Photo by Heidi SellJaye Viner and I used to pass each other in the eighty-year-old corridors of Arts and Sciences Hall at the university where I taught and she was earning her second graduate degree. That was five years ago, and while we said hello to each other, we never crossed paths in an actual classroom. In retrospect, I can see that was my loss. I remember admiring her short blue hair — which is longer now — and her quietly confident, unassuming manner. During the pandemic, Viner and I reconnected in a social media group for women and non-binary writers with forthcoming books. I admired Viner again, this time for her attention to the business side of launching a book, something I knew little about, and for her willingness to support and share resources with other writers. Post-vaccination, Viner and I were soon joining each other in conversation at a small coffee shop in Omaha and later at a cozy, independent bookstore to talk about her novel, Jane of Battery Park (Red Hen Press). It was my turn to be a student, learning from someone who was a year ahead of me on the journey to publishing her debut.

Jane of Battery Park is set in an alternate America that takes voyeuristic pleasure in watching the cult torturing of celebrities on trial for their alleged moral failings. Jane and Daniel, the novel’s star-crossed lovers, come from each of these extreme worlds yet long to find peace — and each other — somewhere in-between. Viner’s book is a literary hybrid, an intoxicating mix of romantic thriller, dystopian fantasy, and social commentary. The prose is lyrical yet often quirky. The language is precise and elegant, yet sometimes dark and graphic. In other words, there is something here for everyone.

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Jody Keisner: I took the “Which Battery Park Character Are You?” quiz on your author’s website and was matched with Jane Dalton, the book’s heroine. So, let’s start with Jane. Readers meet her when she’s a Los Angeles nurse who has fled her husband and The Vanguard, the fanatical religious cult her family belongs to. How did Jane come to you? Was she an image or an idea first — or based off someone you knew?

Jaye Viner: Jane came after I had the idea for the story. I knew I wanted to write about the gap between fundamentalist Evangelical culture and Hollywood pop culture. The foundation for Jane started with my own experiences in the faith. We were both homeschooled and we both grew up in the Purity Culture movement started by Joshua Harris. But my parents and family life were pretty moderate (and uninteresting, I thought), so I expanded on that experience with more extreme versions of that culture that I knew other women experienced at that time. I also gave Jane my love of playing the piano, and we share an experience of using film soundtracks as a gateway into mainstream culture.

JK: There are versions of herself that Jane doesn’t share or isn’t allowed to share, depending on the context of the situation or because of who her family is. Why was this idea of our hidden selves important for you to explore?

JV: I think society asks all of us to create different selves for different situations. Most of us would not say that we’re lying, or being less true of ourselves, but rather, all of those performances become who we think we are. With Jane, and all the characters in the book, they’ve taken in a variety of messages from their families, friends, and social experiences, about who they’re supposed to be. I think what’s unique about Jane’s hidden selves is that she never really chose them, they are her way to survive an impossible situation. Someday, she’ll maybe find a place in her life that will allow her to sit and figure out who she really is, but that’s a luxury, as it often is for many of us.

JK: I know that some fiction writers detest questions that attempt to root out the autobiographical details in their novels, but after getting to know you and now Jane, I feel compelled to ask: Do you see yourself reflected in Jane?

JV: I certainly had a journey of leaving the faith and trying to figure out what I believed. Mine was exponentially easier. But most of the closest biographical work comes through Daniel, the has-been heartthrob who is trying to restart his acting career. I had a draft of him that was a pretty traditional love interest stock character. And then I went for a routine cardiology appointment and the doctor said he thought my aorta was enlarged and could possibly rupture. Just whenever. This news gave me a pretty exciting anxiety disorder which manifested in physiological experiences I give Daniel in the book. He’s not just an amputee, he’s a trauma survivor and he was a way for me to explore the ways I felt my body had betrayed me even though, like Daniel, I was physically healthy and able to live a normal life, I had become internally, fundamentally damaged by a lack of trust in that body.

JK: Why did you pick those two extremes — fundamentalist faith and Hollywood — to explore cultural gaps?

JV: My parents were/are missionaries through a non-denominational faith organization. This gave me a unique perspective because I grew up in an Evangelical church, but I was also outside of the church because my parents were not church missionaries. We had a separate faith. I think this gave me both an ability to see the larger church body critically. It also gave me a model for what outsider faith looks like. Jane’s family organization, the Vanguard, wouldn’t be what they are — an organization on its own that draws support from various churches and faith organizations — if I hadn’t known what that was like. Placing an extreme faith movement against Hollywood was something that just felt obvious. I grew up hearing about the evils of Hollywood, and there were various reform movements trying to ‘Christianize’ our entertainment. I.e. Kirk Cameron and more recently Ben Shapiro. After graduate school, where I studied rhetoric and storytelling, I came to believe that what America was missing in our conversation about the Left and Right was about stories. We focus on politics, but in actuality, the most powerful force in shaping the norms of a society are stories. And the capital of our storytelling is Hollywood. So, while political power is certainly what fundamentalists strive for, being able to control Hollywood made almost too much sense. Their values already are a strong influence in portrayals of abortion and romantic relationships.

JK: In what ways did writing this book and creating this world help you to further deconstruct binary thinking that the world is either bad (secular) or good (faith-based)?

JV: I think it helped me move away from the idea that everything has to have meaning. In Evangelical faith every action/thought/activity exists in relation to God. In that way, movies or books or music can never be inert things. I used to feel so guilty for ‘wasting’ time reading novels because they didn’t do anything for God. So, the process of exploring the book and creating a world where everything was just a thing on its own instead of something embodied with this huge significance, was really helpful to moving away from that binary.

JK: English literature has often portrayed disabled characters as “other,” or in the least, as a minor character or foil, but in your novel the main characters both struggle with disability. Why was this important for you to explore?

JV: Disability, both the medical part and the socially-constructed part, is a big part of my life. I didn’t necessarily set out to write disabled characters, it just happened. But since it happened, I sharpened it with my revisions and made sure to do my research to make sure the portrayals are accurate. It’s so rare to have disabled characters fall in love. We don’t have stories like that in our culture and I think that’s an important part of representation.

JK: It seems to me we really feel Jane and Daniel’s isolation because we get to experience both of their POVs. Why did you decide this story needed to be told in alternating points of view?

JV: Both Jane and Daniel are so withdrawn into themselves, and they both put up false versions of themselves in their relationships. So I felt that, without a dual POV, a lot would be lost in terms of the depth of each character and their emotions.

JK: Publisher’s Weekly compared your writing to Margaret Atwood. They write, “With a wholly original and eerily suspenseful story, Viner has created a modern society that’s just creepy enough to be believable. Fans of Margaret Atwood will eat this up.” I know from talking to you that you count Atwood among your writing influences. Who else has influenced your writing? What books are currently on your nightstand?

JV: When writing early versions of Jane of Battery Park, I was heavily influenced by Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad. I also read two David Mitchel novels — Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. Those books are all rather ambitious in their form. So I reached for the stars, and then down the line, I calmed things down to a more traditional novel. Right now, I’m reading Artificial Condition by Martha Wells and A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt.

JK: Do you write with a particular reader in mind? Are you hoping to upend readers’ expectations? Jane certainly upended my expectations for her because she is almost an antiheroine when the situation calls for it. For instance, there’s a highly charged scene in the hospital Jane works at where readers see, for the first time, that Jane is capable of being dangerous.

JV: I always want to break through the limits of readers’ expectations. I’m not a great fan of this idea that characters need to be pristine angels or even likeable. The saintly people I know are either hugely taken advantage of or hugely boring. I think the most compelling characters are reflections of true humanity. And true humanity is much messier and more exciting than what we normally expect or allow in our stories.

JK: Jane and Daniel both exist in less-than-ideal worlds (i.e., Jane lives in fear of being found by her controlling husband, and Daniel spends his days cleaning up the messes made by his unscrupulous brother.) Yet, there is an undercurrent of wry humor that runs throughout each scene. I read the humor as a coping strategy for the characters, and especially Jane. Is the humor a reflection of how you see the world, or something that you crafted specifically for Jane’s character?

JV: I try and be humorous whenever possible. I do see the world as deeply ironic and worthy of dark laughter. Sometimes I am alone in this.

JK: What scares you most as a writer?

JV: The permanence of published writing. Once a book is published, it becomes an artifact not just of its social time but of the author’s mindset at the time. People are always changing, so it intimidates me to think that the self who wrote Battery Park doesn’t really exist anymore.

JK: What surprised you about the pre-publication process? Has anything surprised you post-publication?

JV: My publication process was chaos because of Covid. So there were lots of surprises that mostly could be summed up by the word: Pivot. Post-publication, I’m still processing the monumental task of making a book visible to an audience. There are so many books published every year, so many of them worthy of attention, and many get lost.

JK: Every writer I know will say the best writing advice is simply to write. Can you offer us something in addition to that? What helped you succeed with Jane of Battery Park?

JV: I think being a writer and wanting to sell books are two different things. Being a writer is something a person can do on their own if they manage to get their butt in the chair. But selling books asks for a different kind of knowledge and motivation. This industry is as fragile as it is enormous. Studying the market, watching what presses publish what books, and learning how your writing fits in what is being published is very important for the selling books part of writing.

JK: You once told me that you wrote a thousand pages and whittled it down to Jane of Battery Park. What are the chances that your fans might see some bonus content or the second book in a Jane of Battery Park series? What’s next for you creatively?

JV: Right now there is no plan for publishing other Battery Park projects. But once things calm down, I will start asking questions about companion stories and sequels. If enough people are interested, it might just be a patron or other subscription service. The best thing to do for updates is to subscribe to my social media and newsletter. I’m currently looking for representation for a cyberpunk novel about a woman who takes a job in a dome city to try and restart her messy life only to find out she’s been hired as the scapegoat for a coup.

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