Interview: Lisa Alther
Lisa Alther is an American author and novelist. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in English literature in 1966. According to Ms. Alther, she wrote two novels, a host of short stories, and received "hundreds of rejection slips" between age 16 and 30, before Kinflicks was accepted for publication.
Alther is the author of six novels, Kinflicks, Original Sins, Other Women, Bedrock, Five Minutes In Heaven, and Washed in the Blood, as well as a small number of published short stories and many magazine articles. She has also written two non-fiction books, Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree--the Search for My Melungeon Ancestors and Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance.
Interviewed by John Wisniewski
Published with permission by TCJWW
Wisniewski: When did you begin writing, Lisa? What was your first published story?
Alther: I started writing as a teen for my high school newspaper, at which I was Features Editor. Outside of school I was reading Faulkner and I became enchanted with stream-of-consciousness, so I wrote my first story for the newspaper in stream-of-consciousness. It concerned Nathan Hale on the morning of his hanging by the British for spying during the American Revolution. When it was published, I discovered that the newspaper advisor, the wife of the local sheriff, had turned my prose into complete sentences. When I complained, she sent me to the guidance counselor and I was expelled for the rest of the day. So that was my first experience with editors.
Wisniewski: Who are some of your favorite authors?
Alther: I always loved the British women writers—Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Wolfe—and also the Southern women writers—McCullers, O'Connor, Porter, Welty—because they proved to me that it was possible for women to write well. This helped me believe that I too could become a writer. My mentor was Doris Lessing. I read everything she'd ever written and wrote her a fan letter. She replied, and we became great friends and corresponded, off and on, for forty years. She helped me get my first novel published.
Wisniewski: What was the critical reaction to Kinflicks when it was published? Did you expect the book to be as popular as it is?
Alther: The success of Kinflicks was a total shock. I'd been writing fiction for 14 years without getting anything published (apart from my Nathan Hale story in my school newspaper). I'd written 2 previous novels and 15 stories and had collected about 250 rejection slips. So I felt like Sleeping Beauty, kissed by the prince. The critical reception was mixed. I found that whatever one reviewer loved, the next one hated. It was too confusing, so I stopped reading reviews.
Wisniewski: What is the greatest novel ever written? Is there a book that you hope to write someday?
Alther: There's no one "greatest novel" for me, though there are many I regard as "great." I taught myself to write by reading everything I could get my hands on in my small town in Tennessee—everything from The Sound and the Fury to Cherry Ames, Rural Nurse.
Wisniewski: What kind of stories attract your attention?
Alther: I'm especially drawn to stories that address the basic questions—why are we here on this planet, and what are we supposed to be doing while we're here. Those are the stories I like to read and the ones I try to write.
Wisniewski: Are you writing anything that you could tell us about?
Alther: I've just begun a new novel, but I'm superstitious about talking about new work. I'm afraid that exposing it to light and air will cause it to shrivel up. Sometimes when I've talked about new work, it's sapped the energy and enthusiasm for working on it later. I guess a new book is for me like a secret pregnancy: No one needs to know until it starts showing!
Wisniewski: What about New York inspires you?
Alther: When I'm writing, I try to talk as little as possible so that I don't interrupt my concentration. I enjoy writing in New York because my friends are always so busy that I don't have to make a special effort to avoid them. And when I take a break, I can be among strangers at a movie or museum or restaurant without needing to talk to them. So I feel less isolated, but without forfeiting my focus.
Wisniewski: How do you prepare to write a new novel?
Alther: I'm not very organized about writing. I only write when I feel the urge, and I don't write fiction from an outline because it's a process of discovery for me and I don't know in advance where I'm going. I usually start off with a vague mental image of characters whom I don't know, doing things I don't understand. I write a story to try to figure out what's going on. Sometimes the story remains a story, but other times it morphs into the first chapter of a novel. Often I just write scenes as they occur to me, and then later on I rearrange and meld them into a narrative.
Wisniewski: Does writing come easy to you? Do you enjoy writing?
Alther: Writing doesn't come easily to me. I usually do several major drafts—five or six—before I'm finished with something. But I do enjoy it because I only write when I want to, and tinkering with words entertains me. When I compare writing to a real job like farming or working on a production line, I realize that my job is a piece of cake and that I'm really lucky to have been able to spend my life doing it.
Wisniewski: Do people that you may meet in real life, inspire characters in your stories?
Alther: Yes, I think this is because a lot of my writing is character-driven, by events and people I don't understand in real life. I write stories to try to figure them out. But I don't often put real people directly into my stories. My characters tend to be composites of traits from several people, but by the time I've gone through several drafts with them, they become real to me, and separate from any actual people who may have inspired them.
Wisniewski: What was it like to be a young writer, during the 1970's, when Kinflicks was wriitten?
Alther: When I look back to the 1970's, it seems like a Golden Age for writing and publishing. Books were a more important part of the national conversation then because many of the current forms of entertainment and information didn't exist. Also, there were more medium-sized publishers in New York because multi-national corporations hadn't absorbed them all, so there were more outlets for new and/or risky writers. Editors, not marketing departments, chose their own books, often based on their quality rather than their sales potential.
For published writers it was rather like the old movie studio star system: Once an editor accepted you, he or she would keep you around for several books. Even if some didn't sell well, a house continued to publish a writer, with the hope that the next book would sell. The basic idea was that talent was something that could grow, with encouragement, and it often worked that way.
Also, writers weren't expected to publicize their books. Many excellent writers are introverts, and don't do well performing in public or promoting themselves. Knowing this, editors often urged their writers to stay home and write, rather than to deplete their time and energy doing things they weren't good at or didn't enjoy. I've been lucky enough to have had five amazing editors during my fifty-year career, editors who helped me make my books better. But agents often perform this function nowadays, and many editors just acquire manuscripts and shepherd them through the publication process. So a lot has changed, but good writing is still happening and still making its way into book form, be it print books or ebooks. Writers who can't find publishers can now publish themselves, and the internet makes all books more easily available, especially to outlying areas. So some of the changes have been improvements, however nostalgic I may feel for my salad days!
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Interviewer John Wisniewski is a freelance writer who resides in West Babylon, NY. He has written for Grey Lodge Review/Aliterati, Urban Graffiti magazine, L.A. Review of Books and Toronto Review of Books.
