Jayme Volstad is a writer, former pastry chef, systems builder, and mother of two who has spent a fairly unreasonable amount of her life trying to understand why people and the systems they build behave the way they do.
She came up through restaurant kitchens, working across pastry, service, management, and the general controlled chaos of hospitality. She holds an AAS in Baking and Pastry Arts and later taught herself digital systems work for much the same reason she learned to make things professionally in the first place: if something is confusing, inefficient, or badly built, she has a difficult time leaving it alone.
That tendency extends to people.
Jayme is fascinated by the distance between who we believe ourselves to be and how we actually operate, particularly when the math stops adding up. Someone says one thing and repeatedly does another. Two people use the same word and mean entirely different things by it. We ignore what someone has shown us because we prefer what they told us, or keep adding our own effort to an equation as though enough sincerity on one side can change the value on the other.
Eventually, two plus two still has to equal four.
She tends to mean what she says and, perhaps unwisely, expects language to work that way in both directions. If someone says they want something, love something, believe something, or intend something, her instinct is to take them seriously. She is interested in what happens after that trust collides with contradiction: how long we keep recalculating, what we excuse in the name of context, what we refuse to see, and what finally becomes impossible to explain around.
Her work moves through motherhood, addiction, accountability, love, grief, memory, labor, institutional absurdity, and the complicated bargains people make with themselves and one another in order to keep a life, a relationship, or an idea of themselves intact.
She is less interested in deciding who the villain was than in understanding how everyone ended up standing in the room they did, what power each person had once they got there, and what each person can reasonably be held responsible for after that. People are rarely blameless, but responsibility is not always evenly distributed. Survival, fear, coercion, dependency, threats, money, love, history, and power can all change what “just leave,” “just say no,” or “just stop” actually means.
Jayme also has aphantasia, meaning she cannot voluntarily form pictures in her mind. She remembers places instead through fragments: a sentence, a shift in somebody’s voice, the pressure in a room, what the air seemed to be doing just before everything changed. It may explain something about the way she writes.
She describes herself as an optimistic pessimist with a sunny disposition. She believes people are enormously complicated, systems are frequently ridiculous, context matters almost all the time, and an explanation can be true without becoming an excuse.
She also believes explanation has a point of diminishing returns.
HOW TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF TO WOLVES is her first book.