The Wild in Pau
On Thursday 1st of June, we met an American author, Jamey Bradbury, who spoke to us –students of 1ère and Tle LLCE Anglais- about her first book and her life in Alaska’s cold for a full hour. We asked her questions about her career, her book and her life in Alaska as part of the second edition of the Festival “Ecrire la Nature” or Writing the Wild.
In her first novel entitled The Wild Inside published in 2019, she tells the story of eighteen-year-old Tracy, a young woman living in Alaska with her father and younger brother.
First, we learned that she isn’t a full-time author, but a person working multiple jobs at a time (she said she had 16!!!!): she does social services for the Natives of her state and teaches a creative writing class in a women's prison in Anchorage. Thanks to that, she can pass on her knowledge and her passion to people who need to escape reality.
Moreover, she did a lot of other jobs when she was younger: she worked at a police station and she was also a waitress, among several other occupations. She also volunteered for the Iditarod sled dog race in Anchorage, where she took care of the dogs before the departure. Speaking about dogs, she has a friend who wants to become a musher and has 20 sled dogs, and once Jamey had to take care of all of them for a whole weekend, and it was a really exhausting experience.
About her writing process, she wakes up at 5 every morning and usually writes for two hours before going to work. She also expressed the need to take breaks from writing sometimes, and how not writing for a day or two could ease the writing of a book, at least for her. By the way, she has been writing another book for 2 years, a horror story involving witchcraft that we are looking forward to reading.
Jamey also told us that she did not expect her book to get so popular as to get Telerama’s “Monde Étonnants Voyageurs” prize and get invited to “Ecrire la nature” in our region as well as to other festivals.
“We all really enjoyed the time spent with her, she was the most human and sweetest author we met and we even took a photo together (you can find it on her instagram @jameybee).”
“She was highly interested in answering all our questions and even asked about our opinions and tastes regarding literature genres.”
“Even if it is very cold in Alaska, she really made us want to go there because of how passionate she is about the place.”
“She was very enthusiastic and she answered our questions with a big smile. She always said “that’s a great question!!”.”
“Jamey was open to every subject and didn’t have any issues with evoking topics like menstruations which is still considered as a taboo.”
“By the end of the conference, we had the chance to chat with Jamey: we mainly talked about our favorite horror movies, series… as we were all fond of it. So we got some good recommendations in the horror genre.”
“Jamey is a really impressive woman, and she answered our questions with incredible kindness and humor. This allowed us to be comfortable around her and feel as if we were speaking with a friend.”
“One of the experiences she mentioned was how basic survival skills were really useful when you have to go on a trek to the mountains of Alaska because you never know what can happen and bringing a few things necessary for your survival can really help.”
“Every answer she gave us was well developed, clear and punctuated with her reminding us that we could do whatever we want in life.”
