One thing I didn’t expect was the anger. First came love. Flooding everything afterward, the anger came. I made it to southern California, a surprising haven for me. Most of the people I know in the midwest and east coast tend to generalize SoCal with broad, unfair strokes tainting it with the superficiality of Hollywood. […]
Author: Lisa
Day 12 of the Book Tour: Everything, Especially Life, is DIY
I’ve got one week left. In one week, I’ll be on plane flying home to Cleveland. The west coast sweep of the book tour will be over. Years of thinking, months of planning have gone into each event and then, poof, it will all be a memory. I’ve never been on a book tour and […]
Day 11 of Dear Sister Book Tour: Thoughts from the Road
I’ve been on the road. Two pieces of luggage full of old clothes and fresh books right off the press. The books are all the same title. It’s my book. It’s a collection of letters, poetry, and prose I put together about four years ago. It’s taken this long to get it out in the […]
2014 8th Annual State of the Self Address
I delivered this talk in an unprecedented way this year. My annual birthday reflection was given at the very end of a reading and talk I was giving in Seattle about the anthology, to a packed house at Black Coffee Coop where they laughed, clapped, and wildly cheered and say Happy Birthday. The lyrical parts […]
A Book Tour about Communities, Listening, Sexual Violence, and Rape
The past month has been a blur of dreams. Hard dreams coming true. Pain blossoming into sweet petals of healing. Conceptualizing the idea of this anthology began 13 years ago. Call for submission, editing, book proposal, negotiating, waiting, galley reviews, begging for blurbs, outreaching on the branches of favors from good hearted writers and journalists […]
The Great Irony of 2014
New Year’s Eve is the microcosm of life. I love New Year’s Eve. It’s this holiday that I think perfectly sums up how life is perceived by most people: expectations are high, expectations rest on others to make it exceptional, and when things turn out mediocre, the conclusion is that New Year’s Eve is anti-climatic. […]
Stop Asking Me for my Favorite Things
The Artistic Difference Between Selfies and Selftraits
I’m not up in arms over Jezebel’s latest debacle calling “selfies” nothing but a degrading digital act of vanity, making people focus on beauty and nothing else. As a writer and photographer, I woefully disagree. The beauty about photography, and why it pairs so elegantly with writing, is it’s wordless power to share truth. It […]
The Writer’s Id, Ego, and Super Ego
Over the weekend I ran into someone I knew from college. Someone who went on to become a physician and married a lawyer and wore really nice clothes with a cool, slick satin tie. As we exchanged expected pleasantries, and that pause came, signaling questions were coming I braced myself: So, Lisa, what do you […]
A Guide on How To Write About Sexual Violence, In Reaction to “Mellie’s Rape” on Last Night’s Episode of Scandal
It was horribly done. Last night’s handling of sexual violence. Scandal writers “explaining” the history of Fitz and Mellie’s marriage, how Mellie came to be how she is now. The writers took us back 15 years ago and gives evidence of how Mellie came to be the kind of First Lady that she is. There […]