A Million Tiny Kindnesses

The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with author and teacher Jordan Rosenfeld

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Jordan Rosenfeld is author of the novels Fallout (Running Wild Press, 2025), as well as Forged in Grace and Women in Red (Sibylline Press) and seven books on the craft of writing, including the forthcoming Sound of Story: Developing Voice and Tone in Writing (Winter, 2026), How to Write a Page-Turner, the bestselling Make a Scene, Writing the Intimate Character, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence, Writing Deep Scenes and Write Free. Her freelance writing has been published in hundreds of publications, including: The Atlantic, Mental Floss, The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Quartz, Salon, Scientific American, The Rumpus, Writer’s Digest Magazine and many more. She is also a freelance manuscript editor, writing coach and teaches online classes. Jordan writes the newsletter

Writing in the Pause

, a place of reflection and dissection of books, the world, and ourselves.

1. What are you reading now?

Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor. I’m a huge fan of her Africanfuturism (not Afrofuturism, she’s very clear about this distinction as a way to express the diversity of Black science fiction writers) but this book is something else, a kind of hybrid of sci-fi and meta-fiction.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I was big into escapism as a kid of the sort that could be found in fantasy; I was literally reading to escape some of the realities of my childhood—divorced parents, addiction issues, some illicit activities and a lot of loneliness as an only child until I was nearly 15.

So of course, I read some of the cliché standards for little white girls to read, like The Secret Garden and A Wrinkle in Time, But my parents were very open and didn’t stop me from reading anything–and even explained adult concepts when I asked. I read the adult novel The Mists of Avalon (The Arthurian legend as retold through women’s POVs) in fourth grade—over 1000 pages and my mother not only had to field my million questions, but had to come to school with me to confirm to my teacher that yes, she had watched me read the entire book for my book report. In years since I’ve learned about the author and her husband’s truly heinous and criminal behavior, so that tarnished that book for me, which I did re-read at age 19, and can’t in good conscience tell anyone else to read, but boy did that book have an impact. It was a gateway to things like Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, though. And later, reading books like Madeline Miller’s Circe kind of healed the experience of mythic retellings for me, though, and I could leave Mists behind.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I don’t re-read books from cover to cover, I skim. In part because I’ve written 7 books on the craft of writing in 20 years, which forces me to pull hundreds of excerpts, and this means revisiting books often in bits and pieces. Ironically the books that have carried me through dark times are themselves often quite dark…maybe there’s something about seeing survivors of terrible things that inspires hope in me? I read Kindred (Octavia Butler) during the pandemic, for example.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I have entered my jumpsuit era! In the throes of perimenopause I discovered that jumpsuits are flattering no matter what chaos my body is undergoing, and a complete outfit. I have more than a few ;-) And it must be a sign of age that the reason most people hate wearing them—the fact that you essentially get naked when you pee—doesn’t bother me at all (probably because I’m always hot).

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

In the past year I’ve clawed my way back to my creative process in a deep way after years of struggling with it. While it was a combination of things that led me here, a big piece of the kindling was an audiobook by Jungian psychologist/author Clarissa Pinkola Estés (she of Women Who Run With the Wolves fame) called The Creative Fire. It is only in audiobook format, not print, and she reads it in her delightful, velvety voice. The essential wisdom at the root of the 2.5 hour book is that our creativity may go underground, may feel lost to us, but it is a living force that burns on, and we simply have to learn how to tap back into it. She uses the myth of Persephone being abducted from her mother Demeter—I also loved that as I have a thing for Greek Myth, and the eco-anarchist women in my novel Fallout give themselves Greek Myth monikers so that was nice synergy, too.

Jordan in NOLA!

Something about The Creative Fire helped snap me out of despair that I had lost touch with my writing self, despite struggling with it for years. It began a process of creative reclamation that I’m feeling really fortunate to be within right now. Also, Last September we went to New Orleans for the first time and something about that incredibly culturally, creatively and historically rich location that has come back from such immense loss after Hurricane Katrina also spoke to me on a deep soul level like: What are you waiting for, creativity is life—get back to it.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

So I started feeding crows, as a midlife lady does, and one in particular kept showing up. I called her “Broken Foot” because one of her feet looked mangled though she could hop around. She started waiting for me closer and closer to the house for the peanuts I’d hand out. She and her mate were not afraid of us. She would leave me little stones and nut hulls. Then, one season, they had a baby, and she started bringing it to my yard, to the bird bath, where she soaked the peanuts and fed them to it. I felt very honored that she trusted me so. Baby grew into an adult. Then, for reasons I don’t understand, they disappeared after a few years. I miss them. However, I have a strong connection to crows as symbolism. The hummingbird used to be my symbol—so much that I have one tattooed, and now I feel I’m in my crow era, and added a few small ones to my latest tattoo.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

In a parallel universe, I am still the bank teller I almost became in 1996, a job for which I trained for two weeks, only to fail the final “exam.” As a result not only did I NOT become a bank teller, I took a job at a bookstore where I met the man who would become my husband (we’ve been together 28 years), had our son, and so on. Though in a humorous twist of irony, my day job is writing for a personal finance site now.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Dancing for sure, in the form of like dancercise, or Zumba, but I do both—though the only people who ever hear me sing are my son and husband.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

What’s really crystalized for me, since I turned 50 last year, is that I want to be doing generative creative work of some kind, be engaged in community in some way, and have some kind of impact. If I get to keep doing that the rest of my life in some shape, I’ll call myself content.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

So many! Where would I be without a million tiny kindnesses? But one stands out for how it gave me confidence. I was 18, in my first year of college, and I found a flyer for a local writing group. I called and asked to join. The woman who ran it was a couple decades older and way more talented, but she let me in and nurtured my burgeoning writer self, and I stayed with that group for years, until we moved away. I see now how desperate I was to be around other writers, for accountability and feedback, mentorship and camaraderie and I’m so grateful for it because it really helped me to claim myself as a writer.

Another one happened when my son was 6 weeks old and I was in a post-partum haze of fatigue and depression, and had barely met this woman, Amy, through other friends. She invited me over, let me literally lie upon her carpet while my son slept in a bassinet and made me food, which she sent me home with. I didn’t know how I was going to survive that terrifying time and she threw out a lifeline. She’s one of my dearest friends still.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Creativity is the most powerful guiding force in my life—it is the closest thing to a god or a spiritual practice that I have, and it provides a feeling of purpose, meaning and safe harbor. It manifests mostly for me in writing but I also see it as the force that drives social movements and community events and all the good in the world.

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If you enjoyed Jordan’s questionnaire, you may also enjoy this one with

Jillian Hess

:

Curiosity Is A Kind Of Love

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