Jay Halsey’s poems and prose have been published in several online and print journals and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and has lived on the Colorado Front Range for the past seventeen years. His photography has been used as cover art for poetry collections and novels, featured in fundraising campaigns for the Rocky Mountain Land Library in Fairplay, Colorado, and was part of a touring exhibit featured at libraries and bookstores throughout France to represent Editions Gallmeister’s American authors. The second edition of his photography and multi-form writing collection Barely Half in an Awkward Line was published by Agape Editions in November of 2023.
The book incorporates pieces written over the course of 14 years and photographs shot over a ten-year period. Jay and his partner Hillary Leftwich combed over literally thousands of photos in order to narrow it down to three shots per written piece. He told me that Hillary inspired the collection, noting that he “never had any intention to publish a book until she kept believing in me!”
Jay and I had a conversation about what it was like to work on Barely Half in an Awkward Line, and other aspects of his life.
Gina Tron: “I don’t think I’m the best writer in the world, but I do think it’s honest. That’s what I hope people get from it”: This quote of yours from Westword resonates with me personally. What does honesty mean to you in art and what struggles do you, and artists in general, have in achieving it?
Jay Halsey: For me, being honest in my writing and photography is simply about creating things I want to read and view. If I’m writing something or editing a photo that doesn’t slap immediately, I scrap it because I know I’m not doing it for me if I continue with it. And I personally don’t struggle with being honest in what I produce. That said, I feel like it shows—especially in creative writing—when someone is simply churning pieces that cater to the preferred styles or voices of respected journals. I just feel like one’s genuine voice is the most important tool in creating anything. I create for me, and I want to be my biggest fan so that I can fully connect with others on the same plain.
GT: I also find it interesting that while you emphasize and value honesty, Steven Dunn’s blurb notes that this book doesn’t capture images as they actually are but how they make you feel. Can you speak to emotional honesty vs tangible reality and its connection to this book and you as an artist?
JH: Feeling is everything to me, and expressing feeling organically is honest. My goal in photography is to express succinctly and fully, with one frame, how a scene felt in the moment I pushed that shutter button. I process photos to capture the essence of my emotions, which is never exactly how the scene looked in real life. Just because we portray something honestly from our hearts does not mean that portrayal is accurate compared to real life. The same goes for creative writing. If I write, “bruises slick beneath buzzing powerlines / the air sounded as horror looks,” that’s not necessarily accurate, but the reader understands the attempt I’m making to relate how I felt on a deep level in that moment. Hopefully! Haha!
GT: I know that many of the pieces formed years ago when you were struggling with alcohol and other hurdles. You have noted that you don’t necessarily want people to think this is where you are at in your life, personally. Writing and publishing are always so interesting because of how slow the process is. Even if it goes at the fastest case scenario, it captures a part of our past, not our current. And it’s always going to be outdated if we are to be evolving. How do you reconcile with this? I personally am always distraught and annoyed by this and keep writing to “chase” my current self.
JH: Oof! That’s a great question. I just hope readers don’t assume that every personal piece in every book they read speaks to the author’s current state of existence, you know? Outside of that, fuck it, I don’t even care anymore. We are writers, and there will always be projections and assumptions from readers that come with the territory of putting ourselves onto the page. I was hyper-concerned about what people might think of me after reading Barely Half in an Awkward Line, but I eventually stopped thinking about it because I have so many bigger and more important demons that occupy my head, that I am also writing about now!
GT: Some people refer to writing about the self as healing. Others say, not so much. What does it do for you?
JH: I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve experienced any sort of inner healing resulting from writing about past traumas. Maybe a sense of catharsis, which can be therapeutic, of course, but I’ve never felt healed from the action of writing alone.
Writing about myself, my less-than-shining past specifically, allows me to be vulnerable in ways that are difficult for me in my day-to-day life. I’ve grown to respect other authors who are also vulnerable on the page. Ultimately, that’s the stuff I connect with, and I also want others to be able to connect with my voice.
GT: Your book features photographs of run-down houses, concrete, trailer parks, and grit. What attracts you to these images, and what about them do you feel connected to?
JH: These places evoke what I know most about myself, or what I’m attempting to uncover and express about myself. It’s all selfish.
I romanticize anything that’s hard, or forgotten, and left to fester because of, and despite, its own devices. Like, when I’m out on the Plains shooting an abandoned house, I imagine the history of the people who once lived there. What lead them to bounce and leave that house. It’s all stories I’ll never know. I feel lonely, but also alive, with the ghosts of past. I feel a connection. When I’m shooting inside the city, I smell humanity; I feel the cracks in the pavement and concrete as result of the traumas endured from humans who are also cracked and hardened.
Like, so many people talk about the connections they experience in untouched nature where trees grow, and clean water flows, and even though I love being out there too, I don’t feel connected like I do in places that are worse off because of humans. It sounds terrible when I say it out loud, but it’s true. I love grit. I love the lies that become truth. It’s hard for me to put into words. I just experience a certain sentimentality in manmade destruction, even if I do sort of hate it in the same breath. And maybe that’s it for me: to find love for what I despise, because I am that too!
GT: Some of these images have negative or cold connotations in our capitalist society, but I would love to hear about the beauty you see in them/anything that dispels stigmas about class.
JH: Wow! I love that you see that! And I never intentionally went for that, but again, everything I shoot is instinctual. The beauty I find in expressing hard realities as a byproduct of unfettered capitalism is really a conglomeration of events that happened to me in succession when I moved to Colorado in 2007.
As someone who isn’t institutionally educated, my job choices were limited when I moved from Dayton, Ohio to Colorado. My first couple of jobs were working for places whose sole intention was to make money off people with a lot of money. I worked in a product warehouse, which wasn’t a bad labor gig, and then did sales (briefly) for an immoral company that sold goods they knew had huge issues for the consumers. I hated it so much. But during this period, I met and befriended a graduate student who was getting their MA in rhetorical theory and then eventually their PhD. They opened a world to me of philosophy that was critical on capitalistic structures. It played to the emotions I was experiencing at the time. I read more in those couple years than I had in my life until that point.
Fast forward, I took a gig at a nonprofit working with houseless folks. At the same time, I met and befriended a local photographer. So, talking to the people living on the streets—seeing them for who they are, and understanding/relating to them, helping them, knowing them—and then shooting with my friend, changed my perspective on a deeply emotional level.
I was able to see the beauty that came from the ugliness of a capitalistic society. I was able to apply humanness to it and express my hate with a softer heart. I found my aesthetic. And I wanted others to also see that beauty.
GT: In what ways did the Denver indie lit community shape you in your writing career?
JH: I wouldn’t have a writing “career” if it wasn’t for Dustin Hollandwho founded and helped run the showcase series Don’t Yell at Me. He invited me to read in March of 2015 in front of a live audience, and I was terrible! (Side note: I’m a lifelong stutterer, so I wrote short pieces specifically to read out loud that I’d be less likely to stutter over.) Anyway, he kept inviting me back, and I got better and better. This is how I met you, Steven Dunn, William Seward Bonnie, and amongst so many others, Hillary, who is the love of my life.
Then, once Hillary and I got together, she began featuring me for her At the Inkwell readings, and recognition just took off from there. I got an interview from Susan Froyd of Westword, which gave me the confidence to submit my writing to journals, etc.
And let me be completely honest, if it wasn’t for Hillary, I wouldn’t have published this book, and you and I wouldn’t be talking right now. Real!
GT: How long have you been fascinated with photographing masks (a prevalent theme in the book), and what do they mean to you?
JH: My Grandpapa, my mom’s father, had a mask hanging near his reading desk in his finished basement. It was a ritual mask from a cannibalistic tribe of the Luzon Island of the Philippines that he acquired when he was stationed there during the Korean War. He told me all about it. It represented a demon, and I was awed by it, right? Pure horror. I loved it, which made sense because he was responsible for my love of horror movies. A lot of horror portrays antagonists in masks. All about aesthetics for me.
In 2014, I discovered the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. His posthumous book, The Family Album of Lucybell Crater (1974) was full of photos of his family—wife and kids—in masks. Nothing about the portraits or scenes were specifically provocative, except that the subjects donned bizarre masks. Without the masks, the shots would have been good, but not bizarro art. Aesthetically, I was enamored immediately. Masks made boring interesting.
So, I ripped him off and began a self-portrait series of pig masks, which evolved into having my friends, and sometimes their kids, pose for me in masks in various innocuous locations.
The project eventually took on a deeper meaning beyond cool aesthetics for me. I found that a person’s essence wasn’t lost behind a mask, and instead, could be defined with the mask as an avenue of expressing what they might not have been able to express without the mask.
GT: You have one of the least pretentious bios I’ve ever read in a book. You mention in it, that you have not been educated formally beyond grade 12. I think this is wonderful to include. What led you to want to include this?
JH: You know, I wrote that bio when a piece got published in a “bigger” journal in 2017. At that point, I had a few friends highly involved in academia. I’d attend academic events, talk with academics, etc. Those experiences sickened me on palpable levels. I didn’t understand the pull, and I still don’t. This isn’t to say I don’t respect institutional education; I just don’t like the personas sometimes involved in academia. So, I made it a point to say I am not institutionally educated, which in no way assumes I’m not educated. Just not how academia views an education. Like, I want the “uneducated” (pfft!) to read my stuff. Those are my people, and I want them to know I am with them.
GT: The piece about your stepdad and his complexities struck me because it tackled racism and blue-collar attitudes in a sophisticated, personal, and thoughtful way. What feelings and complications came about while working on this?
JH: Shit. I had to confront so many truths regarding my relationship with him for years after he died in 2006, I went hard on all the positive attributes he held, which were all true. But then, 2020 hit, and that period allowed me to reflect on all the terribleness that still breathes darkness into this world. It forced me to think about my childhood with my stepdad, the bad he wanted to teach me, unintentionally maybe, and the positive aspects that became of me despite of, or because, his beliefs.
I loved him like he was my dad, because he was, but I felt like I also had to come correct with my biases of him, so that I could become a more honest person. I really hope I didn’t make him out to be a terrible human because he wasn’t in so many ways. He was just complicated, and I think it’s okay to be complicated. Existing is complicated. That was what I wanted to get across in that piece. He taught me so much that he meant to teach me. But he taught me so much more that he did not mean to teach me. That was a hard piece.
GT: When and why did you decide to include the first stanza of Ocean Vuong’s poem “Telemachus” in it, and at what point did this piece of straightforward essay become weaved with imagery of water and beaches?
JH: “Telemachus” struck me the first time I read it when Ocean Vuong released his collection. The lines, “like any good son, I pull my father out / of the water, drag him by his hair,” was such a precise representation for how I felt about my stepdad when I became or more thoughtful young adult before he died of pancreatic cancer.
I wanted to teach my stepdad what I knew despite what he thought he knew about societal ailments. But he was stubborn, and so stuck in his beliefs, I knew I could never “save him.” I knew I never “learned to swim” in his currents. So, when I talk about our time spent together beneath the grey skies of Southern Ohio, on the beaches of lakes in Shawnee State Forest, that was our one-on-one time. It just made sense to weave our time spent in the water into the relationship I wrote about in that essay. He supported me, he never let me drown, but I could never return that responsibility to him.
GT: Any interesting writing routines?
JH: I guess the only specific routine is that the older I get, the harder it becomes to write in our office space at home. I must write outside on the porch. I’ll write bundled up in a coat, hat, and fingerless gloves before I try to write inside. I’ve written during snowstorms, no joke. It’s so weird. I just want to be outside when I write. It helps my flow so much.
GT: What are you working on now?
JH: Hillary and I are in the process of collaborating on a photo/writing project. The photos are of her set in our working-class neighborhood, which will play as the central theme of the words we write to pair with the photos.
I’m also writing pieces for a new collection that are central to my childhood and young adulthood and the people from those years. So far, I’m leaning heavily into various forms of creative essay, and although the writing contains strong poetic elements, it’s mostly absent of straight-up poetry, which is a big shift from Barely Half in an Awkward Line.
GT: What challenges do you find while writing about your own life and the people in your life?
JH: The pieces are without a doubt, the most vulnerable material I’ve ever written to date. A lot of them involve my mom, the years she was married to my stepdad, the various men that were in and out of our lives, and all the struggles with her, and my own, chemical abuses. The subjects are hard to approach. They’re emotionally taxing and have caused bouts of depression. But also, because I want to be honest without exploiting anyone’s character for the sake of writing. That said, I have a deep love and respect for my mom from reconnecting with her after a twenty-plus year estrangement. There’s no blame, no negativity, just my truth and how I was impacted as a young person. I feel like there’s a lot of care displayed in my words, and I’m able to recognize the care she had for me despite her recklessness during those years. Had I tried to write these pieces without reforming a solid and loving relationship with her, I think my tone would be less vulnerable and more bitter and resentful. And that’s not the kind of material I want to put into the world when it comes to my family, especially my mom.
GT: What is a takeaway you’d love for people to step away with from Barely Half in an Awkward Line?
JH: That it’s okay to be flawed, and understand that our flaws can define our growth, or our decline. And that, either way, there’s no shame, just honesty. And that there’s always beauty to be found in honest expression, despite what we’re taught, despite judgment. That everyone can and should create art.
Gina Tron is the author of several books, including her newest memoir Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder. Interview Magazine called her debut 2014 memoir You’re Fine. “vibrant, darkly funny, and courageously candid.” Her 2020 debut poetry collection, Star 67, contains a poem that has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She wrote true crime for Oxygen for six years and wrote reported pieces for various outlets, including The Washington Post, VICE, Politico, and The Daily Beast. She is an adjunct professor at Norwich University in Vermont. You can find more of her work at her website: ginatron.net.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 