by Martha Anne Toll
I first met Jody Hobbs Hesler at a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was incredibly generous with my debut novel, THREE MUSES, and I am so happy to provide support to her debut launch. Jody says she has written “ever since she could hold a pencil.” She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Having grown up between suburban Richmond, Virginia, and the mountains outside Winchester, Virginia, Jody now lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. These locations run through her debut book, a short story collection with a wonderful title: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BETTER. The stories assembled here are the work of an experienced, accomplished writer, and are alternately haunting and loving, often both. Like many writers, Jody had a long and circuitous path to publication. I caught up with her by email.
Tell us about your path to publication.
Most writers’ debut books aren’t the first they’ve written. Back in 2007, I had the great fortune of working with Barry Hannah on an excerpt from a novel-in-progress at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Much to my surprise and delight, he asked for the whole manuscript and eventually sent a draft to Algonquin Books, a dream publisher, with a letter of recommendation. The editor there was lovely, but she was correct in saying the book wasn’t ready. I wrote another book after that. For both, I courted agents, received every possible answer from ghosting to near-misses, and I even landed an agent for a (fruitless) year. I wrote the next novel, which eventually became Without You Here [coming out in November 2024] and engaged in the same rigamarole. One agent looked at three different drafts of this one.
Throughout, I was also writing short stories. Now and again, I’d corral a bunch and try for a chapbook or story collection contest. I collected rejections, some with very kind words, a few including “finalist” or “semi-finalist.”
During Covid lockdown, I finally discovered the right approach for Without You Here and had time to wrangle it into order. I also found myself with a stack of stories, ripe for a final revision, that shared that high lonesome feeling and were all set in the same area of Virginia. These became What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better.
At a writing residency immediately before lockdown—in retrospect, the strangest timing for three-weeks of writerly isolation—I finished a full draft of another novel, too.
As lockdown eased, I began querying for both the finished novel and the collection—along with all the other writers who’d finished manuscripts during their pandemic-imposed hibernations. The glut of new manuscripts along with Covid-delayed book launches and other pandemic issues made agents even busier than usual. Eventually, I zeroed my attention on independent publishers that were open to unagented writers.
I researched my way through internet listicles of indie presses, focusing on those that would best suit my work. In the end, though, I discovered the press for What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better in a cover letter I came across as a reader for The Los Angeles Review literary journal. After ages of searching for a home for this collection, and years on top of that searching for a home for any of my books, I received an acceptance within a few short weeks.
In a thrilling surprise bonus, fewer than three months later, a different indie press accepted Without You Here for publication in November 2024.
A lot of the stories in your collection seem dark, or have a dark side. Can you talk about that?
My stories share a sense of loss and longing that reminds me of the “high lonesome” of bluegrass music. Those songs belly up from the ache the way my stories do. People reaching across chasms, never quite connecting—there’s a resonant chord in this struggle for me, something that draws me back again and again for each new story. In the darkest ones, danger factors into missed connections, or loneliness itself becomes a sort of threat, but loss and longing are still the most defining traits.
My stories share a sense of loss and longing that reminds me of the “high lonesome” of bluegrass music. Those songs belly up from the ache the way my stories do. People reaching across chasms, never quite connecting—there’s a resonant chord in this struggle for me, something that draws me back again and again for each new story.
Tell us about your writing life.
Lately, much of my writing life revolves around my book launch. Despite working and pining for this experience for so long, I’ve been surprised by how much and how many different kinds of effort go into getting the word out about a new book. It’s a challenge, but I’m grateful for it!
I’m also deeply grateful for the privilege of being able to shape my life around my work. Most days I put in several hours of writing. I like to have lots of projects in different stages of readiness so there’s always something to work on, no matter what type of energy I bring to my desk.
Besides fiction, I also write for and help edit Charlottesville Family Magazine and Virginia Wine and Country Life and write frequent book reviews. I think of these projects as “using my skills for good,” because these assignments allow me to celebrate people in my community and other writers.
Tell us about your reading life.
Character and place grab me most in a book. Plot for me is almost a means for delivering interesting people, rather than the other way around. Formalistically innovative books lose me if they become more focused on supporting their gimmick than on engendering some empathy.
In my reading I’m looking for authentic human experience, characters that show me who they are, places I’ve been but see anew through a new writer’s eyes, or places I’ve never seen but the author transports me there so viscerally that I feel the grit of its dirt under my fingernails. I enjoy reading writers whose experiences I’ve shared as much as those whose experiences are new to me. It’s important to me to read diverse writers, not just ones who look and think like me, because I’m reading to explore and discover the world, to learn about people, about history, about how we love, and how we fail.
My goal every year is to read at least one book a week. I do know people who read a book a day. I can’t seem to do that. Blame my bad back or tired eyes or general distractibility. For every book I read, I write a brief entry in my reading journal, enough to remind me later what the book was about and what I liked or disliked about it. I don’t have to love a book to finish it. Sometimes I don’t care for a roundly beloved book, but I’ll study it for what’s working, what’s making it appeal to other people. When I do love a book, I wish every time that it would last forever.
You are a teacher. I wonder what you’ve learned from teaching writing that helped with this book?
Everything I’ve learned about writing comes from making mistakes, so as a teacher what I want most is to keep students excited about writing. The more they write, the more mistakes they make, and the better chance they have of stumbling onto whatever insight they need to make the story work.
If they’re stuck, I urge them to go where the joy is. If you’re not on scene X, but scene X is all you can think about, by all means, write scene X. Write out of order. Then write toward the out of sync scene and be prepared to rewrite it entirely when you come upon it again. Tweak, tweak, reorganize. Rewrite a scene emphasizing the opposite emotional tone. Write the beginning last. Don’t get stuck on transitions—build them in later. Question the scene your story opens on. Question the point of view you’ve chosen. Question every condition your story creates.
I try to take my own advice and shake things up after I get a draft down. Question everything. Experimentation is the goal of so many writing exercises because it helps us discover what’s underneath the surface. When I remember to write the way I teach others to write, I have more fun and the results are always surprises.
Tweak, tweak, reorganize. Rewrite a scene emphasizing the opposite emotional tone. Write the beginning last. Don’t get stuck on transitions—build them in later. Question the scene your story opens on. Question the point of view you’ve chosen. Question every condition your story creates.
All of that is terrific advice! How did you choose and organize the stories in this collection?
For a while, the collection included a dozen stories. Then ten. Finally, seventeen. So I chose and un-chose and rechose my way through the process. Longing, loss, “high lonesomeness” unites the stories, but the characters vary widely by age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Their differences across the collection seem to me to emphasize the universality of what they have in common, which is how I wound up with seventeen stories.
Putting them in order was tricky. I wrote titles along with first and last lines onto small strips of paper so I could switch them around on a tabletop and get an idea of how and where they connected. I prefer a junction that communicates to readers immediately when they’ve crossed into a new story’s world, so a story from a teenage boy’s point of view follows one from a young mom’s point of view. A hotel room attendant’s story follows a billionaire’s. Looking at where first and last lines joined also helped me create ebb and flow in emotional intensity and flavor.
For readers who have not yet read your book, can you tell us about the title? 
The title comes from a line of dialog in the story “Sorry Enough.” Buckley has come to Ida to atone for the hit and run that landed him in jail for a year and permanently injured her. Without giving too much away, the title is Ida’s response when Buckley seems to look to her to feel better about what he’d done, and she refuses to let him lean his need against her. That refusal, the collection’s title, was what unlocked the whole story for me, and it captured the sense of longing that runs through each story.
Can you recommend three short story writers that you love?
Louise Marburg writes wryly funny and emotionally cutting stories. Her characters lie and misbehave and create chaos while delivering emotional punches that land true. I love reading her because I feel like she cracks her stories open in marvelous, unexpected ways.
Celeste Mohammed writes richly-voiced stories that immerse the reader in the beauty, conflict, and contradiction of contemporary Trinidad. Her characters run the gamut from powerful to powerless, and their conflicts and crises explore greed, political and personal power dynamics, and the old standards of love and loss.
Shena McAuliffe’s recent collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness blew me away with its inventiveness and beautiful language. And I could go on, but you only asked for three!
What writing/publishing projects are you working on now?
Right now, I’m working on later revisions of that other novel I worked on during lockdown, Watchdog, and I’ve got several new short stories out on submission and in varying degrees of completion. Final edits for Without You Here are pending, and I’ve begun what will be the next novel and have lots of simmering excitement for the one that will come after that. It’s a busy, productive, distracting time!
Anything else you want to add?
Like so many writers, I’ve had a bunch of close calls and plenty of hope and heartbreak along the way. Now that I have a book coming out, I am overwhelmed and overjoyed by the support of my friends and family and my writing community. I want to thank everybody for their generosity and for sharing my joy.
And thank you, Martha, for making time for this interview.
Martha Anne Toll is a DC based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses, was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize and won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her second novel, Duet for One, is due out in May 2025.
Bloom 