NOVEMBER 2025 (INTERVIEW): Jack Gross

"Being human means that there’s so many different you’s out there, so I try to gather all the Jack’s in the universe and conjure this kind of inherent sense of myself, and understand myself better."

This November is a busy month for Artists from Maryland! After finishing up our high school creative writing contest with Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, we have decided on three winners and one runner up! We are featuring the third winner, Jack Gross! Below is our interview with him, and you can read his story here!

Jack Gross (he/him, b. Jan. 2010) is a filmmaker, writer, artist, amateur documentarian, and occasional photographer. His work has been shown at the New Works Baltimore’s August 2025 Summer Screening (co-curated by JHU/MICA senior lecturer of film and media studies Jimmy Joe Roche). He is currently working on his second short film, STRETCHES OF BLACK. His work can be found at jackgross.neocities.org, and he can be accessed on Instagram at @jjjackgross or by email at jackelliottgross@gmail.com.

ALDRIN: Hello Jack! I want to prelude this interview by telling you just how much of a fan I am of your writing style. It’s hard to convince me of the strength of a fiction piece, but your voice as a writer is just so enticing! Tangent aside, let’s start with a simple question: What does your writing process look like? Who, and/or what, do you think your writing is in conversation with?

JACK: Thank you, thank you. I just wanna say how much I appreciate the kind words. When it comes to the writing process, a lot of it is just continuous connection to all my endeavors. I write while I edit, while I draw, I keep all of my ideas connected through this common thread of myself. That way, if I have an idea, I can explore it through all the different avenues and see how I can best really expand on what I’m trying to say. I would say I'm in conversation with all the versions of me and perceptions of me that are out there, somewhere. Being human means that there’s so many different you’s out there, so I try to gather all the Jack’s in the universe and conjure this kind of inherent sense of myself, and understand myself better. I’d also say I’d consider my wonderful, wonderful girlfriend Audrey my kind of muse and a real baseline for what I wanna say. She’s one of those people who understands me better than I’d say most people do, and better than I even understand myself sometimes. I don’t think I’d have the confidence to really write "0710081009101010" and base it so much on my own experience without her.

ALDRIN: Now let’s talk about your story, "0710081009101010.” There’s something so wonderful and interesting about how fragmented it feels. When you write, how do you determine whether something should be told through dialogue or through narration? In your writing process, what separates the two, and what makes them similar?

JACK: When it came to "0710081009101010," I had an idea of the main character existing both as himself in the world and also as a character in "0710081009101010," as a kind of extension of reality, especially for dialogue and narration. I saw the third-person segments as a kind of religious overseer. Over quarantine, I lost a part of my own religious identity trying to make sense of the world around me, and in writing the third person segments, I thought about not just the protagonist existing under a higher power, but also myself existing under a higher power. With that, I tried to separate narration as purely what the character is able to perceive when they think solely of their circumstance, how their thoughts dominate their life. I saw the dialogue as maybe God talking, guiding him slightly out of what he had going on, and I think that the religious contingent and the deeply emotional kind of physical presence of the main character helped me to better grasp what I wanted "0710081009101010."

ALDRIN: In his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), Ted Kooser wrote: "While choosing your words it is as if you were at a window looking out into the world… The speaker notices both his or her reflection and the scene beyond." Let’s apply this philosophy to one of my favorite lines from your story:

“‘In all its glory, the sun bathed him as it rose, and it sat upon him as such. The sun burned away what once was, a night anew, a person anew.’” (“0710081009101010”)

Jack, I think it was this line that made me know this would be one of the winners of our contest. To you, how does your reflection/personality/personhood manifest in this line? In what ways does it elevate what Kooser refers to as “the scene beyond”? In a broader sense, do you think fiction requires proximity to its author?

JACK: I think for me, I write best with my experiences in tow. Like I said, a lot of it lies in exploring all the different perceptions of me in the world, all the Jack's roaming around in people's memories or in their hearts. With that, I imagined with that line all of those versions of myself, and of the main character, burning into one whole. One individual, one soul created by the possibilities of a new day. I believe in renewal, in the idea that we aren’t static people, and the main character isn’t a static character either. I can’t write monolithic stuff, you know? And so, I wanted to create this really visceral image of the burning, of the gentleness of a bath in your youth to an almost death under very intense pressure from one’s self to change.

ALDRIN: Let’s look at the title: “0710081009101010.” What draws you to unconventionality here? When you write titles, do you prefer following or breaking conventional titling processes?

JACK: I’ve got a bit of an obsession with numbers, dates, that kind of thing. Even this screenplay I'm working on right now, "quatrième," came out of my idea of four characters and four as a significant part of the story. I feel that I go with what my heart really tells me more than I try to align with convention for most of the things I do, and "0710081009101010" spoke to me as this kind of breakneck speed of existence and existing, and the quickness of time as an individual, flying past me and “grazing my ears” (“0710081009101010”). I see time and the main character as dually connected protagonists in "0710081009101010," through their almost antagonistic relationship. The main character sees the passage of time as an inevitable consequence, a kind of spit in the face. Time sees the main character as, for the most part, unwilling to step forward. When I was writing the point at which their relationship kind of changes, around the September segment, I decided to change the name I had before (I shuffled through the working titles of "endless black," "white cloth," and "The first flash of light in the dreams") into something that more directly references time and its role in change.

ALDRIN: How (if at all) does being from Maryland impact your creative writing?

JACK: Being from Maryland, and especially Baltimore City, definitely lays itself over my work. I see it as a film over top of my work. When you read about the city, or even about Baltimore as an amorphous concept, we get so much shit. So much. And with that, I kind of use it as fuel to write, like how I used it as fuel to hate when I was younger. There was some shame out of being from here, but I think in writing and in growing and filming I’ve grown to love my city and by extension a key part of myself.

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