Fiery and Floating: A Conversation with Jeannine Ouellette

Coming back to the body after trauma, making art, and the act of giving

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I first became aware of Jeannine Ouellette when social media exploded with unbounded praise for her memoir The Part That Burns. Her words were making people feel seen, giving them permission to speak more openly about their experiences with abuse and neglect, offering hope that hard things can happen and they, too, can learn to thrive, and also inspiring them to play around with the conventional nature of storytelling. Dorothy Allison wrote this about Jeannine’s memoir: “I love this book and am grateful it is in the world.” Joyce Carol Oates had this to say: “Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid.” And both Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus had given it a starred review.

So, of course, I had to see what all the fuss was about. The fuss was about a tender, aching story of an unstable and abusive mother, a distant beloved father, and a sexual predator stepfather who forced Jeannine to play the “tickling game” starting when she was four. The fuss was about Jeannine’s mom eventually becoming so unstable, that after moving more than a dozen times, Jeannine and her sister landed in foster care. The fuss was about how Jeannine navigated all of this, and rather than coming out the other side hardened and reckless and continuing the lineage of abuse, over time she broke the cycle, and created a vibrant and safe life for herself and her three children—and, these days, a loving second husband, three stepchildren, and several grandchildren. It’s beautifully told in a collection of fragmented essays—a steady, compassionate unfolding of her life and a finely wrought contemplation on nature, animals, trauma, healing, family, and standing by oneself even when your legs are wobbly.

Jeannine’s work has appeared in Narrative (an excerpt from her memoir), Los Angeles Review of Books, North American Review, and The Ilanot Review amongst others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and is the founder and director of Elephant Rock, which offers wonderful creative writing classes (you’ll be happy you’d signed up for one!). She earned her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on her first novel. And she also has a beautiful Substack bursting with insight and writing prompts to make your writing life easier and more fulfilling.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

Don’t Miss This Week’s Master Craft Advice:

Stick with us to the end to catch Jeannine’s unique take on the practice of engaging the five senses for creating vibrant scenes.

Growing up you in lived in so many places I lost count. How did this impact your sense of home? And how do you define home these days?

In my first marriage, we bought a house perched up over a lake and we were there for a little under seven years, by far the longest I'd ever lived anywhere in my life. When that happened, I thought, “Oh, now I know what it feels like to have a home.” It was like when two pieces of broken china fit together and the crack is mended. I thought that had happened.

The older I get, and I think it also has to do with having grandchildren and watching what happens with the long arm of stability, I've come to realize that the impacts of those shallow roots and being uprooted over and over and over again are so much deeper and wider than I understood when I was in my early twenties. I keep discovering all the new ways in which having that chronic repetitive disruption and starting over in childhood, shaped how I move in the world.