Interview
Defying Boundaries through the lens of constraint: AN INTERVIEW WITH Paul Lisicky
BY Jacqueline Session Ausby, Nicolina Givin, & Amanda Rennie
MARCH 2017
“Making—whether it’s designing cities or composing music or writing— is a way toward freedom, individuality, expressiveness, connecting to others. A way to feel less alone.”
Engulfing us in his tug of war of emotions and bringing to life the burning and rebuilding of his relationships, Paul Lisicky has enticed his audience with his latest novel, The Narrow Door, which follows his other works like The Burning House and Unbuilt Projects. Now a Rutgers University creative writing professor, the South Jersey native has taught in multiple creative writing programs around the country, like Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and more. Besides his novels, his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, and many more print and online publications.
Limitations and boundaries pave a path that leads to The Narrow Door telling “just one version of the story” seen through a spectrum of possibility. Lisicky, a Guggenheim Fellow and award winner from the National Endowment for the Arts, gives life to the feeling of what could be utter disparity and desolation, creating glimmers of hope.
Approached by Glassworks magazine, Lisicky offers a candid and self-aware interview focused on his most recent memoir. Topics include life, "making," his thoughts on successful relationships, how creative nonfiction has evolved as a genre, his writing process, and how it has transposed over his work in various genres.
Engulfing us in his tug of war of emotions and bringing to life the burning and rebuilding of his relationships, Paul Lisicky has enticed his audience with his latest novel, The Narrow Door, which follows his other works like The Burning House and Unbuilt Projects. Now a Rutgers University creative writing professor, the South Jersey native has taught in multiple creative writing programs around the country, like Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and more. Besides his novels, his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, and many more print and online publications.
Limitations and boundaries pave a path that leads to The Narrow Door telling “just one version of the story” seen through a spectrum of possibility. Lisicky, a Guggenheim Fellow and award winner from the National Endowment for the Arts, gives life to the feeling of what could be utter disparity and desolation, creating glimmers of hope.
Approached by Glassworks magazine, Lisicky offers a candid and self-aware interview focused on his most recent memoir. Topics include life, "making," his thoughts on successful relationships, how creative nonfiction has evolved as a genre, his writing process, and how it has transposed over his work in various genres.
Glassworks Magazine (GM): You've written texts in a variety of genres, including fiction and nonfiction. Creative nonfiction has recently experienced a spark in popularity. What do you think about the sudden popularity of the genre? Does this becoming mainstream negatively affect the genre or the ability for seasoned nonfiction writers like yourself to maneuver it?
Paul Lisicky (PL): When I went to get my MFA, you pretty much had two options: poetry and fiction. Nonfiction wasn’t even a part of the conversation, and I just assumed it was the department of facts, not art. It wasn’t meant to last. Never mind the work of John McPhee or Joan Didion or Annie Dillard or the essays of Virginia Woolf… The MFA paradigm didn’t even make a place for it. And if it did, it was just tacitly assumed it was a lesser form than poetry and fiction. All that is changing of course, or has been changing for many years now, but it’s strange how many writing programs and esteemed writing programs, are still grouped around that old poetry/fiction dualism. The program I teach for, the MFA at Rutgers-Camden, wants to challenge that, and everyone takes at least one workshop out of her primary genre. So in any given fiction class you’re likely to sit next to poets and nonfiction writers. Those three lenses are brought to bear on the stories in the room, and that keeps everyone awake, asking questions about how they see, what they value.
Paul Lisicky (PL): When I went to get my MFA, you pretty much had two options: poetry and fiction. Nonfiction wasn’t even a part of the conversation, and I just assumed it was the department of facts, not art. It wasn’t meant to last. Never mind the work of John McPhee or Joan Didion or Annie Dillard or the essays of Virginia Woolf… The MFA paradigm didn’t even make a place for it. And if it did, it was just tacitly assumed it was a lesser form than poetry and fiction. All that is changing of course, or has been changing for many years now, but it’s strange how many writing programs and esteemed writing programs, are still grouped around that old poetry/fiction dualism. The program I teach for, the MFA at Rutgers-Camden, wants to challenge that, and everyone takes at least one workshop out of her primary genre. So in any given fiction class you’re likely to sit next to poets and nonfiction writers. Those three lenses are brought to bear on the stories in the room, and that keeps everyone awake, asking questions about how they see, what they value.
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The good news is that creative nonfiction is being taken in by larger audiences. Think of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s book. The idiosyncratic form of that — the space breaks (some close, some wide), the multiple braids, the folding of outside passages into the primary text, not to mention Harry Dodge’s account of his mother’s death… is there even a primary text? The form itself challenges that notion, and it’s broadened the scope of what’s possible in terms of structure and thought. It can’t help but encourage permission, innovation. Same goes for Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Sarah Manguso, Ander Monson, Nick Flynn—so many interesting writers.
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"Any form has limitations—all art, even experimental art, makes use of constraints. Otherwise, it's just chaos, narcissism—it's not aware of the possibility of a reader, listener, viewer" |
GM: Would you say that writing nonfiction comes with certain limitations? While The Narrow Door is a memoir based on truth, you and Denise are still characters in a story. While writing, did you find yourself drawing lines where the story became too personal and you had to steer away from a certain subject or avoid it altogether?
PL: Any form has limitations — all art, even experimental art, makes use of constraints. Otherwise, it’s just chaos, narcissism—it’s not aware of the possibility of a reader, listener, viewer. For instance, I don’t think of The Narrow Door as being the biography of Denise Gess. If anything, the book takes pain to say this is just one version of the story. Very close to the end, the speaker talks about many Denises, a different Denise for every friend, family member, or student. To put it another way, I didn’t want to write a book that would eat her up, or own her.
The material here is written through the lens of a fresh loss. It’s also written through the lens of Denise as a writer. It’s interested in thinking about attachment, saying goodbye, boundaries, artistic rivalry, platonic love: the interrelationship of all these things. It’s primarily the story of my year in the aftermath of her death. I don’t think I’d have been able to write the book if I hadn’t had that constraint. For instance, it would have been a different book if I’d felt the urge to write about Denise as a mother—or, say, Denise as the sister of a performing musician.
PL: Any form has limitations — all art, even experimental art, makes use of constraints. Otherwise, it’s just chaos, narcissism—it’s not aware of the possibility of a reader, listener, viewer. For instance, I don’t think of The Narrow Door as being the biography of Denise Gess. If anything, the book takes pain to say this is just one version of the story. Very close to the end, the speaker talks about many Denises, a different Denise for every friend, family member, or student. To put it another way, I didn’t want to write a book that would eat her up, or own her.
The material here is written through the lens of a fresh loss. It’s also written through the lens of Denise as a writer. It’s interested in thinking about attachment, saying goodbye, boundaries, artistic rivalry, platonic love: the interrelationship of all these things. It’s primarily the story of my year in the aftermath of her death. I don’t think I’d have been able to write the book if I hadn’t had that constraint. For instance, it would have been a different book if I’d felt the urge to write about Denise as a mother—or, say, Denise as the sister of a performing musician.
"As a reader, I'm not really stirred up by a writer's ideas unless I'm able to inhabit them in on the sensory level ... in other words, [sentences] should be able to make a shape in the air, like a song, when read aloud."
GM: As for your title (The Narrow Door), one could see this in a variety of contexts to draw conclusions about your story. Does this contain more of a psychological or metaphorical meaning, or is the ambiguity of the title an attempt to leave it up to your audience to decide? Also, many describe your writing as “poetic prose.” Is this a technique you set out to do, or is this the unintentional result of your style?
PL: I’d like the title to resound on many levels, psychological, poetic, spiritual—all at once. If I restricted it to one window it would feel overdetermined, too one-to-one. I appreciate the word “poetic” — I know it’s a compliment— but it’s also unnerving, as it implies the style’s pretty and elite rather than messy and down in the dirt. All I can say is that I want to write from the body, as I try to write to the body. Bodies breathe. Bodies perceive—i.e., see, hear, taste, etc. Senses are in foreground. Doesn’t Flannery O’Connor say, “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses?” As a reader, I’m not really stirred up by a writer’s ideas unless I’m able to inhabit them in on the sensory level, so it’s also important to me that sentences have a life on the page, but also a life off. In other words, they should be able to make a shape in air, like a song, when read aloud. I read everything I write aloud—definitely as I edit, but sometimes even as it’s coming to me—and my voice box is my primary editing tool. If it sounds wrong or fake or corny, then the word in question goes. If I stutter or mispronounce a word, it goes too, and I try to find the word my mouth wants to speak.
PL: I’d like the title to resound on many levels, psychological, poetic, spiritual—all at once. If I restricted it to one window it would feel overdetermined, too one-to-one. I appreciate the word “poetic” — I know it’s a compliment— but it’s also unnerving, as it implies the style’s pretty and elite rather than messy and down in the dirt. All I can say is that I want to write from the body, as I try to write to the body. Bodies breathe. Bodies perceive—i.e., see, hear, taste, etc. Senses are in foreground. Doesn’t Flannery O’Connor say, “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses?” As a reader, I’m not really stirred up by a writer’s ideas unless I’m able to inhabit them in on the sensory level, so it’s also important to me that sentences have a life on the page, but also a life off. In other words, they should be able to make a shape in air, like a song, when read aloud. I read everything I write aloud—definitely as I edit, but sometimes even as it’s coming to me—and my voice box is my primary editing tool. If it sounds wrong or fake or corny, then the word in question goes. If I stutter or mispronounce a word, it goes too, and I try to find the word my mouth wants to speak.
"If anything, writing the book made me feel very alive at a time when I might have felt exactly the opposite. Pain is certainly a part of aliveness; and I'd choose aliveness over numbness and depression any day."
GM: When referencing certain memories, you quote them as being ‘patchy,’ reflecting back and forth in time with frustration. Was there a moment when you felt that resurfacing those memories was also inviting back the pain and suffering you endured during those relationships?
PL: The book was pushed along by joy as much as loss. I had so few specifics around the first years of our friendship: no snapshots, no letters, nothing physical to hold on to. How the hell do you write what you don’t know? But the deeper fear was this: All that life might have vanished if I’d waited too long and tried to write from that Wordsworthian distance: emotion recollected in tranquility. There was something grounding about trying to capture certain memories, as if I was meeting her for the first time, falling into the friendship all over again. Grief and ache and sweetness and fury—all those threads so wound together, it’s impossible to unravel. If anything, writing the book made me feel very alive at a time when I might have felt exactly the opposite. Pain is certainly a part of aliveness, and I’d chose aliveness over numbness and depression any day.
GM: The natural disaster imagery you mention is much like the relationships throughout the memoir. For example, in the “Volcano” excerpt, you describe how the volcano slowly builds and eventually erupts as news of Denise’s cancer finally hits you. You also describe the multiple volcano eruptions around the world along with people’s reactions and current events of the time. The correlation between the imagery and emotion is very profound. Did you use this technique intentionally to give the reader a different emotional approach? Do you find a certain significance between the correlation of the characters and natural disasters?
PL: We think of disasters as extraordinary when they’re happening around us, at every moment, on the other side of the world or in the drinking water coming through our taps. I think I became more attuned to them in that hard year. I didn’t choose to fold them into the book as literary devices; they just happened to be on the TV, or on the web, and they didn’t feel so far away. Something seismic had cracked through my optimism, my sense of the future. But I hope, too, that that material leads you to make a connection between a damaged environment and our domestic lives. How do we have sane and loving relationships when we continue to spoil the earth? Maybe volcanoes aren’t exactly the result of manmade actions, but what about earthquakes (think: fracking), hurricanes, oil spills?
GM: Relationships that mirror natural disasters seem like perfect metaphors for how we’re feeling. However, most people would say that when friendships fall apart, they’re not worth saving. You take that approach very differently, saying the diffuse of your friendship with Denise was as much of a breakup as yours with M. Do you think people sometimes deny that friendships deserve the same amount of work as an intimate relationship?
PL: Oh sure. I think we pretend friendships don’t take work, but honestly they take as much work as romantic relationships, only it’s a different kind of work, much less obvious. There’s more space and flexibility in a friendship. Sometimes two close friends can go on without being in contact for months at a time, and all of a sudden they pick up where they left off, without any harm. But friends can get under each other’s skin in a way that romantic relationships often don’t—maybe because sex isn’t part of the picture, so intimacy has to be gotten some other way. Friendships don’t come with rules the way marriages come with rules, and thus, we have to make it up day by day, week after week. Maybe that keeps us on our feet; it keeps our animal senses alert. There are consequences to casual meanness, whereas married people get away with curt remarks and long silences all the time. Longterm friendships can explode overnight, over an argument at a bar, or after a movie. There’s always the possibility of a fallout beneath the ease and good times on the surface. Maybe there’s even something appealing about the often unconscious tension in a friendship.
GM: While there are fights, resolutions may or may not follow. Some critics have claimed The Narrow Door as a eulogy for a friend, do you agree with that categorization? If so, was it originally intended for that outcome? Is it a declaration to yourself and others experiencing the same emotional turmoil?
PL: No question, and no problem with the category. The list of Denise’s qualities in the “Volcano” chapter is taken directly from the eulogy I gave at her funeral—the book makes that clear in one of the final chapters. I definitely wanted to write a book that honored her, but that’s only part of the project. You might be reading about me, but you’re also reading about you, your losses, and the loved ones you’re already preparing to lose someday. The book just presented you with some nouns and verbs to do that.
PL: The book was pushed along by joy as much as loss. I had so few specifics around the first years of our friendship: no snapshots, no letters, nothing physical to hold on to. How the hell do you write what you don’t know? But the deeper fear was this: All that life might have vanished if I’d waited too long and tried to write from that Wordsworthian distance: emotion recollected in tranquility. There was something grounding about trying to capture certain memories, as if I was meeting her for the first time, falling into the friendship all over again. Grief and ache and sweetness and fury—all those threads so wound together, it’s impossible to unravel. If anything, writing the book made me feel very alive at a time when I might have felt exactly the opposite. Pain is certainly a part of aliveness, and I’d chose aliveness over numbness and depression any day.
GM: The natural disaster imagery you mention is much like the relationships throughout the memoir. For example, in the “Volcano” excerpt, you describe how the volcano slowly builds and eventually erupts as news of Denise’s cancer finally hits you. You also describe the multiple volcano eruptions around the world along with people’s reactions and current events of the time. The correlation between the imagery and emotion is very profound. Did you use this technique intentionally to give the reader a different emotional approach? Do you find a certain significance between the correlation of the characters and natural disasters?
PL: We think of disasters as extraordinary when they’re happening around us, at every moment, on the other side of the world or in the drinking water coming through our taps. I think I became more attuned to them in that hard year. I didn’t choose to fold them into the book as literary devices; they just happened to be on the TV, or on the web, and they didn’t feel so far away. Something seismic had cracked through my optimism, my sense of the future. But I hope, too, that that material leads you to make a connection between a damaged environment and our domestic lives. How do we have sane and loving relationships when we continue to spoil the earth? Maybe volcanoes aren’t exactly the result of manmade actions, but what about earthquakes (think: fracking), hurricanes, oil spills?
GM: Relationships that mirror natural disasters seem like perfect metaphors for how we’re feeling. However, most people would say that when friendships fall apart, they’re not worth saving. You take that approach very differently, saying the diffuse of your friendship with Denise was as much of a breakup as yours with M. Do you think people sometimes deny that friendships deserve the same amount of work as an intimate relationship?
PL: Oh sure. I think we pretend friendships don’t take work, but honestly they take as much work as romantic relationships, only it’s a different kind of work, much less obvious. There’s more space and flexibility in a friendship. Sometimes two close friends can go on without being in contact for months at a time, and all of a sudden they pick up where they left off, without any harm. But friends can get under each other’s skin in a way that romantic relationships often don’t—maybe because sex isn’t part of the picture, so intimacy has to be gotten some other way. Friendships don’t come with rules the way marriages come with rules, and thus, we have to make it up day by day, week after week. Maybe that keeps us on our feet; it keeps our animal senses alert. There are consequences to casual meanness, whereas married people get away with curt remarks and long silences all the time. Longterm friendships can explode overnight, over an argument at a bar, or after a movie. There’s always the possibility of a fallout beneath the ease and good times on the surface. Maybe there’s even something appealing about the often unconscious tension in a friendship.
GM: While there are fights, resolutions may or may not follow. Some critics have claimed The Narrow Door as a eulogy for a friend, do you agree with that categorization? If so, was it originally intended for that outcome? Is it a declaration to yourself and others experiencing the same emotional turmoil?
PL: No question, and no problem with the category. The list of Denise’s qualities in the “Volcano” chapter is taken directly from the eulogy I gave at her funeral—the book makes that clear in one of the final chapters. I definitely wanted to write a book that honored her, but that’s only part of the project. You might be reading about me, but you’re also reading about you, your losses, and the loved ones you’re already preparing to lose someday. The book just presented you with some nouns and verbs to do that.
"You might be reading about me, but you're also reading about you, your losses, and the loved ones you're already preparing to lose someday. The book just presented you with some nouns and verbs to do that."
GM: In the chapter entitled “Artist Colony” in The Narrow Door, you speak of the time you were reading a new story to Denise, when she asked you the question: “Is that you?”, you say reading at the artist colony helped you to take a step ‘further,’ from yourself. What do you mean by that?
PL: Well, once you turn personal experience into something made, it isn’t just about you anymore— your ego dissolves; at least that’s what you hope. You’ve transformed your own stuff—ideally. You’ve made it into a story everyone can connect to, regardless of identity, race, gender, age, etc. Everyone knows what it’s like to be, say, the object of projection while you experience yourself, from inside, as something else. For the writer, there’s a kind of safety in that transformation, so it could be both you and the writing.
GM: Did Denise’s acceptance give you more confidence to be true to yourself?
PL: I wish I had a simpler story to tell, but my coming out seemed to precede a time of distance between us—that goes completely against the whole ethos of coming out, I know. Come out to your loved ones and you will be whole! I don’t think there was actually one-to-one correspondence between that and the falling out— I mean, it had to happen, but my announcement did shake up something between us. The terms of the friendship had to be redrawn. And maybe it made Denise think about her own secrets from me. I mean, change is very hard on most relationships, and it rarely happens smoothly, even if it’s all right in a while.
PL: Well, once you turn personal experience into something made, it isn’t just about you anymore— your ego dissolves; at least that’s what you hope. You’ve transformed your own stuff—ideally. You’ve made it into a story everyone can connect to, regardless of identity, race, gender, age, etc. Everyone knows what it’s like to be, say, the object of projection while you experience yourself, from inside, as something else. For the writer, there’s a kind of safety in that transformation, so it could be both you and the writing.
GM: Did Denise’s acceptance give you more confidence to be true to yourself?
PL: I wish I had a simpler story to tell, but my coming out seemed to precede a time of distance between us—that goes completely against the whole ethos of coming out, I know. Come out to your loved ones and you will be whole! I don’t think there was actually one-to-one correspondence between that and the falling out— I mean, it had to happen, but my announcement did shake up something between us. The terms of the friendship had to be redrawn. And maybe it made Denise think about her own secrets from me. I mean, change is very hard on most relationships, and it rarely happens smoothly, even if it’s all right in a while.
GM: In your novel The Burning House, published in 2011, Isidore Mirsky loves both his wife, Laura, and her sister, Joan. Despite his flaws, he still comes across as a sympathetic character and readers feel a connection to him. What parts of yourself do you see represented in Isidore? Did his characterization and response from readers influence the way you represented yourself in The Narrow Door?
PL: I’m so glad to hear you describe Isidore as sympathetic. All of my work, up to that point, had been involved in this notion of human inscrutability—how do you love someone whose emotional logic is unreadable to you? And it was always written from the perspective of a character (or speaker) whose motivations were clear to himself. With The Burning House I thought, what would happen if I gave this inscrutable other center stage? What if I allowed him his blind spots? What if I showed him making mistakes, aware of hurting the others he loved, not able to stop. All of us have blind spots, and mine wouldn’t be blind spots if I were able to convey them to you. But as for my connection to Isidore? He does have a great love for people and things, an enthusiasm in his voice that sort of sounds like me. He’s not afraid of laying out his darkness and shame—and maybe I brought some of that spirit to The Narrow Door. Someone else is probably better qualified to name the connections between myself and my character. I don’t want to sound like a jerk here.
PL: I’m so glad to hear you describe Isidore as sympathetic. All of my work, up to that point, had been involved in this notion of human inscrutability—how do you love someone whose emotional logic is unreadable to you? And it was always written from the perspective of a character (or speaker) whose motivations were clear to himself. With The Burning House I thought, what would happen if I gave this inscrutable other center stage? What if I allowed him his blind spots? What if I showed him making mistakes, aware of hurting the others he loved, not able to stop. All of us have blind spots, and mine wouldn’t be blind spots if I were able to convey them to you. But as for my connection to Isidore? He does have a great love for people and things, an enthusiasm in his voice that sort of sounds like me. He’s not afraid of laying out his darkness and shame—and maybe I brought some of that spirit to The Narrow Door. Someone else is probably better qualified to name the connections between myself and my character. I don’t want to sound like a jerk here.
GM: Human inscrutability is a really interesting topic, and I don’t think writers can help but write about it. When we write, whether it’s fictionalized or work based on a true story, pieces of us live on within our writing, but it’s also a way to work through something, to move on. When you’re reflecting on the past, do you ever regret how you handled things or desire a different execution in your writing?
PL: Honestly, I don’t spend very much time regretting writing decisions. That’s not to say I’m in love with everything—far from it. Sometimes I’m okay with certain pieces, sometimes I’m … [shakes head]. But I think of each book as the artifact of a certain point in time. You have to sit with that, live with it. The work isn’t exactly yours anymore once people are reading it, making their own way with it. And if you don’t like something, you do it better the next time around.
PL: Honestly, I don’t spend very much time regretting writing decisions. That’s not to say I’m in love with everything—far from it. Sometimes I’m okay with certain pieces, sometimes I’m … [shakes head]. But I think of each book as the artifact of a certain point in time. You have to sit with that, live with it. The work isn’t exactly yours anymore once people are reading it, making their own way with it. And if you don’t like something, you do it better the next time around.
Find out more about Paul Lisicky on his website: http://www.paullisicky.net/
