Author of the 2023 Sarton Young Adult Fiction Award Winner
Eat and Get Gas
Becoming a writer was not a goal for Jodi Wright, whose young adult novel Eat and Get Gas is a Sarton Award winner. It was a way to heal herself.
The author grew up in Tacoma, Washington—with an affable father who couldn’t hold a job and didn’t put his family first and a mother who had four daughters in five years and struggled with anxiety and depression.
“My childhood was not peaceful or secure, as my parents couldn’t control themselves; our house was a war zone,” recalls Jodi, adding that she found it difficult to answer questions about her early life because it’s so different from most authors she knows. “I was about 10 when I discovered the magic of drinking a beer before walking to school. My addiction progressed quickly, and by age 18, I knew I was in trouble but didn’t know how to stop.” And so it was that a few years later she ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where one of the nurses arranged for her to be admitted into a drug and alcohol rehab program.
“They detoxed, counseled, and introduced me to 12-step meetings,” says Jodi. At one of those meetings, Jodi says, she met a smart and wise woman, a feminist, educator, and writer who had been sober for many years. Jodi adds, “She taught me to read, write, behave better than I wanted to, and trust the process… and she insisted that I write my thoughts, dreams, and plans in a journal each day. She said people like us can write ourselves well, that we really never know what we mean until we write it down and read it out loud. I became a writer out of necessity; it wasn’t a childhood goal, as I knew I wasn’t good enough to be a writer or anything like it.”
That was in 1985. Jodi was 20 years into daily writing before she finally decided to have a go at writing a novel. It was 2017 when her first book, How to Grow an Addict, which she says loosely mirrors her own young life, was published.
During this period, she also wrote a flimsy draft of her award-winning book, Eat and Get Gas. The story, she says, was based on an idea that had been floating around in her brain for many years. “I grew up in the Vietnam era and knew a few who fought in Vietnam and then came home messed up. And when I was little, my grandma ran a roadside café and gas station, and some of the things I included in the book were close to what happened there, such as clam digging with my dad, the postal routes, and people’s infatuation with D.B. Cooper.”
Writing, Jodi says, was just something she did until she realized it was okay to write more than a few sentences in a journal, a realization that came from hanging out with other writers and meeting a few successful writers who were encouraging.
“My paying job is festival director, and one of the festivals I founded and directed for many years is our city’s writers’ festival. In 1997, Frank McCourt and Margaret Attwood were featured at the festival. I had read Angela’s Ashes but not Alias Grace and I was worried Margaret would ask me about it… I talked nonstop about everything except her book. After the session, she handed me a signed book and said: ‘You should write.’”
Jodi says she still can’t believe her book won the Sarton Award. “I’m amazed. They sent me a few gold stickers to put on book covers. I wore one on my coat for days.”
Her advice to other writers is to just write it. “You can sort out the details later… and you can also write yourself well.”
