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What does it feel like to be an overnight success after 17 years of publishing? In our lovely conversation with novelist, memoirist and essayist Paul Lisicky, we discuss the benefit of low expectations and the liberation of not worrying about having a huge audience followed by the surprise of getting one with his new memoir, The Narrow Door. We look at the role of discouragement in shaping a life/ life story, what it’s like to be writing the book while the story is still unfolding, inhabiting each moment of a narrative with feeling and intelligence, questions of perspective and time, and decisions around anonymity and using names. Paul talks shop: the process of placing work in journals and lit mags, submissions, and a surprising thought about online vs print publications. Writing while walking seems to be a theme in the Story Maker podcasts, and it comes up in a fun way here. This rich and winding conversation also covers boredom, randomness, the importance of paying attention to the way your mind works.
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Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky is the author of five books: Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, Unbuilt Projects, and now The Narrow Door, a memoir named one of BuzzFeed’s “27 Most Exciting New Books of 2016.” His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Ecotone, Fence, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, Unstuck, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, the low residency program at Sierra Nevada College, and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He is the editor of StoryQuarterly and serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.
I so appreciated Paul’s humor and his generosity of spirit.