LJ Pemberton is the author of
Still Alive (Malarkey Books), which was longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award. Her essays, poetry, and award-winning stories have been featured in
The Baffler,
Exacting Clam,
Los Angeles Review, the
Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Decatur, Illinois.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? I maintain that publishing a book doesn’t really change your life. You wake up the day after your book has been published with the same life you went to bed with the day before it happened. But I will say that publishing
Still Alive has had a surprising effect on my own sense of myself as a writer—in trusting my instincts. I have become more okay with only writing in a way that interests me, rather than trying to write something that I think people will like or that gatekeepers will prefer. Many years ago, I used to write with an audience closer to the forefront of my mind, whether that was my family or the anonymous public or agents – but after my book came out, I felt validated for having put the work first. I used to question myself for being kind of contrary in that way, for abandoning my more commercial projects because they bored me, but after my book came out, I had no doubts anymore. This is my path.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction? I tried my hand at all of it, but fiction, and especially long fiction, is better than any other medium at capturing the chaos and fullness of life, in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve succeeded yet in using fiction to its fullest potential, but the challenge to try is more interesting to me as an artist than the restrictions of other forms.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?I am always starting new projects and then letting them sit for years. Later I return to them and see whether there’s a kernel that interests me there, whether the piece is ready to bloom. I believe in organic time when it comes to art, that a piece will grow when the conditions are right, but that also means constant tending and nurturing of the garden. I am ever planting seeds. I think some people start a piece and then wait for it to grow into something but they never return to it, never spend time reading around and towards it, never plant more in the meantime. You can’t abandon the yard.
Once a piece gets ahold of me, I’ll work on it exclusively for a while, until I hit a wall—creatively, directionally. Then I have to put it away again. Read. Read more. Plant some more seeds. Think. A few months later the damn breaks and the wall comes down and off I go again. For novels, I’ve learned to keep going until that first draft is done, then fill in the weak spots. Edit ruthlessly.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?For a piece to become something long, it has to have an unanswerable question behind it. The writing of the book is my way of trying to find an answer. Short work is for exploring a feeling, communicating something that is perhaps still ephemeral, but that I already know the shape of.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I used to hate readings – attending them, doing them – but I’ve learned they’re such an important part of being a writer, experiencing literary community, nurturing literary community, and keeping literature alive. There’s no version of being a writer anymore where you write something and then hide away for years and people somehow magically find your work. The noise is too loud. You have to be willing to put yourself out there. I enjoy doing readings now. Some nights I’m a better reader than others. So it goes.
6 - 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?Yes – I’m interested in time and memory and the limits of language when trying to express the sensation of being a three dimensional, bodied, person moving through physical landscapes and contending with the culture you’re subject to, year after year after year. Fiction is one of the only tools we have for inhabiting another person’s experience, not just through observation, but by having access to their interiority, and I am endlessly in awe of how fiction can accomplish that. I feel like I still have so much to learn.
My work is mainly about the ways ordinary people navigate frustration and sadness, while finding beauty in the strange, surreality of contemporary life.
If a current question exists in modern letters, I think, unfortunately, it’s whether such fiction is still a worthwhile project, or if we should abandon our attempts at storytelling and consume the manufactured, tropey slop of AI. But I think people are hungry for more than recycled plots, whether consciously or not.
James Baldwin talked about the magic of reading, finding out that your pain and heartbreak have been felt by someone else, and I think that will always be more important than pure entertainment devoid of symbolic or overt meaning.
7 – 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?I don’t think the (capital W) Writer has a role in larger (capital C) Culture anymore, at least in the U.S., but writers have a role in smaller contexts: their city or region, their cohort of fellow artists, and in creating something meaningful for the readers that find them.
I’m not saying there aren’t still writers who have access to the national stage in the U.S., but to what end? To sell books? Toni Morrison is the last writer I remember who had a national spotlight and not only spoke about her writing and process, but about power and race in America. Who was a formidable public thinker, in addition to being a writer of literature. But the stage has changed, the audiences are more fragmented, and the writers who get access to that kind national coverage are more sycophantic to power, frankly. We are living through an era of artistic conformity and social cowardice.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It depends on the editor. Some editors make you wonder if human communication is even possible. Other editors, editors who understand your project, can make your work shine.
Alan Good at Malarkey Books and
Guillermo Stitch at Exacting Clam/Sagging Meniscus are two of the best editors I’ve ever worked with.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I took a class with
Richard Howard, the poet, many years ago, and he was old and tired, and on the days that he wasn’t up to lecturing he would read to the class, sometimes the very same reading that we had done during the week. At the time I was young and full of hubris and I was disappointed on those days, mainly because I enjoyed his lectures so much, but before he would read to us, he used to say, “You have to learn to how to read,” and I would think: I know how to read. But I was wrong. All these years later, I hear his voice sometimes, when I’m reading my own work aloud, and I understand what he meant: you have to learn how to hear the music and the possibilities in language, all the accidental meaning in a phrase, the way a sentence or paragraph can become a room. You have to learn how to read.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (the short story to essays to poetry to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?It has been hard for me to return to poetry. Fifteen years ago, I had this spurt where I was going to the Brooklyn Library and writing poetry all the time, but since then I have become rather obsessed with fiction, with finding fiction that interests me and avoiding fiction that sucks the marrow from life and trying to write the kind that is interesting. I’ll pull out some of the old poetry sometimes, try to write something new, but I haven’t been able to re-enter that voice. Maybe I will someday. Life is long.
Short fiction I have managed to create in the meantime, and I have learned that it can be fun to write and read, although I admit short stories still feel like a sandwich to me. Quick.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?On a typical day, M-F, I’m getting up, getting dressed, and going to work. Then in the evening, I usually come home and take a shower and put on comfy clothes and read or watch something. Writing usually happens on the weekend, or when I’m deep in a project, on a designated night of the week. At different times in my life, I’ve done the early wakeup, but I already get up for work at 5:30am these days, so that’s just not tenable. I need my sleep.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Lately I’ve been returning to
Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy—it rewired my brain, retaught me what fiction can do.
Édouard Glissant’s Mahogany blew my mind—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write something as formally complicated, but I aspire to. I hope to try. When I am working on a particular project, I always have a stack of 10-12 books that I dip in and out of. Right now that includes
Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote,
Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner,
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor – can you tell I’m working on a Southern novel?
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Petrichor.
14 - 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?Modernist painting, gothic architecture (specifically cathedrals), certain contemporary and classical music, cooking (like watching
Chef’s Table), photography as a means of creating beauty from ordinary environments.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Christopher Isherwood,
Clarice Lispector,
Dodie Bellamy,
Spalding Gray,
James Salter,
Gayl Jones,
Jean Genet,
Horacio Castellanos Moya,
Fernando Pessoa,
Denis Johnson,
Michael Ondaatje,
Anna Kavan,
Virginia Woolf,
Thomas Bernhard,
Camille Roy,
Paul Preciado16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?I would like to visit Edinburgh, Scotland someday. And write another book that I’m proud of.
17 - 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 have had many occupations while being a writer. I still have another job. I imagine I always will. For me it has never been an option to wonder what else I would do.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?I have often wondered, on nights and weekends when I am tired and could be doing something else, why I haven’t stopped. I am also a photographer, and have spent a time painting, although I don’t know if my paintings are particularly interesting. But I haven’t stopped writing and I don’t think I will. It is a practice. When I write, even when I’m frustrated, I feel at my most human.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?The last great book I read was
Aside from My Heart, All is Well by Héctor Abad.
The last great film I saw was
The Night of the Hunter. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.
20 - What are you currently working on?A novel, set in my home state of Georgia. It’s a beast.
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