Jayne Benjulian grew up in Westchester, New York, but lived many lives before returning to the East Coast and making a home in the Berkshires. She served as chief speechwriter at Apple, investigator for the public defender in Washington, director of new play development at Magic Theater, lecturer in the Graduate Program at San Francisco State, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in France. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Agni, Barrow Street and The Cortland Review. Her debut poetry collection, "Five Sextillion Atoms," was published in June. To find out where Jayne is reading and teaching next, visit her events page. I have always been a writer; the first things I remember writing were letters to myself when I was about nine years old. I would slip them under the mattress and leave them there for weeks or months so I could find them later and understand who I'd been. I'm still interested in how people become who they are, and I often think of life backwards; I read The New Yorker backwards, too. After I got my graduate degree in English, I worked at Apple and built its speechwriting department. Then I had a job in branding in Silicon Valley, but I always knew I would cut the cord and write on my own. After I left Apple, I taught theater and writing, and as a dramaturge I developed new plays in San Francisco. I always thought the saddest thing was a dramaturge who wanted to write her own plays. There's a lot of crossover between writing drama and writing poetry, a lot of left-brain right-brain thinking. When I teach, I encourage poets and fiction writers to think about theater writers and how they use silence, and encourage them to borrow from other genres. It's all about craft and how you can shake up your voice or approach your art from other viewpoints.
Before I moved here I looked at Vermont and the Pioneer Valley, but when I left California I said I wanted to live somewhere really beautiful. I moved to Housatonic 15 months ago, and I realized right away how lucky I was to live in such a remarkably open artistic community. I met Deb Koffman on the street the first day I moved here, and I was quickly invited to read my work. There are so many artists here, and the expectations for work are high, and I like to try to meet a high bar. My second collection has to make a leap from my first. I love to hike and like to stop the car and just look. At first I was terrified of winter after living in California, but now I love it. My work is changing because of where I am now. I'm still interested in how a life was shaped, but I also will spend time on my deck, sitting and watching, with no expectations of what I'll see. We have a fox family that lives here, a porcupine, groundhogs, bees and hundreds of birds. Our garden was decimated last year by wild animals, but then I thought, well, they were here first. We made a good decision moving here; this area really suits me.
