Fiction & Essays
I am a slow writer. I think and then think again about my characters and what they do or refuse to do, what they say or what they keep to themselves. I savor the rawness of an edgy metaphor, the allure of an unexpected image. As Annie Dillard has said of writing, I follow a line of words. It is my epicure’s fork, my sculptor’s chisel, my park ranger’s chainsaw. My line of words clears a path I walk behind.
Sometimes I type a vignette for an essay, then read it over and delete it—a scrap of trash, burned. Often my writing is this way: two steps forward only to go back and erase my tracks. The times when I take just a single step back, I am revising. I move from pure creation to the real work of the writer: revision. Writing is revision. For just as a pianist must run her scales and practice her ballade or sonata or invention with one hand, one section at a time, a writer must work and then work again on the small stuff—this line of dialogue, that description. And when I can finally run the scales of my descriptions, dialogue, images, exposition, and everything else with ease and grace, then my ballade or sonata (my story, my essay) will come together—fantastic fusion. The work brushes beauty. It skims truth.
I do not write one kind of fiction or one genre of essay. As a reader, I enjoy Carver-like clarity as much as Morrison-esque complexity. I am fascinated by Garcia Marquez as much as Shakespeare, moved by Wordsworth as much as Winterson. Perhaps the only common element among my creative pieces is an abiding interest in heartache as well as in the landscape and weather of the Midwest. As my narrator says at the end of “A Very Short Story Begins on a Farm”: “For all that matters in any story is a character in fierce or quiet pain, and this place is perfect for violence and need and anger and loss. This is farmland, after all, the country’s heart—a thin topsoil over stones and raw clay.”
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Abandon
Short story in The Centrifictionist 2.2 (Fall/Winter 2021).
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Read The Centrifictionist’s Microinterview with J. Annie MacLeod here.
Daughter Mother Daughter
Short story in Story Magazine 10 (April 2021): 83–89.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
A Letter, Written by Hand, from Quarantine
Poem in Ecotheo Review 11 March 2021.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
The Now of Our Togetherness
Essay in How We Are 7 October 2020.
The Hot Thing
Essay in From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines.
Eds. Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls.
East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2016. 78–97.
A Clean Shot
Short story in Valparaiso Fiction Review 4.2 (Summer 2015): 34-39.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
American Gothic
Short story in PoemMemoirStory 14 (2015): 125-137.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Burn
Short story in Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal.
New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014.
Double
Short story in Versal: The Literary and Art Annual 10 (2012): 58–59.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Blink
Short story in So To Speak Summer-Fall 2009: 71–76.
Finalist for So To Speak Fiction Award.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Lip Service
Essay in Mama PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and the Academy.
Ed. Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. Piscataway, NY: Rutgers UP, 2008. 129–135.
A New Love Poem
Short story in Pisgah Review 3.1 (Spring 2008): 103–108.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Meiosis
Short story in Literary Mama Sept. 2007.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Gasoline
Short story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction September 2004: 130–141.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Fairytale
Short story in Another Chicago Magazine 42 (Spring 2003): 104–117.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
A La Cart
Short story in Roanoke Review 27 (Spring 2002): 71–92.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
A Cold Climate
Short story in Briar Cliff Review 13 (Spring 2001): 54–59.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
A Very Short Story Begins on a Farm
Short story in South Dakota Review 38.2 (Summer 2000): 29–31.
Finalist for Glimmer Train Short Fiction Award, 1999.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Static
Short story in The Cream City Review 24.1 (Fall 1999): 59–77.
Published under the pen name J. Annie MacLeod.
Allegro con Agitato
Essay in Ohio State Alumni Magazine (July/August 1995): 21–23.
About my pseudonym, J. Annie MacLeod:
I publish my fiction under a pseudonym, J. Annie MacLeod, which is actually an alternate version of my own name. "J" is for Jennifer, of course; "Annie" is my middle name, Anne; and "MacLeod" is my mother's birth name. While I was able to retain my father's birth name, Cognard, when I got married, I didn't want to lose the other half of my heritage, for I identify strongly as being from both French and Scottish extraction. Thus, my critical work is all published under Jennifer Cognard-Black, whereas my creative stories come from the pen of J. Annie MacLeod. These names also speak to distinct parts of my self and psyche: the more rational Cognard side, and the more emotional and creative MacLeod side. A little too Jekyll-Hyde? Well, perhaps that's why I read and teach so many monster books....