In “The Good Eye,” Jess Gibson Plays With Readers’ Perception

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There’s an incongruity in the way the characters in Jess Gibson’s debut short story collection, The Good Eye, see the world around one another. A woman needs the assistance of another woman, who, unbeknownst to her, is secretly harboring resentment against her. A caretaker stumbles across boxes in her elderly patient’s home that reveal details of the patient’s past life. A woman waits for her lover to return to her one afternoon, not knowing the unfortunate circumstances of his long delay. 

Gibson likens the process of writing the stories that appear in The Good Eye to a kind of puzzle. “I get a lot of pleasure from a clue or a hint or a plot twist or a red herring,” she tells me. Gibson talks to me about the process of bringing together a decade of her short stories for The Good Eye, studying art history, and advice from her mother.

I read that you initially studied art history. What was it that drew you to study art initially? 

I loved studying art history. I think maybe because I feel like it's another way of doing history and cultural studies. Looking at what is produced in a particular time, by a particular culture, what they look like, what anybody at a moment is making. And I'm interested in history, but the actual history classes I took in college were kind of factual and dates and political events, and that draws me less than like what the feeling of a time and a place, and what were people making. So I think maybe that's what I was drawn to initially, studying art history. Certainly, when I was teaching it, one of the things I was thinking a lot about was the way that we see, because in a classroom, when I had a group of students in front of me, they would all look at the same thing and see something slightly different. So we don't all perceive things the same way, and trying to figure out how to put into words how it is that I or you or somebody else is actually literally seeing something and thinking about what it means. We also bring ourselves to interpretation. So the idea that there's like some singular and correct way to see an art object — obviously, there are facts, like when it was made and who made it. But the interpretation of it is this kind of interesting, mutable thing that is also about the looker. 

That brings us perfectly to The Good Eye, which, by the description, talks about how these short stories are connected through the idea of perception. So what was it about that theme that you wanted to explore in this collection?

Well, there are a lot of people in this collection who are not perceiving things the same way as other people, and that's also happening in relationships. There are misperceptions. There are people who are fooling themselves, being fooled, or being deceived. So there's that kind of plot element that I'm obviously interested in.

Does the disconnect in the way people perceive things excite you or frustrate you? 

As a plot point, yeah. In life, it's frustrating, but at the same time, I don't want everybody to see everything the same way. That would be a weird monoculture. In an interpersonal way, in real life, it's frustrating. In stories, it's interesting to explore.

 You said you started working on The Good Eye during COVID, so when did the idea initially come to you? 

Oh, I'd written a lot of the stories before COVID I just hadn't really finished them. I had been writing them here and there. So I had been kind of collecting stories somewhat accidentally, and during COVID was a quieter time for me, obviously. We had moved in with my mom. She was eighty. We were in Canada, which was a bit more locked down, I think, than the States in terms of going outside. But I was also like, no one's going outside. We're with my mom, who's in a wheelchair, and I had a little kid. So it was this kind of a quieter time in which I had more time in a way. That's when I did the finishing of the stories, but I had written quite a few of them before. 

What brought you to writing after years in the art world?

I've kind of always been writing. I started finishing them right after the death of my father. My father was a pretty decisive person who wouldn't have had a stack of finished short stories and just been put in a box. He would've done something or would have encouraged me to. So, not consciously, but looking back on why it happened right around then, I would say that's probably why. 

You dedicate this collection to your parents. Do you worry about being misperceived as a daughter of famous authors Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson? 

Yeah, I mean, I'm fifty now, as of, like, last week, so there's a reason why I didn't do this when I was twenty-five. I understand that that's gonna come with the territory, and it's just, I don't know, it just is what it is. It's not that I don't care what other people think. It’s not that that has gone. It's not that I'm like, "Whatever." But my understanding of myself is, I know who I am outside of that. And I think that I'm also not on social media really. I don't know what to say about that. It obviously has advantages and disadvantages that are gonna come. It's just kind of a fact, I guess. I have a very good relationship with my parents, and they're just my parents. I mean, one of them's dead, but I still have a good relationship with them. I don't know if I have anything brilliant to say about that really. But if I was going to publish these stories, I was gonna have to be kind of okay with that.

What were her thoughts when you finished The Good Eye?

Apparently, the only thing that she noted was like, "I think you need to go through and add a couple more commas." And to put the microphone next to me when you’re doing a public event. My own grandmother, so my mother's mother, was a very good model. I think all she ever said was, "How wonderful, dear." I think as a parent myself, if my kid brings home a drawing, I'm not like, "Mm, I kinda think there's an empty spot over here," and like, you've failed to represent things correctly. Like you would never do that much to your child, I don't think, or I wouldn't. What I say is like, "I love this drawing. Can I put it on the fridge?"

A lot of the stories end on ambiguous notes. “Cushion Cut” in particular was one where I was like, wait no, come back! 

I mean, what's gonna happen in that story is that she's gonna wait and wait and wait in the sun, and he's not gonna come. And so she's just there. I like there to be like a couple of beats after the story that are not written. When it's successful — I'm sure that not all of them are equally successful here — but when it's successful, what I would find fun as a reader is to walk around after going like, "but what happened? was it this? Was it that?" I mean, the other thing about life and other people is that you're never going to understand everything. And that’s one of the reasons we read. There was a study recently that people who read extensively had scored better on empathy tests 'cause they were used to putting themselves inside other people. You imagine yourself as someone who's not you. I kind of firmly believe that this allows us to go around in the world with a better ability to be like, "What would it be like to be that person?" But at the same time, we just don't ever get the kind of certainty, and I find that the place of uncertainty to be interesting.