Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Jennifer Lynn Barnes has been a teen model, a competitive cheerleader and was first published when she was nineteen years old.
She is now a PhD student at Yale where she researches animal cognition and teaches an undergraduate class called Human Nature, Sex and Evolution. Her latest book, Raised by Wolves, is out now in paperback.
Parul Bavishi: Jen, we’re getting pretty excited about your upcoming tour next month. How do you feel about it? What are you looking forward to? Is there anything you’re nervous about?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m so incredibly excited to be headed back to the UK! I spent a year there between undergrad and grad school and absolutely loved it, and the idea that my British friends will actually be able to get copies of Raised By Wolves in their own stores makes me really happy.
Add onto that the idea that I actually get to come over for a visit myself, and I’m ecstatic. I’m really looking forward to doing joint events with some other great authors, and to the blog party in London! I’ve heard rumors about an annotated and doodled ARC…
Parul Bavishi: Along with your publicist, you are going to be tweeting a behind-the-scenes exposé of a book tour on #JenLynnBarnesTour. How honest are you going to be?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I tend to be a stream-of-consciousness tweeter. So – very honest. You guys will probably know what I’m eating for breakfast before I do.
Parul Bavishi: You’re a PhD student at Yale, and before that you took a Masters at Cambridge and then an undergraduate at Yale. Whew! How much more studying remains?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m on my fourth year of five of my PhD program–so that means I have just under two years left, but I’m done with taking classes and done with my teaching requirements, so from this point out, ‘school’ consists almost entirely of doing my dissertation research.
Parul Bavishi: Raised by Wolves is your first UK publication – what is the story of its evolution?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’ve always loved werewolves, and I always had it in the back of my head that I’d write a werewolf book someday. Over the past decade, I’ve probably started four or five different werewolf books, but none of them were ever quite the fit for me as a writer.
Then, one day, I more or less woke up with the opening scene of Raised By Wolves in my mind – a human girl interacting with the alpha of the werewolf pack in which she lives – and I immediately knew that this was the right story for me, because that first chapter raised so many questions in my mind. If you were raised by werewolves, how human could you possibly be? What would that be like?
I’m a sucker for family stories, and right from the start, Raised By Wolves hit that square on – it’s about the family you’re born to and the one that you choose, the people who raise you and the friends you’d die for… and that was what made me want to see it through.
Also, Bryn is much more of a badass than I am, and as a result, writing from her perspective is quite a bit of fun.
Parul Bavishi: How many more books are planned?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m just wrapping up work on book two – Trial By Fire - which takes place about a year after the end of Raised By Wolves. I’m not sure how many books there will be in total – I’ve just started discussing that with my editor – but I think, in an ideal world, I’d want to do four: one a year every year from the time Bryn is fifteen until she’s eighteen.
In the US, that’s roughly the same amount of time that you spend in high school, and I like the idea of taking Bryn right up through ‘graduation’ into a more adult world.
Parul Bavishi: At Yale you help teach the Sex, Evolution and Human Nature class – what’s the one fact that always interests your students?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I think the thing the students find most interesting isn’t actually the facts, so much as one of the assignments. Every year (including the year I took the class as an undergraduate), the students are asked to design and run their own experiments on human mating behavior by using data already available on sites like Hot or Not or online dating services.
You come up with a hypothesis based on something in the animal world and then you look to see if your predictions are borne out in personal ads/attractiveness ratings/whatever. It’s fun seeing the similarities and differences between us and our closest non-human relatives first hand – especially since I write about werewolves, who fall halfway in between.
Parul Bavishi: I hear you used to be a competitive cheerleader – do you still have the pom-pom skirts? Do you still do any cheerleading? What role did you take in the cheerleader team?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m pretty sure my parents still have all of my old uniforms, but I can’t swear that they would still fit! I’m quite a bit taller than I was in my cheerleading days (though I was, at the time, already really tall for a cheerleader!).
As for my role in the team, I was what we call a ‘back spot’, which is basically what it sounds like – whenever we did stunts, I was the person at the back, guiding the ‘flyer’ (the person on top) into position and making sure that, no matter what happened, they never hit the ground.
Parul Bavishi: You used to model as well. What was the best bit about modelling?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’ve never been the type to wear much makeup or spend much time deciding what to wear, so the best bit about the modeling jobs I did was probably just the novelty of having people do those things FOR me. You’d just show up, and they’d do your hair and makeup and dress you, and I always had this moment of ‘Huh. So this is what I’d look like if I was more into this kind of thing myself.’
But ultimately, the downsides definitely outweighed the pros – I was always pretty thin, but there were always people who wanted me to be thinner, and I didn’t have a whole lot of tolerance for that kind of thing. One time, a scout made some critical comments about my hips and then asked if I’d ever ‘thought about exercising.’ I responded by telling him that I played two school sports, one club sport, and took ballet and jazz classes multiple times a week. And then I decided that I’d rather be doing more of THAT and less modeling.
Parul Bavishi: Being the author of seven teen novels, you must have taken part in your fair share of touring and signing. Is it a bit of a shock, switching from PhD researcher to celebrity teen author?
Jen Lynn Barnes: By this point, I’m so used to doing both that there’s not much of a shock involved in switching – though if I’ve been doing author stuff for a while, I do tend to go into withdrawal when I first get back and have to buckle down and start combing through data or going to talks.
The best thing, though, has been that people on both sides of my life are really supportive of the other – my author friends are always asking about my latest experiment, and my academic advisor is the first one in line to buy every new book.
Parul Bavishi: What do your friends and family think of your very successful hobby? Have they read all of your books?
Jen Lynn Barnes: My mother is my first reader – she’s read pretty much everything I’ve ever written (including the stuff I haven’t published). My dad reads them once they’re in book-form, and my brother has read a few of them (though Raised By Wolves is the only one that made him call me at three in the morning, the second he was done).
Parul Bavishi: What’s the most glamorous book related thing you’ve ever done or taken part in?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I recently went to a writing conference put on by the Romance Writers of America. One evening, there was a 500-author signing, where I was sitting very close to writers I’ve been reading (and loving!) since I was about twelve, but the most ‘glamorous’ part was probably the awards show. One of my friends was nominated, and they really treat it a lot like the Oscars – fancy dresses, acceptance speeches, celebrity presenters, and all!
Parul Bavishi: Do you ever Google your own name or get Google alerts on your books?
Jen Lynn Barnes: No comment. (Read: yes. All the time).
Parul Bavishi: You lived in England for a bit –what do you love most about the English? Did you ever try curry and chips?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I love curry and chips, but the thing I probably missed the most about England after I left (other than the people, of course) was just how beautiful it was. I was living in Cambridge, and I never quite got used to how much history there was there, or how I could just stroll down a street past buildings that had been there for seven hundred years.
Parul Bavishi: A serious question now – where do you see yourself in ten years? Best-selling author? Head of Yale Animal Cognition Department?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m so busy juggling my double life *now* that I don’t have a lot of time to sit around and think about the future. Ten years from now, I’d love to be a bestselling author. I’d also love to have discovered something about the way the mind works that nobody really knew before.
And somewhere in there, it would be nice to start thinking about a family and kids! For now, though, I’m more focused on next week.
JEN IN THE UK
If you’d like to meet this hugely talented lady, here’s an overview of her public events:
Sunday 3rd October
Bath Literature Festival, Guildhall, High Street, Bath, BA1 5AW
6-7pm Panel event with Maggie Stiefvater
Wednesday 6th October
Foyles Charing Cross
5.30pm
Thursday 7th October
Christopher Ingold Ramsay, UCL Lecture Theatre, 20 Gordon Street, WC1H 0AJ
5-7pm
ULU Creative Writing Society & Quercus present a talk on writing and publishing
Guest speakers Jen Lynn Barnes, Roisin Heycock, Children’s Editorial Director & Parul Bavishi Assistant Editor and Publicist.
Open to all with free entry and wine!
