As the saying goes, the only constant is change, which makes water, its fluidity and ability to conform to any shape, perhaps the most elemental of substances. So it’s fitting that the recently released Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue (Third Man Books) anthology takes water as its unifying motif.
Edited by Memphians Sheree Renée Thomas and Troy L. Wiggins, with additional editing by Pan Morigan, the collection bristles with stories from Memphis, the Delta, and the Mid-South. The book features stories from Thomas and Memphian Danian Darrell Jerry, alongside an essay by Wiggins. But, as those talented writers have been featured in this space before (What can I say? I’m a fan.), for this month’s edition of Pages, we turn our gaze to Memphian and author Jamey Hatley.
Her list of awards and honors is extensive, but in summation, Hatley is the author of “Spirits Don’t Cross Over Water ’Til They Do” from Trouble the Waters. She was a Prose Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner, and the inaugural Indie Memphis Black Screenwriting Fellow. She wrote, directed, and produced a short film based on her story-essay, Always Open, The Eureka Hotel, which is an official selection of the 2019 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the Black Film Festival of New Orleans. She is also a staff writer for the second season of the Katori Hall-helmed STARZ show P-Valley.
“Writing Behind My Back”
photograph by jeri hilt
Jamie Hatley
Writing is many things besides the act of putting words down on paper — or on a computer screen. It’s revision, contemplation, and, perhaps most of all, it’s observation. So it should be no surprise that Hatley was a reader before a writer, and a listener before a reader. Stories have long been interwoven into the fabric of her life.
“Before I could read, my mother read to me. Those are some of my first memories,” Hatley says. “My kindergarten teacher had to give me an extra book. So I was one of those children.”
She remembers visits to the library, chaperoned by her mother. As with many children who fall in love with fictional worlds, she found herself romanticizing the literary life. In some ways, that’s a wonderful thing — an awareness of the allure of storytelling can call a future writer to create. But it can also be daunting. “I loved writers too much. They were too big,” she says. “That was something I wouldn’t have said that my little scratchings in notebooks were.
“I write some difficult characters. When I would leave the café I could leave them behind, but now I feel like they’re all just crowding around, hovering over me when I’m making my coffee or trying to vacuum.” — Jamey Hatley
“There was a long time when I didn’t think of myself as a writer,” Hatley continues. “I say I was writing behind my back, trying not to draw attention to myself.”
When she was younger, first driven by her mother and later herself, Hatley would attend book events. “I would make myself the last person in line so that I could think of one thing to say that wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of the fancy writer. That’s how I met most of the writers I know now. That’s how I met Victor LaValle. That’s how I met my friend Tayari Jones. That’s how I met my mentor Arthur Flowers.”
She continues, “I was looking for the magic. I guess I wanted a fairy godmother to make me a writer. Instead I got Arthur Flowers, who always gives a speech about ‘If you can do something else, quit,’” she laughs. “He instilled in me that it’s work.”
Writing in the World
The process of writing is work, of course, but most writers have tricks to help the medicine go down, so to speak. “Before the pandemic, I always wrote in cafés. So whenever I was having a very good writing day someone would ask me, ‘Are you okay?’” Hatley says, and it’s easy to imagine her typing away furiously at a table in a café in New Orleans.
“The writing happened out there, and I would have this buffer between the magical world and the real world. I write some difficult characters,” she says, a truth evidenced by her story in the Trouble the Waters collection. “When I would leave the café I could leave them behind, but now I feel like they’re all just crowding around, hovering over me when I’m making my coffee or trying to vacuum.”
Just as important as finding structure in writing practices is finding a structure for within the work. After earning a degree in business at the University of Tennessee and a journalism degree at the University of Memphis, Hatley made up her mind to focus on the work that called to her — writing, storytelling. She applied to MFA programs and attended a workshop at the Voices of Our Nations Foundation (VONA), where she studied under award-winning author Victor LaValle.
“Every work I end up writing ends up being a community work. And at the core of that community work is always liberation.” — Jamey Hatley
After being accepted to Louisiana State University to earn her MFA, Hatley studied a multitude of writing formats, including poetry. In her poetry classes, she would outline the necessary structure first, and then write her poems to fit it. In conversation, it’s clear that Hatley has lost none of the reverence for the written word that propelled her to readings and book-signings as a child, but that love for the magic of storytelling is undergirded with a bone-deep understanding of the work. Because, as her mentor Arthur Flowers pointed out, writing is work.
“Usually I give myself a kind of structure. That structure might not be apparent to anyone else,” she says. Hatley has worked on numbered pieces, for example. “Spirits Don’t Cross Over Water ’Til They Do,” her story in Trouble the Waters, deals with several time periods in the protagonist’s life. It’s like an interlocking puzzle, and one can imagine the different eras of Rabbit’s life gives Hatley a template for the piece.
On Different Genres and Doing the Work
As previously mentioned, Hatley has written short stories, essays, and is working on a novel. She has also done some screenwriting. Hatley met screenwriter and director Dee Rees, who eventually invited her to work on a project. At first, Hatley thought it was spam mail, but she did some sleuthing and realized the offer was legitimate. The only problem was, at that point, she was a stranger to screenwriting, but that was just a brief hurdle.
“I worked it, worked it, worked it until I figured it out,” she says. And, as she points out, from the work comes more work. Hatley found herself hired as a writer for the second season of P-Valley, created by Memphian Katori Hall, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hot Wing King.
“I just happened to land in the perfect room,” she says. “Katori Hall — who’s also from Memphis — is just an amazing person. She’s an amazing writer. She’s an amazing thinker, and the way she ran her room, everybody got a say.”
“It was like being in the best workshop ever because everybody was brilliant. So it didn’t have to be on you,” Hatley continues, acknowledging that writing can often be a solitary pursuit — which might explain her penchant for writing in public spaces. “It was a lot of fun,” she says of the P-Valley writers room, “and our fans are so great.”
Stories Should Have Secrets
For her contribution to Trouble the Waters, Hatley set her story during the Vietnam War and just after the death of singer Otis Redding and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “There was so much silence about it,” Hatley says. “I remember every year when the anniversary of the King assassination came around, I would ask my parents, as a little child, ‘Hey, what did you think? About what happened?’ And they would just say, ‘Why did it have to happen here?’ Or they would talk about the snow that happened right before, because there was an uncharacteristically huge snowfall that happened,” Hatley remembers. “It just felt like, to me, whenever there’s that much silence around something, that there’s a lot of shame there. It felt like a wound of the city. So I started asking myself these questions, ‘Can a city be wounded?’”
Some cities suffer a wound and grow more resilient around it. They become a civil rights center, a powerful locus for change, but Memphis took on the grief. “What happens when the most important dreamer, the most important Black man, Nobel Peace Prize winner, is killed where you live? What does that say about your prospects as a human in this city?”
Those are big questions to answer in a short story, but Hatley interweaves much into the narrative. This story asks questions, but it also has secrets and hidden depths only hinted at. The reader is compelled to finish the work in their mind, drawing together threads about returns and homecomings, about exile and hurt and socially acceptable modes of being in a world whose cruelty we can never truly accept.
The story pulls from history, of course, but it also draws from her own life. “I was gone for ten years, and then I came back,” she points out. And Hatley believes that the writing should do more than entertain. It should pose and answer questions.
“How do survivors return?” she asks. “There used to be rights of passage if you were a warrior. You would go through this process to be reacclimated into the community. Even now we’re having all these talks about how our veterans are not being taken care of, how the waiting lists for mental healthcare are incredibly long.” In this way, Hatley offers compassion to the broken and outcast. Though the story is unflinching in its depiction of loss and displacement, its author offers a guiding light home.
“Every work I end up writing,” Hatley says, “ends up being a community work. And at the core of that community work is always liberation. Arthur Flowers instilled that in us. “Whatever the work, whatever the project I take on, I always want them to be doing double work.”
