Fourteen Hills interviews Jill Tidman, winner of the Bambi Holmes Award, 15.2 Contributor

Fourteen Hills fiction editor Fernando Pujals interviewed Jill Tidman, who was awarded the Bambi Holmes award by Fourteen Hills Editor-in-Chief for her story, "This is How I Saw It", which appeared in issue 15.2, Spring 2009.


Read the entire interview on our website. Here's some highlights from the interview:



14H: How do you know when you’re reading something really, really effing great?

JT: For me, when I read the sentence three or four times before I can move on. Often, for me, it's about how people put words together, I almost can’t see the story until I’ve really seen the sentences first. I look at it through that angle and then I have to let go of the sentence structure and get into the story line.

14H: What are you working on now?

 JT: Well, I did that write 50,000 words in a month thing.

14H: What was that experience like?

JT: It was crazy. I decided to write on a typewriter so I couldn’t erase anything which was liberating because I often, I mean, I can’t really move on to another page, until one page is really set. With this experiment, because of the quantity over quality aspect of it, if something wasn’t going right I just kept [writing]. I was so unattached to the outcome, and that was fantastic. The story starts in a restaurant, during a conversation over dinner.

14H: Have you gone back to it?

JT: I let it rest, and then figuring how to get it into the computer was a really nice way to review it... I didn’t have to retype all of it.  I probably salvaged about two percent of each page. I was able to pull the stuff that felt like there was something to work from, so I’m stuck piecing it together, it’s fun, it’s just a new way to generate material, I guess.

14H: Is that important, to find new ways to to generate and reenter your work?

JT: Sometimes. Yes, because life gets in the way. I have a full time job, and lots of distractions it feels. If I don’t have something that’s really tugging at me, I can easily fall out of the habit so this is definitely a trick.


More from this interview on our site!

An interview with Jill Tidman by Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review fiction editor Fernando Pujals

Check out Jill Tidman's story in issue 15.2 of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. Issue 15.2 is virtually sold out, but we may be able to scrounge up a few copies if you contact us.

- Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review Editors