Jaya Saxena on Giving Ourselves Permission

Not to get too meta in an intro, but if curiosity and love for people fuels a good interview, an interview with Jaya Saxena is like opening an infinite portal—the Wikipedia page that leads to other Wikipedia pages that lead to fifty-two open tabs on a browser and three hours of time truncated into moments.

Sure, we’re talking about crystals today. But mostly, we’re talking about people, the objects we imbue with magic to in order to survive, and trying to create while trying to survive in 2021. So take a mental walk back to New York 2015, past the quiet sizzling of the 10 a.m. hot dog stands on Central Park West, reach into your jacket pocket and decide what you would donate as General Admission to the Museum of Natural History right now to feel the grey carpet, hear the sloppy murmurs of teens “secretly” making out, and bask in the shine of the Hall of Gems and Minerals. We’ll meet you there.

Jaya Saxena is a writer and editor from New York City. She is currently a staff writer at Eater.com. Her writing has appeared in GQ, ELLE, The New York Times, The Toast, The Daily Dot, The New Yorker, Racked, Catapult, and others. She is the co-author of Dad Magazine (Quirk Books, April 26, 2016), the author The Book Of Lost Recipes (Page Street Publishing, June 14, 2016), and the co-author of Basic Witches (Quirk Books, August 29, 2017). She is the author of Crystal Clear: Extraordinary Talismans for Everyday Life, out now from Quirk Books!

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Mallory Soto: I don’t know when or where you’ll be answering these questions, but I can't seem to start these interviews without checking in. So: What’s up? How was your week? How is your 2021 going so far?

Jaya Saxena: I’m answering these questions from my couch in my apartment, which I barely leave except to either work at my “desk” (the dining table) or to sleep. Life is going well by pandemic metrics, I think. My parents and grandparents have all gotten their first vaccines, and my partner was just made eligible, so I’m starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

My book came out in the last week of 2020, so it basically came out in 2021, and it’s at once thrilling to have it out in the world and very annoying to feel like all I can do is scream at people from my little corner of the internet about it. But still, I have the security of work, the fulfillment of my relationships, and mostly the wisdom to keep those things separate, and that’s pretty good.

MS: “We tell these stories with crystals and incense and chants because we want to create ourselves. To make other people see us and treat us the way we want them to, we have to see ourselves that way first.” Your book has such amazing depth. You’re never just giving readers rock facts. You explore human nature and the ways we cope with existing, while examining your own relationship to each stone. Was that energizing or exhausting, exploring so much within and without? Do you feel like you’ve created yourself here?

JS: I know it’s corny but sometimes I look back at the book and can’t quite remember how I did it. Like I remember all the days sitting at my laptop, going through research, pacing my living room until an idea crystalized, talking with my writing group about where I was stuck, and somehow it still doesn’t add up into “you wrote a book” for me.

It was definitely energizing, because so much of writing Crystal Clear was this pursuit of answering questions for myself. The essays began because I was both annoyed and curious about the vagueness of descriptions of crystals—like how they all said “according to ancient myths” or something. Which ancient myths? Who said that? But I also really wanted to explore what’s actually fascinating about crystals to me, which isn’t really crystals themselves but the human desire to externalize metaphor and place meaning in objects, which in turn we use to give ourselves permission to do things.

If you pick up a crystal that’s supposed to help you feel creative and suddenly your writer’s block is gone, it’s not the crystal that did anything—it’s you using an object to allow yourself to think differently. And I want to be clear, this isn’t a bad thing. I’m fascinated because we do this with so many things, whether it’s wearing a lucky sweater or listening to a particular song every time you get dumped. We like creating ritual and I wanted to talk about that—and crystals were just a framework to write essays that interrogate some common human desires and fears.

Where it did run up on exhausting was sometimes realizing how much of my own relationship to those desires or fears I still had to unpack. I had to look at some core beliefs I held and ask myself if I still wanted to hold them. Like anyone, I’m still a work in progress, but I do think writing this book helped me understand myself better.

MS: It’s 8 a.m. on a sunny fall day—jacket weather. You had plans, but they’ve been canceled. The laundry is done. You are not on a deadline. Bills have been paid. Everyone’s social distancing as dutifully as teens slow-dancing at Catholic school prom. Where do you go and what do you do with your day?

JS: It’s a tough decision between calling my friends to see who wants to have a picnic with me and just taking a walk. I am both desperate for the energy of other people and for alone time nowhere near my laptop. As a teenager, I spent a lot of weekends just walking around with my Walkman, headed nowhere in particular, and even that feels like such a luxury right now. But I’d also happily text everyone I know to see who wants to bring some wine and sandwiches to Central Park and just lay in the sun with me.

MS: Can you talk about an experience in life that cemented how powerful words could be?

JS: Sometimes I worry I’m not built like other writers because I don’t always feel enamored with the written word. I’m a slow reader and there are like four poems that I like, and I always feel a little distant when other people talk about how their sole childhood joy was reading. I mean, I read a lot! But I wasn’t that kid who never left her room or always had her nose in a book.

Clearly I’m being defensive here, but sitting with this question, I realize I did have a lot of formative experiences with how powerful words are, but they weren’t with books, but with music. I didn’t always have my nose in a book, but I almost always had a CD player with me. As a kid, I plastered my wall with index cards with my favorite lyrics written on them, and followed along with the liner notes with every CD I bought. Lyrics stay with me in the way paragraphs never do, and maybe that’s because writing a powerful song feels foreign and magical to me, whereas I’ve seen myself write a beautiful sentence.

In general, I think about every breakup or bad day that a certain song or album got me through. There are probably a hundred pop-punk songs from my teenage years I could quote, or the entirety of Fiona Apple’s discography. And of course, a theater kid at heart, there’s anything Stephen Sondheim. About once a month, I listen to “Being Alive” and just sob.

MS: How do you stay focused and present day to day—whether on writing, other work, or just existing—in this pandemic?

Not well! Every day is different, as it always was, but the differences seem more pronounced in the pandemic. Some days, I wake up and have all the energy and focus and finish all my work by noon, and some days I realize I’ve been playing Pokémon Sword for three hours. I keep lists and try to take things step by step, and to forgive myself if I’m overwhelmed, but there are just as many days where I blame myself for not being as productive as I think I should be. Sometimes I do use crystals or pull a tarot card to check in with myself; taking even ten minutes to actively think about my feelings and ask myself questions definitely helps. But also, I’ve been taking a lot of baths.

One thing that has always helped for me though is getting at my work right when I wake up. I’m not a 5 a.m. riser with a set ritual for work by any means, but if I wake up at 8 a.m. and I’m at my laptop by 8:30, my brain hasn’t really turned on enough to be filled with more distracting thoughts and I can just start doing, instead of wondering what’s happening on Twitter or answering all my text messages.

MS: Because I’ve read so much of your work on Eater, you're now one of the writers I trust the most with crystals, self-knowledge, and cuisine. So readers must know: Have you ever had rock candy, and if so, what is your review?

JS: A friend and I made a plan that when all this is over, I’m going to have the book release party I didn’t get, and it’s going to be entirely crystal themed. The Crystals on the stereo, jewel tones and crystals dress code, and it’s going to involve a ton of rock candy. Like, rock candy garnishes on all the drinks, and one of those big geode cakes they can make now. I know rock candy is just exciting sugar, but it’s great and I’d give a limb to feed it to all my friends right now.

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