Jessie Hennen

For about a decade now, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has been one of the titles I’ll rattle off if asked to name my favorite novel. “Oh, it’s wonderful,” I always say, but when pressed, I’m usually unable to reveal much of the plot. “Well,” I’ll say, “it’s about – boarding school, you see, and the classics,…

A lot of noise has been made about the rough ride that this year’s high school seniors are having, and it’s merited. Their graduation ceremonies have been strange drive-through affairs, a parade of SUVs with the windows rolled up, black caps barely visible. Their parties have been tiny barbecues laced with a sauce of anxiety.…

There’s a certain form of silly Internet positivity – “Let’s flood the news feed with pictures of cats!” – that, well, I don’t want to accidentally take part in. So I’d like to clarify, before I begin, that this list is not that. It’s just something I started this morning. Possibly it’s that I turned…

I’ve spent most of quarantine trapped in my house, feverishly editing a book about a woman who is also trapped in her house. The heroine of my book – a person whose given name is Christina, but who has renamed herself, in a fit of vainglory, Patina – is an aspiring fantasy novelist. The reason…

One of the fantastic things about working at a bookstore – and there were not so many, but there were enough of them, enough that I did it for a year – were the many free books that came my way. Advance reader copies came in every day; they spilled over the shelf next to…

If you are, like me, a claustrophobic extrovert, coronavirus is hitting you hard. Not the disease itself, but the trapped-indoors-ness of it – especially coming off the heels of a long winter. Had this happened in January, I’d be toast. Thankfully, though, it’s mid-March (right? We’ve only been stuck inside for 3 days, and already…

McSweeney’s just rejected this because they get a lot of rejection-themed pieces (unsurprisingly), but I still think it’s funny, so I’m posting it here. Is it possibly based on a real-life letter I got this week?? Who knows! Anyway, at least I’m submitting stuff, right?     Dear Writer, First off, let’s just say: wow!…

This is just to say that I have been to the stats page where I can tell who has searched for me   and apparently there are lots of you lately   it is delicious so strange and so mysterious     *One of my favorite activities to do as a teacher is to make…

In a fit of decadence, I bought myself a ticket to Iceland from November 1-11. This was perhaps too long (as a Minnesotan I feel deeply guilty about having any kind of vacation at all, much less a week-and-a-half-long one), but in my defense I suffer horribly from jet lag, and also I had a…

Last weekend, I attended my first meeting of the wholly wholesome protest sect Extinction Rebellion. If you’re a government agent reading this, I’d here like to state that they are not, in any way, a terrorist organization, despite the fearsome name. This is a post about what they are instead. I think I suspected, while…