Where Writers Write: Jill Stukenberg

  Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a series in which authors showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

photo by Emma Whitman

This is Jill Stukenberg. 

Jill's first novel, NEWS OF THE AIR, is the 2021 winner of the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and publishes in September 2022. Her short stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, The Collagist (now The Rupture), Wisconsin People and Ideas magazine, and other literary magazines. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University and has received writing grants from the University of Wisconsin Colleges and has been awarded writing residencies at Shake Rag Alley and Write On, Door County. Jill is an Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point at Wausau. She grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and previously taught in New Mexico and in the Pacific Northwest. She lives in Wausau with the poet Travis Brown and their eight-year-old.

Where Jill Stukenerg Writes

Don’t tell, but sometimes in the deep Wisconsin winter, after having hiked the two blocks from my house in facemask, snowpants, snowboots, and mittens, and climbed the stairs to the quiet of my on-campus office (imagine it is January, or a Sunday morning), I strip down to my socks and long underwear to write. I’m lucky to have this space, my own office on a university branch campus from which I also teach and grade papers, edit and advise student editors, and work with community writers to organize book festivals and poetry walks. In the ebb and flow of the year, with its semesters and breaks, I am grateful for the hours when the work is my work—when I am alone with my thermos and novel plot—and for those when my work is to give to others—my students, other writers. 

This desk isn’t a sacred place; unless the places owned by the taxpaying public hallow their own ground. This office isn’t a she-shed, with cute curtains I sewed from a Pinterest model. But this is the place where, in losing myself, in giving myself over on cold mornings (or hot ones, in flip-flops) I most open to the blank page and what will come through it. And on the back of the closed door, though my students don’t recognize her, I keep a poster of Janis Joplin.