A CONVERSATION WITH JOCELYN JANE COX, AUTHOR OF MOTION DAZZLE by Abby Alten Schwartz • Cleaver Magazine

Interview by Abby Alten Schwartz
**A CONVERSATION WITH JOCELYN JANE COX, AUTHOR OF MOTION DAZZLE (Vine Leaves Press)**

Motion dazzle: a form of camouflage found in nature, where high-contrast patterns, like a zebra’s stripes, confuse predators by distorting the perception of a moving animal’s direction and speed.

In Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice, author Jocelyn Jane Cox throws a zebra-themed first birthday party for her son while her mother lies in a hospital bed at the end of her life. A former competitive figure skater and coach, Cox has long relied on distraction as a coping mechanism and draws on the skills she honed dazzling judges while masking the pain of her injuries. In this interview with writer Abby Alten Schwartz, Cox delves into the themes that link the storylines in her book and the thinking behind her narrative choices.

Abby Alten Schwartz: In Motion Dazzle, the theme of distraction as a means to survival informs the unique structure of your book. By focusing on the details of your son’s first birthday party, you allow the reader to feel your conflicted attempts to distract your mind from where it wants to go—to your mother’s hospital bedside, three hours away. You could have postponed the party. What drove your decision to have it—and to execute it with such care?’

Jocelyn Jane Cox: I was definitely doing something that was part of a tradition, and I may have been leaning into that even more because she couldn’t be there. I was essentially bringing my mother to the party by doing it in her way. And I was extremely aware of the ways that she did parties—it was never about extravagance; it was about attention to detail. She would make little dolls as souvenirs. Everything would be homemade. It was a level of effort that not everyone wants to go to, but everyone notices. Whether or not I would’ve gone this big had she been there, I don’t know. I imagine I would have because we would have been doing it together. But I was absolutely distracting myself and using [the party] as a coping mechanism.

Abby: “Motion Dazzle” is a fitting description for figure skating, which not only required incredible discipline and athleticism but also sparkly costumes and choreography. How did figure skating serve as a means of distraction or survival following your parents’ divorce?

Jocelyn: Figure skating was a way to prove that we were okay as a family, even though our family had been broken. We were doing something “important and all-encompassing,” training alongside Olympians. I think that my mother, my brother, and I all felt we had something to prove after going from this perfect, all-American family to being suddenly—and to me, very surprisingly—broken.

Abby: One of the themes of your book that resonated with me, both as a reader and a writer, was the concept of duality. Motion Dazzle reveals the duality of joy and pain. You write, “I’d known for a long time that opposing feelings can exist inside one person at the same time.”

You also write of the parallels of life and death. As your son grows stronger and more alert, your mom gets weaker and less aware. You describe it so beautifully: “You two were opposite lines on the same graph, one going gradually up and the other down.” I found that especially powerful against the metaphor of zebra stripes—literally black and white opposites intrinsically linked by design. Did you have this duality in mind when you started writing or did it later emerge?

Jocelyn: As soon as I got that call from the hospital that she’d passed, it was crystal clear to me that that day would always contain darkness and light. It would always be the day that I celebrate my son’s birthday and grieve the loss of my mother. I mean, the balloons were still wafting around our living room. I wasn’t thinking in terms of writing, but I also saw how a zebra really embodied that opposition, or that duality.

Abby: Was the party on your son’s actual birthday?

Jocelyn: Yeah, the life cycle. I was very conscious of that. But I wasn’t imagining I would write anything. I started writing the book almost seven years later, to the day, and the story started percolating. At some point, the black and white stripes started to have even more meaning, and the concept of motion dazzle would gradually emerge as well. I found as I was writing that I had a lot to work with metaphorically by randomly choosing zebras as the birthday party theme. I didn’t have any particular affection for zebras, but that night it didn’t feel so random.

Abby: I loved your descriptions of your mom’s creativity and resourcefulness. But beneath her cheerful exterior, there’s a grit and resilience you seem to possess as well. We see it in how you stayed with figure skating despite painful injuries, a grueling training regimen, and some scary moves you were expected to pull off. Both you and your mom seemed to channel your physical and emotional pain into a drive for perfection. Was that a coping mechanism or another example of duality?

Jocelyn: I think it was both. My mother was hilarious, lighthearted, as I mentioned many times in the book. She loved her whimsy and frivolity, but there was so much pain and darkness in her past. And as she went through adulthood, she ended up having a lot of health issues even before she got dementia, so she was really fighting that and, of course, the devastating divorce from my father.

My experience of skating was so 50/50. For a number of years, I blamed my mom for having me do what would end up being a very dangerous sport for me. I don’t think figure skating necessarily has to be this dangerous, but pair skating was, and certainly for someone of my height and size relative to the size of my brother. We just didn’t have enough size difference to be doing a lot of the things that we were trying. I never say that I was forced to skate, but the family dynamic and the situation meant that I both wanted to be part of this team and I also could not stand it. I hated the reality of that day-to-day experience and the cold and the training and the injuries. And I can see why it was difficult for my mother to figure out how to navigate that, because I also loved the spotlight, being in ice shows, and signing autographs.

Abby: I want to talk about your writing process and the structure of your book. I loved that you not only used your son’s party as the pillars of your story, but that you zoomed in on a single day and balanced that with chapters covering a much larger span of time. How did you come up with that idea for the structure and pacing, and how do you feel it serves your story?

Jocelyn: As I said, the story was percolating for seven years. Either consciously or unconsciously, I always knew I wanted to tell the story of that one day. It only recently occurred to me that this is the structure used in Mrs. Dalloway, which I’d read many years before. It wasn’t a favorite book of mine, but it was definitely a woman preparing for a party with a lot of other things going on, and a lot of her interior thoughts.

The more complicated aspect for me was in the revisions and determining the order of the backstory. I revised it maybe 13, 14 times, and gradually made it more chronological—but not completely. For the most part, my childhood and skating experience are chronological, but I added in the dating factor, which jumped in time. By the time we reach the second half of the book—when I’m married, buying a house, pregnant with my son, and my mother is starting to decline rapidly—I wanted all of those strings to weave together by then.

I personally enjoy reading books that are kaleidoscopic. If it’s done well enough that the reader can follow along, and you create enough white space or chapter breaks, and use enough technique to place people in time and setting, I really enjoy it. Of course, we always hear that this is how memory works. We don’t necessarily remember things in order. I did do the work of putting a whole Post-it outline on my wall and I tried to create some sense of order to that backstory. But I wasn’t trying to be completely chronological.

Abby: In the chapters that take place on the day of your son’s party, you refer to your mom not as “grandmom” or whatever your son would have called her, but as “she.” It’s a choice that feels deliberately distancing. You write of learning from a young age to compartmentalize, and I was curious if that choice to refer to your mom that way was another way of conveying how hard you were trying to compartmentalize to get through that day?

Jocelyn: It’s interesting, because that actually was not my intent. My attempt was to actually not distance her but to make her feel closer by not naming her. My concept was that if I didn’t name her, she was so important that she could just be “she” and not have a name. But the book does deal a lot with compartmentalization, and who knows what subconsciously was going on. I’ll be interested if people read it that way or read it the way I intended, because now it’s out in the world and I have less control.

What I love about your question is that the concept of compartmentalization is maybe not a theme that I was as conscious of, but there’s so much compartmentalization that we all do. I think a lot about the distraction involved in motion dazzle and about coping mechanisms. We all need to separate out different parts of our lives, and on that day, I needed to be a mother and not a daughter.

Abby: You and I both cared for moms who had dementia and we did it long-distance. We know what it feels like to ingratiate yourself to caregivers over the phone and then shut off that part of your mind for a period of time in order to function.

Jocelyn: I think compartmentalization is necessary when caregiving for our aging parents and also as a parent. We’re constantly telling our kids certain things, but not everything. We have to pull ourselves into a different way of thinking several times per day, you know? To go into meetings, to be with our spouse, to be with our kid, to go to this parental function, to care for our aging parents. I think that, to a certain extent, compartmentalization is healthy and necessary. Of course, it can cross over to being over-compartmentalization, and that’s a whole other situation. But for the most part, I do see it as a coping mechanism.

Abby: What kind of impact did your mother’s dementia have on your decision to write this memoir? Were you aware of any desire to capture your story, and parts of hers, while you still had the capacity to remember and process the details?

Jocelyn: Yes, I absolutely wanted to leave a record for my son, because I don’t know what’s going to happen to my brain. I hope it will be fine. My father is 91 and doing very well with his memory and his cognition. But the other layer of this is that my mom didn’t talk about everything. And I think that another difficult decision that we all make as parents is when is it age-appropriate to tell our kids certain things about our own lives? For my mom, there was never going to be a moment where she would tell me certain things. For the most part, I respect that decision—unfortunately, what that does is cause the child to make incorrect assumptions. But I definitely wanted to create a record and create a connection between my son and my mother beyond this coincidence of this day, because he only did get to meet her six times in the first year of his life.

Abby: Even though your book covers some painful experiences and serious themes of illness, loss, and grief, it’s a funny read, too. I’m familiar with your many published humor pieces, and since meeting you in person at the HippoCamp Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference a few years ago, I know you’re funny in real life. Humor has also been a big part of your relationship with your husband, right from the start. Can you speak to the role of humor in your life and as part of your voice as a writer?

Jocelyn: I absolutely see humor as a distraction, a coping mechanism, and honestly, therapy. I have written about some of the most difficult parts of my life through humor. And I’m working on some right now as ways to get through difficult things. It’s not to take away any of the gravitas of a situation; it’s actually to try to look at it from a different angle. I do think that levity can be overused in certain situations, and we have to be careful with it. But it can actually change your perspective if you can use humor when you’re going through dark times.

Abby: One last question. As a native Philadelphian (Go Birds!) and since Cleaver is a Philadelphia publication, I have to bring up the fact that you lived in Delaware for a number of years and you graduated from Penn. Can you share something memorable from your time in this area and what parts of Philly you still carry with you today?

Jocelyn: So, I went to high school and trained in Delaware. And even during that time, we would travel into Philadelphia to go to South Street and into all the fun stores. For a person who grew up in Wisconsin in a town of about 4,000 people, to then be on South Street, was really eye-opening and exciting for me. Once I was at Penn, we would go there all the time to get cheesesteaks in the middle of the night. Of course, a lot of my experience in Philadelphia is through ice rinks. I coached all four years at the University of Pennsylvania Class of 1923 Ice Skating Rink and have many fond memories of the beginnings of my coaching practice there. And as a teenager, I performed many times at the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society. It’s the oldest skating club in the country—this beautiful old rink where we would do Saturday exhibitions and compete.

And I guess my final memory is that during my sophomore year at Penn, I was in one of the dorms called the High Rises. These were buildings that were 25 stories tall and we were near the top; I believe we were somewhere around floor 20. And you can just imagine what a view that was from my tiny dorm room in West Philly, where there were not a lot of other tall buildings. I had a view of the whole city. I’d later go on to live in New York, but my years in Philadelphia were great and I’ve always loved that city.

Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice was released on September 30 by Vine Leaves Press. For our Philadelphia-area readers, Jocelyn Jane Cox will participate in a reading, conversation, and book signing with Robbie Kaine at the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society on Saturday, Nov. 8th. Information about this and other events can be found on her website.

Jocelyn Jane Cox’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, Good Men Project, WIRED, The Offing, The Linden Review, Cleaver, Litro Magazine, Penn Review, and Colorado Review. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice (Vine Leaves Press) explores motherhood, sports participation, and caregiving. She received her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, her BA in English literature and creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives with her son and husband in Nyack, NY. More information at jocelynjanecox.com and on her Instagram @jocelynjanecoxwriter.

Abby Alten Schwartz is a Philadelphia writer whose published work includes essays, reported stories, creative nonfiction, flash, humor, and craft articles. She’s currently writing her first book, Hypervigilant: A Memoir of Uncertainty, Intuition, and Hope. Abby’s literary work has been featured in Hippocampus, HAD, The Citron Review, Five Minutes, Brevity Blog, and other publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She works as a freelance journalist and as a health & wellness writer for healthcare organizations. Find her at abbyaltenschwartz.com, on social media @abbys480, or on Substack at Name Three Things.