Why cross-training is essential for creative writers - Jaclyn Desforges

Sheelagh Caygill
Apr 7
5 min read

Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of a short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine's Quill, 2026), a poetry collection, Danger Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020).

Author Jaclyn Desforges. Photo by Calvin Thomas. — Author Jaclyn Deforges. Photo by Calvin Thomas.

Flower (Anstruther Books, 2021), and a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020).She teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner and daughter. Jaclyn is working on her first novel, Eyelash Person, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Jaclyn discusses why cross-training is essential for creative writers, vulnerability, and the art of writing short stories.

Exploring themes in short stories

OCW: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

JD: The best part of writing a collection of short stories was watching my subconscious play in the mud. I worked on Weird Babies for five years, during which time my style grew and changed, my approach grew and changed. I was gobsmacked to witness motifs emerge organically from my subconscious mind and arrange themselves into themes.

Earlier on in my writing life, I thought I needed to write top-down, starting with theme and figuring the whole thing out before actually making a story. I think I was afraid to trust the process. But writing top-down never worked for me. Instead I followed the images and the patterns of those images became motifs – there is a lot of doubling in this book, there are miraculous quadruplets and children that split into two different versions of themselves, there are duplexes and mysterious gaggles of indistinguishable infants.

Nesting dolls appear structurally and also symbolically. It wasn’t until the book was all the way written that I realized what connected it all – there are literal weird babies in this book, yes, but the theme that truly anchors the collection is the idea of vulnerability, of longing, of the desperate need to be witnessed and cared for. I refer to this as the weird baby in each of us. I think I spent much of my twenties living through that part of myself – grasping at affection. Now, at thirty-seven, the weird baby in me is mostly fat and happy and quiet. But she shows up sometimes, howling, and after writing this book, I have a new and immense affection for her.

The evolution of the creative process

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

JD: Earlier in my writing life, I edited as I wrote because my writing had a dual purpose: I was A) trying to write a story and B) trying to prove to myself that I could write, that I was actually a writer. I couldn’t leave a messy sentence be – that would be proof that I was not a good writer, and I’d have to have a whole big feeling about it.

Sometimes I still feel like an imposter, but if I am an imposter, I am a very good one. So not only do I have the power to let a messy sentence sit, but I have the mental and emotional strength to let an entire NOVEL be a mess – I’m writing my first novel in this free and messy way and I am very impressed with myself and very proud of myself for getting to this point. Will I be happier when the novel is finished and neat and tidy? Yes, but for now I can leave it. And the benefit of leaving it is that I can write in a kind of trance state and just let the words come through me. I don’t have to get my logical mind involved. It’s much more pleasant.

Technology, connection, and the writing craft

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

JD: In terms of the human structure around writing/capitalism – I mean, it’s probably a threat? When I graduated from journalism school in 2011, it was at the tail end of a world in which you could and should make a dollar a word writing an article. The world has been trying very hard not to pay writers for a long time, and AI is definitely scooping up the work that I did early on in my writing career – ghostwriting, writing web copy, writing articles about the benefits of coconut oil or whatever.

On the other hand, I never much enjoyed that type of writing. And I think it’s pretty hilarious that I grew up believing it was somehow more responsible to go to journalism school and then do copywriting than it was to try to build a career writing weird poems and stories. And I think the fact that AI is taking over writing that’s conventional – I mean, it gives us an opportunity to be less conventional, doesn’t it? I think nowadays, the weirder you can be, the better. The more yourself you can be, the more human your writing can be, the more you’ll stand out in a sea of robotic prose.

My personal political opinion is that since AI was trained on the collective work of humanity, we should all get royalties from it, every single one of us, in the form of a robust UBI. And then we can write whatever we want. That’s what I would declare, were I queen.

OCW: Do you use social media to engage readers, writers, or publishers and, if so, which platforms?

JD: I like Instagram because I like posting selfies and collages. I’m not very strategic, I just try to show up. I also write on Substack because it reminds me of blogs circa 2010 (I hate the paywalls, though.) I have Facebook only so I can scroll through Facebook marketplace looking for chandeliers and ceramic birds.