Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson is the author of four novels, Wide Blue Yonder, The Woman Driver, My Wisdom, and City Boy, released in January 2004, and three short story collections, Little Face and Other Stories, The Gasoline Wars, and Who Do You Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book.

Wide Blue Yonder takes place in Springfield, Illinois and finds protagonist Josie Sloan, a 17-year-old girl, bored, cynical, and longing for something more. But much is stirring underneath the seemingly dull surface of her town, where “you could wipe down the sticky counter of the Taco Bell for the twentieth time so the same fly could keep landing on it.” Thompson, who describes Springfield as “the place where weather lived,” uses weather and natural disaster as a environmental backdrop to suggest the complexity that lies beyond the surface of life.

Who Do You Love, a collection of stories about unrequited love, presents the reader with the same sense of impenetrability. As Elle magazine’s Lisa Shea explains, “Thompson’s characters remind us that who and how we love is life’s greatest mystery.” The stories in Who Do You Love, about such topics as war veterans, kidnapping, flings, and futile jobs, are witty and heartbreaking, powerful and unpredictable.

“Thompson's unpretentious clarity pays off most rewardingly in stories that expose their characters gradually to the unforeseen consequences of their actions.” —Kirkus Review

“[Who Do You Love is] a beautiful book, but a hell of a sad one...The best stories here are so sympathetic and true that they glow a little.” —Jeff Niles, Newsweek

“Wide Blue Yonder offers precisely the kind of beautifully crafted, intelligent, imaginative writing that serious readers crave....Each sentence deserves to be appreciated.”
—Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

“Wide Blue Yonder reaffirms Thompson’s stature as one of our most lucid and insightful writers.” —Andrew Roe, San Francisco Chronicle

Thompson began her writing career with short stories. “I loved the form,” she says. “It’s like trying to fit everything into one kind of box, all the things that you need for a piece of fiction.” At the same time, she enjoys writing novels, where she has “the opportunity to give…abstract ideas features and flesh, make them move and talk and surprise us.”

Volunteer work is an important part of being a writer for Thompson, who teaches English to migrant workers. Through these experiences, Thompson begins to “see how people construct the narrative of their lives…It’s fascinating to see where their stories begin, how they foreground the incidents of their lives.” Thompson’s attention to the lives of others is expressed in her own writing, where she avoids writing about herself and instead attempts to understand others. “We all pretend to be people we aren’t in our fiction,” she says. “Who wants to be themselves all the time?”

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Mademoiselle, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prizes. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jean Thompson will teach a fiction workshop at the 2004 conference.

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