Jill Christman

2020 Prose
Jill Christman

Photo by Olivia Mikkelson

Bio

Jill Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. She has published work in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Longreads, TriQuarterly, True Story, and O, The Oprah Magazine, as well as in many anthologies, including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction, and The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. She is a professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two children. In addition to teaching creative nonfiction writing, she serves as a senior editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and executive producer of Indelible (a podcast about campus sexual violence).

p>I was born into a family of artists. My siblings and I grew up knowing that our job on this planet was to make art. When I was a child, art trumped all for my parents—so there were sacrifices, but there was always paint and plentiful tools for mixing colors or for cutting new things out of old things. We wore hand-me-downs and ate free lunch at school, but our gingerbread houses had stained glass windows and our nightcaps were embroidered with poetry.

In the pursuit of ever more dramatic landscapes, my mother moved us to a remote mountain in Washington. During this time in the woods, in addition to building our off-the-grid house—itself an act of art—my mother made sculpture and collages out of what she found, and I, at 14, began scratching out stories by lamplight to make some sense of it all.

Fast forward 35 years and the path I have chosen to feed my habit looks quite different. I wanted art plus indoor plumbing and health insurance: I am a mother, a wife, a writer, and a teacher. I am lucky beyond my wildest dreams—and every day, no matter how hard I work, I wish I could have written more.

For me, this fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts will mean time, a respite from my regular teaching load during our daughter’s last two years at home. What a gift from the NEA, what an honor to have had my work chosen by this esteemed committee, and what a mind-blowing inspiration to join the company of NEA fellows past and present. Thank you from my heart. I will use this time to say something true. I promise you that.