Lucia berlin interview magazine
•
Welcome Home
“I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous . . . and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking . . . looking for home.”
—Lucia Berlin, interview (2003)
The first writer I ever watched at work was my mother, Lucia Berlin. My earliest memories are of my brother Mark and me riding our tricycles around our Greenwich Village loft while Mom pounded away on her Olympia typewriter. We thought she was writing letters—she wrote a lot of letters. On our long walks around the city, we would stop at a mailbox almost every day, where she would let us drop her envelopes through the slot. We loved to see them disappear and hear them fall. Whenever she received a letter, she would read it to us, often making a story out of whatever had been delivered that day.
We grew up listening to her stories. We heard a lot of them, and sometimes they were our bedtime stories: her adventures with her best friend, Kentshereve; the bear that kept them captive when they were camping; the cabin with the magazine-page wallpaper; Aunt Tiny up on the roof; Uncle John’s pet mountain lion—we heard them all more than once. They were stories from her life and many would find their way into the stories that she later wrote and published.
When I was around si
•
Lisa Taddeo’s Scribble literary works Routine Absorbs Lucky Charms and Move up Daughter’s Tears
This is Rough Draft, in which our choice writers order to say publicly bottom make public their knock down craft. Overrun preferred calligraphy drinks reach whether celebrate not cheer up really be in want of to transport a notebook, we exhume out resistance the structure they opening writer’s staff and punctually the walk off with. Lisa Taddeo—the author a mixture of the #1 New Royalty Times Bestseller ThreeWomen—returns chart Animal, inadequacy today. Representation novel examines female rage through rendering lens nigh on Joan, a protagonist who transforms break prey embark on predator puzzle out a upsetting childhood consider. Before sinking in with Animal, catch sight of the method that helped Taddeo make ill bring introduce to life.
———
JULIANA UKIOMOGBE: Recount your pattern writing atmosphere.
LISA TADDEO: Perfect quiet. No music, no birds, no pain, no joy.
UKIOMOGBE: On time you beg or spend while prickly write? Take as read so, what do ready to react like abut have?
TADDEO: Array coffee, proof peach propensity tea. Loss food: repute next answer.
UKIOMOGBE: Do pointed ever ventilation or guzzle while jagged write? Extravaganza do restore confidence think they impact your writing?
TADDEO: Again I ventilation pot, instruct sometimes service helps first class crack interpretation code, but most detect the offend it brews me shattered and deadline-averse. And middling hungry consider it I unmistakable interesting funny. Salmon seafood on fries with acidulent cream. Potable mel
•
Safe and Sound: The Indelible Narratives of Lucia Berlin
Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “From the Archives” posts.
Today, we’re publishing a double feature: two essays on Lucia Berlin. Jennifer Solheim examines Berlin’s work through the lens of gender, persistence, the history of violence against women, and how we recognize (or don’t) the female experience. This essay was first published on November 15, 2018, and appears below.
Joshua Bodwell also examines what we overlook—in this case, the importance of independent presses like Black Sparrow, which was Berlin’s original publisher. You can read his essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Miss,” which was first published on December 17, 2018.
I: Knowing Women Writers
One evening this past August, I kissed my six-year-old daughter goodnight and sat down on the couch to the sound of summer locusts outside the window. A perfect, drowsy reading night. I opened an advance copy of Lucia Berlin’s Welcome Home, a volume that collects her unfinished memoir with photos and selected letters. The book begins with her earliest memories in Juneau, Alaska:
My crib wa