an interview with paul lisicky

PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012).

His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review,StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow.

He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.

Do you consider yourself a fiction or nonfiction writer?

I’m hoping it can be “and” instead of “or.”  I’m probably most accurately described as a multi-genre writer, or a hybridist: i just wish those terms didn’t sound so pretentious.  Some of the pieces in Unbuilt Projects, the collection of short prose pieces, move and think like poems.  Some of them, in fact, have been published as poems in magazines.  So fiction, nonfiction, poet—could that be asking for too much?

In all seriousness, I think my work has always wanted to escape classification, not just in form, but in content too.  That’s what it’s always been about for me: fending off external categorization.

How do you determine what genre you will call your work?

I start with a sonic scrap—that scrap probably contains an image, a sensory perception.  I keep going from there, scrap by scrap, as I try to get down the sound the work wants to make.  Gradually, the piece tells me what it wants to be. I get myself in trouble if I start with some externally conceived conception.  Then at a certain point sense needs to inform sound.

Recently you had four pieces accepted for publication at the Iowa Review. When I asked you whether they were fiction or nonfiction, your response was “They accepted them as fiction.” I found this a very interesting way to respond. What did you mean to communicate by responding this way? In other words, how did you intend them as you were writing, and does it matter to you whether your work is labeled fiction or nonfiction?

Those four pieces are all interconnected by concern, situation.  In other words they think about a mother, loss, loss of memory, the connection between memory and identity.  Two are in third person, two first.  The first-person pieces actually happened, they’re faithful to fact; the third-person pieces are closer to fables in texture and content.  Fiction, as a designation, has more room in it.   It’s more spacious.  In those pieces, I’m more interested in the reader entering the drama of consciousness than anything.

In terms of craft, do you see any difference in the way one is taught the specific techniques of each genre or do you see the craft techniques as the same in both genres?

Well, I do think fiction workshops at their worst can overemphasize verisimilitude–in other words, “would Lisa bake a Duncan Hines cake if she grew up in Searingtown, Long Island?”  I think subjectivity gets lost in that discussion; it presumes that there’s an objective world in which people perceive the same.  How a character sees, hears, etc. is informed by how he feels at any given moment.  That’s a pretty obvious statement, but we can lose sight of that in a fiction workshop.

The tools of the fiction writer are certainly valuable to the nonfiction writer, but something else needs to happen. The best nonfiction isn’t just representation, but thinking alongside the representation. How to get the urgency of thinking, the mind at work on the page?  Good fiction can capture a sense of that thinking too, but it’s not so crucial to the project of it.

Now of course I sound like I’m making binaries.  [Sigh]  But then again we’re thinking about how these forms are taught.

What is “truth” in writing?

There’s the world of journalism, the world of agreed-upon facts: “A Honda Civic crashed into the eastbound lanes of the Verrazano Bridge.”  But that’s not the same thing as emotional truth, which slides and is endlessly mutable.  How you think about the day of your 15th birthday will be different at 45 than it is when you’re 75.

Do you feel we should dissolve the fiction/nonfiction issue and instead use the word narrative to refer to both?

I think each piece should teach us how to read it.  By that I mean clues dropped, stance developed toward the reader.  No reader wants to feel manipulated, whether we’re talking about sentimentality or overstatement.  I perhaps would feel manipulated if I were led to believe the “I” was the author only to find out otherwise.   But maybe the dissolve you’re talking about is already underway. The latest issue of GRANTA does entirely away with genre classifications.  Take a look at Victor LaValle’s piece–is it memoir or is it fiction?  I’m not sure, but that question was interesting to think about as I read the piece.

Why do you think David Shields latest work is so important?

I’ve been a fan of David’s writing all the way back to Dead Languages in the 80s. I like the fact that he’s a fan of inquiry on the page; he’s also a believer in wider possibilities of expression, a larger palllette than what’s been given us, even though he’s not always been interpreted that way.  I am attracted to the expressiveness and heat of his writing voice, which to my mind is a relief at a time when we overvalue the cool, the neutral.

What is your advice to memoirists and personal essayists who feel that by writing, they are betraying and breaking familial and societal codes of denial and silence? How does the writer not become paralyzed by the fear associated with these situations?

You have to trick yourself into thinking that those people aren’t going to read what you’re writing.  Later, you can decide what to keep in, what to leave out.  In truth, I’ve always gotten it wrong in terms of what I think might be perceived as offensive.  One relative, for instance, didn’t like the fact that I’d said my grandmother had once cleaned houses.  Who could have predicted that?  I wonder if most writers simply get it wrong.

I wrote a letter to my father just before my first book came out.  I told him how much I loved him, how much I valued his support of my work…  Etc.  I told him I was concerned about how he’d perceive some of the content.  I told him again that I loved him.  That directness brought us closer.  By the time the book came out, he and my mother were sending the book out to their friends and to my aunts and uncles.  Not every situation works out like that, but I’d venture to say that hurt and angry people often soften over time.

Here’s a thought: imagine if you had a relative who’d write about you as a character.  Would you necessarily like it?  I can’t say for myself.

Why is portraying the contradiction in people vital in crafting narrative?

Because all of us are marbled creatures; we wouldn’t be telling the truth if we didn’t try to get some of that down on the page.  I do think we tend to distrust speakers who idealize, or worse, vilify as part of some agenda.

Do you have a spiritual life, and if so how does it inform your creative process?

That’s a lot to get my head around.  Still…I do think that the act of paying attention, to what’s inside us, to what’s outside, leads us toward something larger and more profound than ourselves.  Is it prayer? I’m talking about writing. Maybe, but I’m usually uncomfortable with the metaphors of spirituality, especially when they’re thrown around too easily, too publicly.  Here’s a quote from Joy Williams that says it better than I can: “Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve–hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve–not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

You really care about animals. Please comment.

We tend to overestimate our position in things; we forget that we’re a part of a larger web of creatures and plants and life that we can’t even see or name.  Animals–I think of their mystery and beauty. I think of how we take them for granted, disregard them, hurt them if you think about what’s happening in the Gulf right now.  My partner has a line in one of his books, something to the effect of: why should we have been born knowing how to love the world?   Animals can be an entry to that.

When did you call yourself a writer?

I think of myself as someone who writes.  The term “writer” seems fixed to me; there’s so much weight attached to it.   I started out as a musician, and in a way I still think of what I do as having musical roots.

What is the single most important thing to develop in yourself as a writer?

This might be two things: the ability to recognize what you do well, and the ability to recognize what you don’t.  How can you turn what you don’t do well–those liabilities–into assets.  Very early in her life as a musician, Joni Mitchell devised a different set of guitar tunings in order to compensate for the weakness in her left hand brought on by polio.  And the harmonic structures of the songs that came out of that accommodation are extraordinary. That’s really central to her contribution as an artist.

How important is “down-time” to the actual time you spend at your desk writing? Do you feel unplugging is vital for the creative process?

It’s important to have other interests, preferably non-verbal.  Going to the gym, running, gardening, playing an instrument, walking through the woods–all that. How might our all our work participate in some kind of creative energy?  It’s important to think about that.  It might be dangerous to say, there’s creativity over there, and then there’s… [deep breath] the boring shithood of my everyday life.

Is there anything else you would like to tell the readers? Could be anything at all….

I think community is really central to keeping literature alive.  We often make the mistake of thinking the literary community is “out there,” something we have to “network” our way into.  I think we can make our own literary communities, whether through starting a reading series, or telling other writers about books on a blog.  In this day and age it’s economically feasible to start our own presses or journals.  This can all be done on-line for cheap.  What can you contribute? That’s the important thing to think about.