Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Dream Apartment (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), and two books of nonfiction. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Publishing a first book helped me continue to have a life in poetry, a new mooring of starting out. It allowed for the possibility of being in conversation with readers, those unknown beloveds, and it brought me into relationship with Copper Canyon Press and my editor there, Michael Wiegers, who I’m lucky to be still working with 18 years later. All of which I’m very grateful for. Comparing my first book (2006) to my most recent (2023) is like trying to compare myself then to myself now—much continuity, much difference, much more experience.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
During my early adolescence, I remember my mother reading poetry aloud to me sometimes when I was very upset. So I assume it’s her fault.
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?
It varies quite a bit. I’d say my writing comes quickly, over long, slow periods of time. When a voice, its music, arrives things tend to move along but this quickness is part of a much slower process. Drafts and notes vary, too. I rely on both but at the same time, anything that sticks—whether a few lines or a whole draft—tends to have a lot of its energy from the start, though this doesn’t mean revision isn’t also crucial.
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?
It begins in the ear. I have to hear a the music of a voice or phrase, the rhythm of the thought, to borrow Oppen’s line. Without it, I’m thinking not writing.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings are separate from my creative process, they’re a different thing. Having the opportunity to share work and be in community can be quite lovely, and I definitely hear the work differently when reading it in front of people. But my creative process is quite separate, quite solitary, private.
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?
I hope everything I write asks and answers this question in its own way. Of course there are certain obsessions, fascinations, ethics and aesthetics that stay with me, evolve with me. But writing is where I go not to deposit answers or prove conclusions, but to pursue questions and urgencies, to discover—in collaboration with language, that extraordinary medium—what I didn’t know I knew or didn’t realize I needed to ask.
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 kind of shrink from monolithic singularities like “the writer” or “larger culture.” Writers. Cultures. Roles. We need writers and writing in so many different ways. It’s kind of like asking what is the current role of the scientist. We’d never ask or answer that singularly, or at least I wouldn’t. We need scientists to do science, in myriad ways toward myriad ends. We need writers to write, in myriad ways toward myriad ends.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For me, a few trusted readers are essential and I get their feedback first. Then an editor’s role can be many different things, from pretty hands off to pretty hands on. I’ve been fortunate to work with insightful, keenly intelligent people, so I try to listen to what they say, however overarching or specific, while preserving my inside sense of the work, what holds it together, what is and isn’t malleable.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t try to make a happy baby happier.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction to collaborative epistolary prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
In many ways, I found shifting from poetry—my home base—into lyric essay terrain surprisingly smooth, at least in the two books of prose I wrote/cowrote. In those cases, the sentence felt like the right unit, and I was happy to realize that I was as obsessed with its music as I tend to be with the unit of the line when writing poems. That said, the rigor/abandon of poetry is where I like to live.
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?
Both my health and my days—what they demand and allow—vary quite a bit, so I try to be a flexible forager. On a good day, I’ll slip into my study with a mug of coffee before doing anything else or talking to anyone and not emerge for at least three or four hours.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for
lack of a better word) inspiration?
Certain authors and books, of course—some predictably, others of the moment
sprung—but just as often other interests: film, music, performance, visual art;
cooking; landscapes; natural science; textiles.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Peonies and the soil they grow in. The air at about twenty degrees after four inches of snow. A german shepherd’s ruff. Cape Cod bay. I could go on…
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?
All of the above, indispensably. Other disciplines and mediums—their content and form, their parallels and differences—are as essential to my creative/thinking life as reading and literature.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to name! But I always return to Li Po, Bishop, Dickinson, Plath. In the contemporary space, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Jenny Erpenbeck, Renee Gladman, Leni Zumas.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Crisscross Iceland on horseback.
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’d have loved a life that put me on or in the water a good deal of the time.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It didn’t feel like a conscious choice, exactly; it felt like a pull or a pressure in the chest, which is how Grace Paley described it.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I love Jane Miller’s new poetry collection, Paper Banners: exquisite, full of restraint and abandon in equal measure, brilliant. And I thought the film, American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel, was pretty great.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on my contribution to a project called Delisted 2023, which invites artists, scientists, and writers to engage with animal and plant species that have been recently removed from the US Endangered Species List due to extinction.
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