Jennifer Niesslein runs Full Grown People, a web magazine of essays for men and women transitioning through the issues of adulthood. Photo: Emily Moroné
Woman, interrupted
Jennifer Niesslein explores midlife transitions through writing and a web magazine
In 2012, writer and editor Jennifer Niesslein published her last issue of Brain, Child, a literary magazine devoted to essays about motherhood. Co-founded in 2000 by new moms and former C-VILLE Weekly staffers Niesslein and Stephanie Wilkinson, the publication won accolades like a notable mention in Best American Essays 2002 and a Pushcart Prize before being sold to a longtime reader.
“After that I went through this weird thing,” Niesslein, 41, said in a phone interview. “It was almost like I was selling my identity. At that point my child was going on 13, and I was no longer in the intense years of motherhood, and I didn’t have a motherhood magazine anymore. I thought ‘Ugh. This is another one of those awkward stages.’”
So began Niesslein’s next project, a web magazine of essays called Full Grown People (The Other Awkward Age). Its audience is women and men like herself, ones transitioning through the issues of adulthood.
“I think there’s a lot written about youth, but there’s quite a bit left for people who are in the thick of their lives,” she said.
A supporter of VIDA, the organization that quantifies gender disparity in literary publications and book reviews, Niesslein helps level the playing field for all underserved writers by creating platforms for their work. Just as Brain, Child was unique in offering “a cerebral experience [to mothers] rather than service and instructional articles typically found in parenting magazines,” according to Media Bistro, Full Grown People offers a singular home for nonfiction essays by midlife writers.
But her work is more than a political exercise. “I get a lot of insight by reading other people’s stories of how they’ve dealt with these milestones in their lives,” said the self-described “fangirl” of great writing. “When you’re reading an essay, there’s no argument there. It’s an empathy-building exercise. I’m stealing this quote from [children’s book author] Brian Doyle, but, ‘Bad personal essays are about the writer, and good personal essays are about all of us.’”
Niesslein said she writes to make similar discoveries. “If I already know the answer to something, I’m probably not going to write about it,” she said.
In her early 30s, she began tackling problems like decluttering, finance, marriage, and motherhood using self-help advice and wrote a memoir, Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Journey Through the World of Self-Help—and Back.
Now that she’s seen the hard stuff up close, her writing has changed to suit. “My latest piece is about when my brother-in-law died last year,” she said. “I thought the essay [published in Full Grown People as “The Family Versus the Grief Glommers”] was about a family dynamic, but it turned out more about my helplessness in trying to soothe my sister.”
Niesslein knows that the awkward years have strong appeal, at least for the right demographic.
“People either get it immediately or just get confused,” she said. “When I tried to explain what I did [with Brain, Child] to a guy here in town, he said, ‘So mommies write poems about their kids and you publish them?’ At some point I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ Because he was never going to get it.”
For Niesslein, life in Charlottesville (which includes her 15-year-old son and her husband, Brandon Rose, who performs around town with Zuzu’s Hot Five) plus work at the helm of a magazine equals the end of at least one transition. “Full Grown People is growing, and I plan on coming out with our first anthology this year,” she said. “I’m in this for the long haul.”—E.D.