Issue 9 Writer Spotlight | Jeffery Allen Tobin
C+B: Tell us about yourself, Jeffery!
JAT: By day, I work as a political scientist and professional researcher, focusing on issues such as U.S. foreign policy, democracy, national security, and migration. I spend a good deal of my time analyzing systems of power, reading field reports, and trying to make sense of complex, often contradictory realities.
In my spare time, I read a lot. I dig both fiction and non-fiction. I often lean toward classic literature—Hardy, Eliot, and the Brontës are among my favorites—and I listen to a wide range of music, especially jazz, classical, and Americana. I find that poetry and fiction speak where data and policy can’t: they reach the ineffable corners of experience.
I became a writer because I needed a language that could hold more than argument. I’ve been writing for more than thirty years, across genres—poetry, fiction, essays—not to escape my professional life, but to complement it. Stories and poems let me explore the same themes I study—loss, power, ambiguity, justice—but from the inside out. My background straddles two disciplines: the analytical and the lyrical. I try to make them speak to one another.
C+B: Describe a time when you doubted yourself. Explain the scenario and how you were able to work through it.
JAT: I doubted myself most after taking a break from my doctoral work. What was supposed to be a short pause to regroup turned into a longer stretch of silence, and in that silence, the old doubts crept in—was I still cut out for this kind of thinking, this kind of writing? Had the moment passed?
What got me through wasn’t some flash of inspiration—it was a return to rhythm. I started walking again, reading poetry again, writing sentences with no purpose other than to hear the cadence click into place. Slowly, the gears turned. I remembered that doubt is part of the process, not proof you’ve failed. You don’t overcome it by waiting to feel brave. You just keep going, one page at a time.
C+B: Describe a time when you felt successful in your creative pursuits. Explain the scenario and what was so impactful for you.
JAT: Success is a slippery concept. I’ve felt it exactly three times: once when I finished a poem and didn’t hate it the next morning, once when an editor I admired said yes instead of ghosting me, and once when my dog fell asleep while I read him a draft—which I took as high praise.
But honestly, the moment that sticks with me most wasn’t about publication or praise. It was during a late-night writing session when everything finally clicked—the rhythm, the tone, the strange emotional logic of the piece. I sat back, blinked at the screen, and thought, "Well, that didn’t suck." For me, that felt like winning the Pulitzer. Which is probably why I’ll never win one.
C+B: What do you think makes a creator or their work impactful?
JAT: I think impact happens when an artist tells the truth in a way that feels both familiar and completely unexpected. Not the truth in some grand, definitive way—but a truth that rings out like a tuning fork in your chest. Art becomes impactful when it names something you didn’t know needed naming, or when it holds up a mirror you weren’t quite ready to look into.
It doesn’t have to be loud, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. But it has to be honest—emotionally, structurally, spiritually. The best work sneaks up on you. It lingers. It rewires something. And then it quietly dares you to make something that might do the same.
Find and support Jeffery here:
IG: @jefftobin11
Website: jefferyatobin.com
Substack: jefftobin11.substack.com
Jeffery Allen Tobin
Me in 3 words: Curious. Disciplined. Restless. Curious, because I’ve never outgrown the urge to ask why things are the way they are—and why they shouldn’t be otherwise. Disciplined, because both writing and research demand persistence, even (and especially) when the path forward isn’t clear. Restless, because I’m always chasing the next question, the next sentence, the next way to tell the truth.
My favorite creator of all time: Probably Tom Waits. Or maybe Edward Hopper. One of them painted loneliness in oil, the other growled it into a microphone—and somehow, both taught me more about storytelling than most books ever did.
Waits showed me that beauty doesn’t have to wear clean clothes. His songs stagger and mutter and bleed, and yet there’s poetry in every line. He made me realize that voice matters more than polish, and that strangeness—when it’s honest—is a gift, not a flaw.
Hopper, meanwhile, mastered the unsaid. His scenes feel like the moment just before someone speaks, or just after they’ve left. I write toward that space now—the charged quiet, the unresolved tension. From both of them, I learned that restraint can say as much as revelation, and that sometimes, the most powerful art is the kind that just . . . waits.
A medium I’ve never tried but want to: Pottery, without question. There’s something deeply appealing about shaping something with your hands—something that isn’t words or ideas or abstract arguments. Just clay, pressure, and patience. It feels primal and grounded, the opposite of staring at a blinking cursor and hoping for a decent sentence.
What’s stopping me? Honestly, time. Also the mild suspicion that I’d make lopsided mugs no one wants and accidentally invent a new form of ashtray. But maybe that’s part of the appeal—it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be made. One day, I’ll sign up for a class and let the mud do the talking.
