10 Questions for Lisa Olstein
- By Edward Clifford
In one chemical future, the clouds themselves will be extinct, so we try to hold them in mind as they float by casting their individual storm-sized shadows across the animals across the plains.
—from "Glacier Haibun," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I started writing in high school, under the influence of a passionate tenth grade English teacher whose love of literature was palpable. The first poem I can remember writing was about a horse named Lindy who wanted to run fast as she was asked to by her rider, but also wanted to run away. I remember reading it over the phone to my friend Claire, telling her it'd been published in The New Yorker, the only magazine I knew of at the time that published poems, in an elaborate attempt to get her honest opinion. (If memory serves, she was lukewarm about the whole thing.)
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
This question. . . I, too, dislike it. Why? Hard to say, but I think it asks me to go outside myself and my writing in a way that almost make my skin crawl. In any case, I’ve been reading and never ceasing to find inspiration and instruction in certain writers since I was a teenager: Bishop, Plath, Paley, Rich. Rilke was a gateway drug for me, also John Donne. These days there are certain writers I can count on to electrify my mind and make me want to write, and write more adventurously: Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Hanif Abdurraqib, pretty much anything Susan Bernofsky decides to translate. Often, it’s individual poems or collections that do the work of making me think or feel differently.
What other professions have you worked in?
Once upon a time I worked in women’s health as a hotline and clinic counselor. It was meaningful, rewarding work freighted with the unconscionable and idiotic danger that such work was (is) freighted with in that (our) time and place. I also worked as a part-time nanny, a tech in an ophthalmology practice, an assistant and sometime copywriter in a small advertising agency, very briefly as a busboy, even more briefly as a beach bar coffee slinger.
What did you want to be when you were young?
Dolphin trainer. Who didn’t?
What inspired you to write this piece?
This piece is a take on a haibun, a Japanese form that's something like a travelogue or account of a journey. I was taking a trip and was drawn to the idea of the form as an experiment in how I might observe and remember. What emerged, I think, was how layered everything was: Astonishing natural beauty and wildness layered with commerce and the violence of capital layered with creeping climate crisis. The presence of loved ones layered with the absence, the recent or impending loss, of others. The personal version of this presence and absence layered against the broader ecological, social, and cultural versions of it: the presence and absence of people, of peoples, on that land across its history. Human time layered against geologic time—so many kinds of time were all stacked up and intertwined: tourist time, seasonal and ecosystem time, agricultural and ranch time, search and rescue time, political time. The poem's sections came to feel almost like a series of vases to fill or lenses to peer through; I found they invited me into a distinct, slightly distant observational gaze.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I think every place I've ever loved has left its living map written into my mind. Memory and longing, which are inextricable from imagination, are almost always placed and those places imprint as sense and sensibility. So, it feels more accurate to me to say my writing is infiltrated by place, by places. Some are easy to point to: particular shorelines or window frames or street corners or cornfields and just beyond a river, not to mention particular homes with their particular rooms, that are always hovering in my mind. Others are surprising: vivid fragments that persist but I couldn't tell you why these as opposed to others. I kind of love the way the brain reveals itself in this way: beautiful archive full of logical and arbitrary holdings.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I try to grab the first hours after waking, if I can. Coffee, no food, no conversation, nothing to side track the brain from wherever it's been in sleep. If I can walk right into them, those are usually the most productive and immersive hours. But overall, I've learned to be an opportunist. I do what I can, when I can, to invite possibility, but mostly I just try to pounce when it shows.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
If we're talking fantasy, I covet them all, each for what I imagine are its particular pleasures and ways of moving through the work and the world. I frequently have the opportunity to envy musicians the chance to collectively make literal resonance. From high school through college I did a lot of black and white photography, and there was nothing like the utter disappearance of time in the darkroom.
What are you working on currently?
Right now, I’m working at two very different ends of the spectrum: I’m doing final copy edits on a new book called Climate, an exchange of epistolary essays with Julie Carr, coming out with Essay Press this spring and I’m finalizing a new book of poems, Dream Apartment, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. But what I’m really working on is an obsessive, immersive, confusing then delightful then confusing new project involving erasure, cutout, and collage using a trio of antique reference books as source texts.
What are you reading right now?
Fight Club, Miriam Toews' newest novel (I inhale her brilliant work). Pancha Tantra, an extraordinary, giant book of Walton Ford’s paintings that includes mini-essays as well as excerpts from folk tales, natural history texts, and other sources that influence his paintings. And In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, in advance copy, the second book by the wonderful poet Abigail Chabitnoy, a meditation on water, land, women, and climate coming out from Wesleyan next year.
LISA OLSTEIN is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press) and the book-length lyric essay Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press). Climate, an exchange of epistolary essays with poet Julie Carr, is forthcoming in 2022, and Dream Apartment, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2023. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Writing Residency, Pushcart Prize, and Writers League of Texas Book Award, she currently teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Texas at Austin.
