Born in British Columbia, raised in Kelowna,
Lisa López Smith has lived and
worked in Italy, Uganda, China, the USA, Ireland and Brazil. Along with her
TapatÃo husband and kids, she raises livestock on their small biodynamic farm
in Jalisco, Mexico, which is an endless source of inspiration for her poetry
and fiction and where she practices slow living, contemplation and everyday
revolution. She has a BA from the University of Calgary and an MA from Royal
Roads University in subjects unrelated to writing or farming. Her poems and
essays have appeared in over sixty literary journals and have been nominated
for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net.
How did your first book change your
life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
My poetry chapbook, Grace Notes, came out in 2021 after I won
a chapbook contest. We were mostly still in pandemic mode then. There’s no
English-speaking literary community where I live; we probably had a cake to
celebrate, but that was mostly the end of it. Even with some really kind
blurbs, the chapbook still felt like a lucky accident.
This book feels completely different! It still feels like a lucky accident that it is getting
published, but I’m just leaning into the idea that feeling like a fraud is a
part of my writing journey. This time, however, the publisher and publicist
have been really supportive, and they're pushing me out of my comfort zone—I’ll
travel to Canada to promote it (but also to visit friends and family!), so it
will be a completely different experience!
How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Actually, I wrote and
published creative non-fiction before I began writing poetry and fiction—mostly
writing about raising kids, and occasionally about working with migrants in
downtown Guadalajara.
However, after the US
election in 2016, it seemed like poetry was the only container that could
handle the immensity of all the feelings. The difference with poetry was that
it seemed like a homecoming—I was the weird kid who used to read and memorize
poetry even though I never wrote it when I was young. Also, since my kids were
really small then, finishing a poem was more achievable than chapters or essays,
so all my recent publications have been in poetry.
Where does a poem usually begin for
you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger
project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems often come to me
while I’m out and about, working or driving or doing things. Sometimes they’re
fragments, sometimes they’re more complete. I usually work with pen and paper
for a first draft, so other times poems just come out of the pages of
scribbles.
The project often
comes out of all these short pieces; in the case of Hallelujah Anyhow, I compiled poems that had been published in
literary journals into one document and began revising them. Since I write a
lot about overlapping themes, much of the work fit together reasonably well,
and revising was at the line level from there. I also try to have the poems work
in conversation with each other in interesting ways.
Are public readings part of or counter
to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I live in a
rural part of Mexico, so a literary community is something that I just don’t
have here, especially writing in English. Although Guadalajara hosts the
largest book festival in Latin America every year, and there are little
enclaves of English-speaking communities around the country, public readings
for me so far have been super limited!
I like to imagine reading
as an enjoyable, life-giving part of the creative process, but I have a good
imagination—in real life, I’m definitely an introvert and try to avoid public
speaking, but I’m being pulled into some reading events for my book. I have
launches planned in Vancouver, Calgary and Kelowna, so I’ll keep practicing and
imagining!
Do you have any theoretical concerns
behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your
work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I write a lot about
migrants and immigration, the natural world and farming. Hallelujah Anyhow is definitely making the attempt to hold the
heaviness in the world, and boldly make space for the beauty of the world at
the same time. Especially in these moments—with fascism and oppression and
extreme wealth inequalities and climate change—I hope it helps. Yes, these
awful things exist. Also, the wild cosmos flowers are starting to blossom in my
back pasture this week.
What do you see the current role of the
writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the
role of the writer should be?
There’s a reason that
in political systems of oppression, the writers and the artists are targeted.
Writers have the job of translating situations into whatever their preferred
medium is: journalism or comedy, cartoons or poems, symphonies or paintings, and
also how important it is to have fiction that reflects life or gives us a
moment of escape from it. All of these things are important, and dangerous and
powerful! So whether someone is on the frontline taking photographs of war, or
writing something escapist so we don’t have to think endlessly about war, this
is important work. Or, maybe it is insignificant—but it is still vital that we
do it!
Do you find the process of working with
an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I love
working with editors, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with editors who
have been instrumental in helping both the individual poems and the whole
project. My practice is to simply accept all the changes because an editor offers
valuable insight and a second pair of eyes can be helpful. When I go back to
revisions by line, if the suggestion grates, then I go back to my original
words and try to find the true direction of the revision from there, which
quite often is still the editor’s version.
What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I heard somewhere that
the opposite of compassion is busyness. It rang so true for me because I had
seen in myself how, when I was rushing, I missed the really important moments
of connection with people. I try to keep myself from being too busy, or at
least have a busyness with spaciousness so there is room for compassion. Also
this: your work is not your salary. Your work is the essential, spiritual
calling to the things you need to do while on this mortal coil. Sometimes we
confuse our income with that, and it is easy to get lost in the material world.
Fortunately, the work of poetry— and most writing and art— tends to be pretty
safe from great income, so we sometimes get to miss that trap!
What kind of writing routine do you
tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I was actually just
asked about my process and I ended up writing a response in a day-log Susan
Sontag-style:
My Process: How to Write a Poem
1.
Alarm at
5:20
1 go to bed early the night before. It
helps.
2.
Up at
5:30. Put on the kettle. Put on music—loud, perhaps Julieta Venegas or Natalia
Lafourcade. Or maybe something in English today. Go outside—Stuart and Zapote
are howling at the door for breakfast, and the rest of the cats come running
when you call them. Pick bitter herbs from the garden. Venus is still bright at
dawn.
3.
Bitter
tea, then make espresso for LG and me, while he makes breakfast for the boys
4.
6:20 Boys
to school. Start chores: feed horses, birds. Check for new calves
5.
8 AM
breakfast with LG. We wonder what we are going to do with our house problem.
Maybe cry, maybe not.
6.
9 AM get
distracted with hundreds of things that are not on the to-do list, or
distracted with what is on it, or talking or observing or bringing a calf down
from the cerro or making yogurt or teaching a kid how to communicate with the
horses or school meetings or gardening.
7.
Forget to
do some things that should be done
8.
12:14 PM
sit down to write. Feel like a fraud. Write a paragraph of nonsense. Give up.
9.
12:56 hang
up a load of laundry
10. 12:58 there are swallows and clouds
crisscrossing the sky like the clotheslines
11. 1:10 something terrible in the news.
Make lunch.
12. 2:50 kids home. Eat lunch with them and
whoever else shows up. We laugh, talk about all the things of the day.
Beautiful.
13. 4:33 Do dishes and other things that no
one else notices. Something terrible on the news. Write another line.
14. 7:35 boys come in from chores, playing,
etc., sit on the couch and listen to their chatter or silence. Make something
for dinner. Close the gate, accompanied by 6.5 dogs. Stargaze for a moment.
Call the cats. Check on the horses.
15. 8:58 Sudoku in bed with help from SK. M
tells me about the birds and his homework. Maybe write a poem tomorrow. Or
maybe this life is one already.
What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine trees, VapoRub,
cold mountain air on fallen leaves, stammpot or Beppe soup remind me of Canada.
It’s a little cliché,
but the petrichor of the first rain on the soil after eight months of dry
season is something I first experienced in Mexico. The wild cempesuchil
(marigold) in the fall is also so evocative of Mexico for me.
David W. McFadden once said that books
come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,
whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Absolutely. The
natural world is a big player in my poetry. I work a lot outside, so there is
always plenty of material just in observing what is around me: the garden, the
highway, the neighbours, small-town life, and my dogs/cows/sheep, etc. There’s
always the ugly and complicated things, but also so much wonder!
What would you like to do that you
haven't yet done?
One consequence of losing
my dad when I was a child—and he was just 37 years old when he died— is that when
I want to do something, I don’t wait to do the things I really want to do. We truly
don’t know how much time we get on this earth; we may as well do what we want
to do. This is probably not advice you’d get from your accountant (or lawyer?!),
but I’m not waiting until conditions are perfect for me to imagine and live out
my dreams. However, if money was no object, I’d definitely visit Vava’u to see
the humpback whales, or Palau’s shark sanctuaries.
If you could pick any other occupation
to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have
ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don’t know that
writing is my occupation, and is unlikely to ever be the income generator that
goes with “occupation.” But it is an essential part of what I do in a day,
besides all the other things that are essential! A teacher once told me, What is essential never imposes itself; the
non-essentials always do. Writing is like that. Essential, but easy to skip
when everyday life imposes all the schedules and lists and meetings and grocery
shopping.
What made you write, as opposed to
doing something else?
Sometimes I feel like
I didn’t pick life in Mexico; somehow that Mexico picked me. There’s that
oft-quoted line from Chavela Vargas, an icon of Mexican music—who was actually
from Costa Rica: «Los mexicanos nacemos donde nos da la rechingada gana »(Mexicans
are born wherever the f** they feel like). Writing feels like that too. I
didn’t decide to write; writing picked me, and there’s nothing I can do about
it except give my calling the time and respect that it needs from me.
Fortunately, writing
also feeds off all the interesting things in life, and Mexico and rural life
are full of them. I think Mary Oliver’s theory on writing was on point, so as long
as I occasionally am out doing what the soft animal of my body loves, paying
attention, and looking out for the spiritual weight that is being asked of us
in these moments, I definitely find themes to write about.
What was the last great book you read?
What was the last great film?
I loved The Hours by Michael Cunningham and just
finished rereading it. I also recently read Motorcycles
and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor, which was such a fun book. Also, Correctional by Ravi Shankar was so
beautiful and well-written! I’m usually a few decades behind everyone else in
movie-watching since I rarely watch anything recent. Even if the inspirational-teacher-changes-student-lives
genre is a little formulaic, I still adored Radical (2023) for its Mexicanness—and
because it was based on a real story of change in one of the worst-performing
primary schools in the country.
What are you currently working on?
I just finished
workshopping another poetry manuscript, and I’m very excited about that
project! In other creative veins, I’ve also got some pottery on the go, and a
series of paintings that I’m working on that are based on the style of the
Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla—the master of light!
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
