Meet Jennifer Windsor!
Welcome to our latest BALLER Profile! Every Wednesday you can look forward to reading interviews with authors, publishing professionals, library people, readers, and more. This week it is my pleasure to introduce you to my friend, designer and writer and all around wonderful human, Jennifer Windsor!
Winston: So for our patrons who have not yet had the privilege of meeting you, could you please introduce yourself and a bit about your connections to the bookish world?
Jennifer: Hello! My name is Jennifer Windsor, of the Saskatchewan Windsors lol. I am a graphic designer by day and a reader and writer by night. I have an undergrad degree in Fine Arts, in Visual Communication and Design, and then in 2016 I earned an MA in Humanities Computing studying the future (and the past) of the book. Weirdly, and I swear not by design, most of my friends are librarians.
Winston: So where did the bookishness of this very bookish life get its start?
Jennifer: As a little, little kid – I don't think I had started Grade 1 yet, but I knew how to read – I had access to some 1960s and 70s Rupert Bear's adventure books that my grandmother had brought from Britain and had been in the family for ages. I loved those books! I remember one day in particular, sitting in a comfy chair reading them by a window and it was pouring rain outside and inside was all cozy and warm. And then, I don't know what happened, but I forgot all about Rupert Bear for the better part of my life until recently, when I came across something that reminded me of him again. I mentioned it to a friend who just today gifted me a Rupert Bear story collection book. I realized this afternoon that that one memory of sitting with the Rupert Bear story book is the high I am always chasing (and often catching) when I sit down with any other book: diving into an adventure of one sort or another, the comfort, the pleasure, the escape, the reverie. Oh and sometimes knowledge, and dare I say, even wisdom too. Or fear: I’m also in a horror book group we call Fright Club.
Winston: Now I’ve known you mostly as a designer but you mention also being a writer, and I happen to know that includes being a Story Slam champ (Editor’s Note: you can learn more about Story Slam here). Congratulations on your Story Slam successes! So what’s it been like moving from the design side to the “content creation” side of storytelling?
Jennifer: I came to writing during COVID. I was both anxious and bored and was looking for a creative outlet that wasn't visual in nature – something out of the ordinary for me. I ended up taking a Creative Writing course with three friends through the Faculty of Extension with the incomparable Wendy McGrath, and it was just great. Wendy had the magic touch for, on one hand, giving good honest, critical feedback and, on the other, being generous with encouragement. After the class ended a group of us spun it into a little writing group that still meets every two weeks to write and share our work – it's wonderful. In Write Club, as we call it, we often use writing prompts to trigger writing efforts and I found these often resulted in short short stories that were exactly Story Slam length. I started competing almost two years ago, and it's still so terrifying to get up on that stage and share my writing (even though it's a kind and generous crowd), but I have won five times. I have also hosted a couple of times, which is considerably less nerve-racking.
Winston: I love that story for so many reasons! So what’s been your favourite thing about being a storyteller?
Jennifer: I am constantly amazed at how often I start writing one story and end up with something completely different. My first Story Slam win, for example, started out about playing Barbies with the neighbour kids and ended up being an examination of my dating history. Luckily, I got a lot of laughs from it.
The very act of writing something down helps me work through my memories and discover truths I wouldn't have considered otherwise. Through Story Slam I have realized that the more honest my writing is, the better quality it is, so I stick to creative non fiction. I've also learned that, inexplicably, the more specific I am, the more universally it is received, the better the audience can relate to it.
Winston: Okay, switching gears from writer to reader, what are you reading now? Have you got anything on your TBR pile or recommendations list that you want to share with our patrons?
Jennifer: You know, it's strange that I prefer writing creative non-fiction but I prefer reading fiction.
Right now I'm not reading anything – just working a little too much! But I have some books lined up for when I get through this busy spell. One is Klara and the Sun by one of my very favourite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro (who wrote my favourite book of all time, The Remains of the Day). And I have Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead lined up as well.
As for recommendations, I have so many, but really I believe everyone has to find their own books in their own time. But if… IF… I were to recommend a book that I read recently, it would be I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell – it's beautiful and astonishingly full of life. I swear reading her near-death experiences made me love my own existence that much more dearly.
Winston: Oo, I loved Klara and the Sun… good choice. Now, what about a favourite bit of bookish fact or trivia?
Jennifer: Well in grad school, in order to know where books are going, you also have to examine where they came from. And as a graphic designer and ardent typographer it's the same: you have to look to history. So from both of these areas of my life I learned that the written word in books was never meant to be read silently! Because originally there were so few people that knew how to read, writing and books were intended to be shared with an audience, or more likely, a congregation. In those days, reading silently was considered freakish, an impressive trick. Then, with the advent of the printing press in Europe in the mid 1400s, books became more affordable and it was stylish to own them privately, so more people were able to learn to read as a private, silent activity.
Winston: I’m having so many thoughts about the shushy librarian stereotype but that’s not a topic for now lol. And there’s so much more we could chat about, but to wrap things up for now, any other projects, bookish or otherwise, that you wanted to share with us? What’s coming down the pipe for you?
Jennifer: I'm just working on my writing. I'd like to get in the habit of writing a little, even just ten minutes, every day. I don't want to make any big plans, like a novel or whatever – that's too intimidating for me. Just a little bit every day. Practice, practice. Oh and the Grand Slam, the Story Slam where all the year's monthly winners compete against each other, is coming up March 20, 2024, so I should probably prepare something for that!
Winston: And I know there’s also one last monthly Story Slam coming up before that on Wednesday, February 21, 2024! Well good luck with Story Slam and the Grand Slam, and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us!
And thank you, dear patrons, for joining us as well! We’ve included buttons below that link to Jennifer’s website as well as the Edmonton Story Slam website. And we hope you’ll join us again next week for our next BALLER Profile!
But in the meantime, Happy Reading!
– Winston
