By Jennifer Brett

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Talking to Joshilyn Jackson will slap wear you out.

Those big eyes come zooming in at you, she starts pounding her fists to make a point, and then she'll get up out of her chair and start play-acting, so you know what she means when she says her friend came over this one time so she could pretend to grab her by the neck and sock her one.

Whew!

Jackson dabbled early on with writing plays, then decided she didn't want to fool with directors and actors tracking their intellectual footprints all through her words. But her theatrical bent helps make her characters and scenes feel true, and she not only outlines her plot, she blocks each scene. Given her strong faith and love of literature, the result is a page-turner with something more.

"I write what I call book club fiction," she said. "You can take it to the beach with you with a big rum drink and there's a big ole scoop of plot. If you want more, it's there for you."

A Flannery O'Connor devotee whose favorite book is "To Kill a Mockingbird," she'll be talking about writing on faith at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.

"As a writer, what else is there if not our relationship with God and other people?" she said. "There are two ways to write about Christians. One is sort of safe. I write about Christians who sin, repeatedly, and sometimes they don't even learn from it."

After things didn't, uh, take at the University of Georgia, Jackson started over at Georgia Perimeter College, graduated with honors from Georgia State University and earned an master's in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She chooses different spots to write each book, staking out a corner in a local coffee shop for her latest. An e-mail junkie, she nonetheless does not fear technology will diminish the ranks of readers.

"You have a physical relationship with a book that you don't have with any other media," she said. "Story's not in jeopardy and it never will be. Story is the heroine of the human race."

Book event

Joshilyn Jackson, author of "Gods in Alabama," "Between, Georgia" and "The Girl Who Stopped Swimming." Her next novel is "Backseat Saints."

Book Festival appearance: 11:15 a.m. Saturday, "Writing Covertly About Faith," First Baptist Decatur. www.joshilynjackson.com