You Are Barrelhousing With Philly Conference Craft Workshop Leader Jackie Domenus
You’re really looking forward to Conversations and Connections in Philly on October 5, and you’d like to find out more about the non-fiction workshop that Jackie Domenus is going to lead there. So, you settle in as we talk to Jackie about point of view, why to dig deeper, and one of our favorite villains.
Barrelhouse: Your workshop at C&C is called “Experimenting with 2nd Person Point of View in Creative Nonfiction.” Can you tell us a little about why this can be an important consideration for CNF writers?
Jackie Domenus: 2nd person POV often gets a bad rep from writers. I think it’s important for CNF writers to challenge their assumptions in order to experiment and to explore what effect a different POV can have on their work when it’s used in a purposeful way. In this workshop, we’ll dig into some possibilities of why folks are uncomfortable with it and then we’ll explore 5 different ways to authentically and intentionally use 2nd person POV in CNF. It’s a craft topic I’m really passionate about because it can be beneficial and effective for marginalized writers, folks writing about trauma, and more. We’re in a period where CNF writers are really pushing boundaries and straying from “traditional” conventions – this workshop will lean into that.
Barrelhouse: What can attendees expect to get out of your workshop?
Jackie Domenus: Attendees can expect to get a handful of approaches for employing 2nd person POV in their CNF and will have an opportunity to experiment with it briefly during the workshop. I hope folks will gain a better understanding of when/why the 2nd person POV can be effective. They can also expect A TON of examples of stellar CNF written in 2nd Person POV, from best-selling memoirs and essay collections to short-form personal essays, borrowed form essays, etc. published in lit mags and journals. Examples are sprinkled throughout the presentation, but I’ll also share a Google doc with a running list (that I’m always happy to add to)!
Barrelhouse: You’ve got an essay collection, No Offense: A Memoir in Essays, coming out next year with ELJ Editions. What was the process of putting that together like?
Jackie Domenus: When I started writing personal essays around the same time I “came out,” it became abundantly clear very quickly that they all had something to do with uncomfortable conversations, inappropriate questions, and pointed assumptions that had been thrust upon me in relation to my sexuality. So I took that theme of microaggressions and started digging deeper. Writing about those moments gave me a place to explore things like LGBTQ+ representation in media, my adolescent experience of gender as a “tomboy,” etc. Before No Offense became a book, it was actually my master’s project, so I was lucky enough to workshop a lot of the essays in grad school and even after grad school, in workshops like Tin House and StoryStudio Chicago. Then, like every other writer I’ve ever talked to who’s been working on a manuscript for a few years, I got real sick of it and didn’t look at it for like a year or so before I decided to get my shit together and revise, figure out the order of the essays, query/submit, etc. I’m forever grateful to ELJ Editions for picking it up – small presses rule.
Barrelhouse: What’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
Jackie Domenus: Even though his character is a terrible person in it, I’d have to go with Donnie Darko. I’m a Donnie Darko stan, it’s a tradition in my house to watch it every Halloween. Swayze as a creepy, hate-able villain just demonstrates his acting chops!
Jackie Domenus (she/they) is a queer writer from South Jersey. Their first book, NO OFFENSE: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS, will be published with ELJ Editions in 2025. A 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop graduate, Jackie’s essays have appeared in The Offing Mag, The Normal School, Pidgeonholes, Foglifter Journal, Identity Theory, Variant Lit, Entropy, Watershed Review, Wig-Wag, Philadelphia Stories, HerStry, Not Deer Mag, and Bullshit Lit’s Second Anthology. Their poetry has appeared in Hooligan Mag and Giving Room Mag. Her short story “Mirror Image” published in So To Speak was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Jackie has formerly served as a publishing assistant at Guernica Magazine, an associate editor for Glassworks Magazine, and a contest coordinator for Philadelphia Stories. In early 2024, Jackie was a resident at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She earned her MA in Writing from Rowan University, where she also earned her BA in English. Jackie has taught through the Rutgers University Cooper Street Writing Workshops program, Blue Stoop, Hippocamp: A Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers, and more. They work as the Program Director for Fellowships at Mid Atlantic Arts.