelled with her through one era to another, with Taylor asking the questions, “What do I want my life to look like? What are my priorities? How am I going to grapple with these things that are holding me back?” Her answer, now: “I’m going to live, and I gotta keep going.”
How do we keep going? How do we write about the intricacies of growth and healing? Taylor said to me, “I really like books where you feel the perception of the character is shaping the story,” and I believe this is true for Paul and Adrian in Play. As the story is told through Paul’s eyes, pacing back and forth between her memories of childhood, her grieving of Adrian, and the present-day healing of it all, readers can fully integrate themselves into the mind of Paul in various points of her life. The present-day scenes include therapy sessions in which our protagonist dives into the depth of her trauma, but not without the heavy burden of financial struggle, something often faced in today’s society. As the characters drive the plot, they haunt every page, and Taylor too, felt haunted by her own writing. Tackling issues of suicide, childhood abuse, mental health, and violence is no easy task for a writer seeking realism in every character’s narrative. When asked about how it felt to write Adrian, whose suicide haunts Paul, Taylor answered, “I definitely found it a scary thing to write. And I also feel like a lot of the time, I write into my fears and anxieties, and that’s part of how I become ready to cope with those things.”
Taylor is currently working on her next novel, titled Experiencer, while balancing her full-time job and family life. Publishing with Book*hug Press has been an integral part of her career thanks to its supportive editorial team and guidance for future creative projects. As readers, we can look out for various genres from Taylor, from poetry to short stories to novels; she is a writer to keep an eye on, and it was a pleasure meeting with her on behalf of the White Wall Review.