Q&A with Jeannine Atkins

 

Photo by Isabella Dellolio

 

Jeannine Atkins is the author of the new young adult memoir in verse Knocking on Windows. Her other books include Finding Wonders. She lives in Western Massachusetts. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?

 

A: I’ve loved researching and writing about the lives of brilliant but overlooked women in books including Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science and Hidden Powers: Lise Meitner’s Call to Science.

 

I began this memoir when the pandemic closed library doors and I began cleaning out closets, skimming through old journals, unpublished stories, poems and drafts of novels. It brought me compassion for the young writer I had been. I began to believe that this more ordinary story, my story, deserved to be told, too.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: As I explored my draw to Sylvia Plath and reread The Bell Jar, I was moved by how her autobiographical novel touched me in different ways than it had when I was 19.

 

I had forgotten the scene where the main character was escorted to a garden behind a dance hall where she fought back against being raped. Looking for help in the parking lot, her face bloodied, she knocked on car windows. The sense of glass between a woman’s hand and help, the wanting to be heard, felt familiar to my life as a poet.

 

Q: What did Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou mean for you as a young woman?

 

A: Emily Dickinson was one of the few women writers I met in high school. During college, I began to explore her mysteries and find how much I valued questions that couldn’t be answered.

 

Maya Angelou’s writing was more direct and I loved that, too. Plus it was inspiring to attend a reading and listen to a living woman writer! I’d grown up being advised to hide pain, loneliness and anger.

 

Sylvia Plath showed me another way to be.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Thinking about and writing this book brought me a sense of peace, even or because many scenes were hard to write. I tried to use the sort of quiet voice I’ve usually most trusted.

 

I hope readers can see ways many of us are alike though circumstances are different. We need to keep on, looking, listening, caring for each other. And believe, as I state in Knocking on Windows, “To write is to find the courage to claim that we matter.”

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a book that addresses some ways grief often shapes the heart of literature and art.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I appreciate your thoughtful questions!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jeannine Atkins.