With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine. We’re all about equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?
Quill and the blood of virgins took me down a narrative path that I finally had to opt out of. It became too messy. Before computers became an essential writer’s tool, and when typewriters were my only other option, I wrote exclusively with a pen on yellow lined pads. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to write creatively on a typewriter, and I never did. But when computers seduced me into their world, I could no longer hold out. Previously, I not only hand wrote my drafts of poems and fiction, but I also typed them up afterward so I could then revise them. That involved further (multiple) rounds of typing and revising. Those of you who are writers know how many revisions are necessary before a draft becomes viable.
Once I had purchased my first computer, a Kaypro, I soon discovered that if I could teach myself to create directly onto a disc, I could save myself a tremendous amount of time and effort. However, I also lost whatever dynamic existed between my right hand and my brain (I’m right handed). At times, when I was having difficulty letting loose on the computer with right-brain activity, I had to stop and write with a pen until I could enter the narrative again. And yes, I did use a fountain pen. What else is there?
Do you use chocolate as an intrinsic aid to writing?
I wasn’t a chocolate fan until recent years. I haven’t a clue why. But since I’ve discovered this delectable delight, I’ve had to make a bargain with myself (and the chocolate devil!). Pre-diabetic, I can’t eat the real stuff since most chocolate treats have a strong sugar base. But I’ve discovered a fudge recipe (that I’ll reveal only if you tempt me with lucre) that uses a sugar substitute and satisfies my newfound craving for chocolate. Since I’ve made this discovery, I’ve found that my writing has not only sweetened up considerably, but it also has turned darker. I’m sure none of this would have happened without the assistance of chocolate!
What do you read that people wouldn’t expect you to read? What’s the trashiest book you’ve ever read?
Since most people who will likely read this interview won’t know me, they may wonder, after learning about my novel Curva Peligrosa and the main character’s main focus on sex and eternal life, why I would spend so much time each day on the New York Times and the Washington Post. I confess. I’m a news hound, always searching for articles that deepen my understanding of worldwide problems. Unfortunately, there are too many difficulties to mention them all here, but I’m a political creature, and I seek the truth. The Post doesn’t always hit the right notes, but it tries. The Times has its biases, too, but it does attempt to present multiple sides of an issue. As a writer, though, it’s the sub stories that intrigue me. I always try to imagine my way into the emotional dynamics involved in these scenarios. It’s part of my writing practice.
And the trashiest novel I’ve ever read would me a tie between Amboy Dukes and Blackboard Jungle.
There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?
Since I’ve never been diagnosed as insane, I may not be the right person to try and answer this question. However, I do know that the persistence and commitment required to hang in there and create a novel is enormous. I suspect that an insane person may not have the wherewithal to do it. I also think there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity, depending on one’s definition of the latter. To me insanity means that you’ve really gone over the edge and are no longer available for rational dialogue. I have a half-brother, a visual artist, who is psychotic. And while I appreciate those brief moments when he is “himself,” in recent years, they have become few and far between. He lives in a world that only he can inhabit. I can’t follow him there, and I’m certain that this would be true for writers who have a similar diagnosis. I think we’ve romanticized insanity because those who suffer from it seem to enter a world we don’t have access to. But I believe that it takes a sane individual to enter the underworld and return with material that s/he can share with others.
We’ve all heard the advice that authors “should write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?
I think the key to this question is the last part, “what lives only in your mind.” It assumes that what we fantasize or imagine doesn’t have roots in the outer world, but from my experience, both inner and outer worlds are indispensable. They interact with each other constantly, even when we think we’re writing about people, settings, etc., that we’ve never experienced directly. We humans are namers, Adam (or maybe Lilith) getting the task of being the first to give names to animals and more. We can’t name something that we can’t visualize, and once we visualize it, the item comes alive. That’s the magic of language and our power as writers to do “novel” things with it. So even if we are focused more on themes that originate in our unconscious than those we’ve actually experienced externally, they still are things that we know.
Lily Iona MacKenzie has published books, reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. She also has taught writing at the University of San Francisco for thirty years and was vice-president of USF’s part-time faculty union. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Regal House published Lily’s novel Curva Peligrosa in 2017, and Lily’s poem ‘God Particles’ was featured in Pact Press’ Speak and Speak Again anthology.
Teaching writing has given me many gifts. Maybe that sounds corny, but it’s true. Teaching requires that I make a deep study of masterful writing. In fact, the first writing class I taught was “Learning From the Masters: Techniques of the Literary Greats.” Of course, I had studied renowned authors in grad school, but now I had to go deeper. To prepare for the class, I examined how Hemingway constructed his dialogue so it sounds real, how Baldwin used imagery to create underlying meaning, what Grace Paley does to make us laugh. In identifying specific techniques and articulating for students what they accomplish, I have learned a tremendous amount. Ten years later, I’m still teaching the “Learning From the Masters” course and it continues to feel fresh.
Writing 
What do you read that people wouldn’t expect you to read?
Anything that helps us to understand and connect with others is important, and learning other languages is most definitely a window into other people and different cultures. The way we express ourselves in our languages is hardwired into our brains, and if we can speak other languages, we can have insights into the thought processes of other people that we otherwise wouldn’t have. I loved writing Secrets in Translation, because I could use my Italian, which I began speaking when I grew up in Southern Italy as a little girl. It made me feel at home again! I speak other languages, as well, but Italian is the language of my heart.
There’s something to be said for pairing excessive attention to detail in real life with the ridiculousness of imaginary trajectories. Most days, I notice a lot of inconsequential stuff and catalog it away (today, it was a line of ants fighting along the crack in a sidewalk). Writing about them gives me a release of all of these relatively unimportant details that follow me around (strangely, people are willing to read about ants, but no one in real life is really wants to talk about them). These details get dropped into scenes to add a bit of grounding to scenes, both for the reader and in my own mind. As I edit and revise, that’s where my imagination kicks in and adds the details I don’t recall or the things that should have or could have happened. Then later, when I think back on the actual event, I…uh, I sometimes can’t remember what was real and what I made up.
For example, in Spartacus Ryan Zander and the Secrets of the Incredible, I include a scene where there’s a rat stuck in a crack in the cement. I recall in real life, walking to brunch and coming across a rat in a crack. It was horrible. There was nothing we could do. Later, we passed it again and it was gone. A cat? A good Samaritan? I have no clue. But I went home and wrote it into my book and it became one of my favorite scenes. In that scene, the rat is very much alive. However, to this day, neither my husband nor I can agree whether our rat was alive when we passed it the first time. I insist it had to have been still and playing dead—if it were alive, I would have done everything possible to get it out. Even hunt down some reverse lion pliers.
One of the strangest way this manifests itself is this weird auditory/location memory, where I can pair something I heard with where I heard it (and vice versa). Right now, on my jogging loop, every time I pass under the walking bridge, lines from the Modern Love podcast I listed to under it echo through my mind. Someday, I will harness this skill and maybe learn Italian—which I’ll only be able to speak in the park where I listened to language tapes.
Plus, I think there is also a confidence that comes with being an adult and reading something meant for a younger audience—you’re getting to go back to your own happier times, but with the wisdom of your experience. It’s rewarding to read about a stressful teen experience and think you’d be capable of handling it. 😉
How do you think translation affects a story?
The modern world provides us with countless conveniences. Almost anything we could want is available for purchase within seconds, at any moment. Amazon can deliver a package to our house within days for free, and this convenience is exemplified by book deliveries, its flagship service. So why then do we still go to book stores to buy books? This simple answer is that we don’t; we go for the experience. The more complicated answer involves our relationship with books and our emotional responses to seeing them, browsing them, the wholly deliberate de-commodification we enact by treating books as something slightly more sacred than most of the other objects we buy. Bookstores evoke a complex web of interconnected desires, sensations, and visceral satisfactions, all of which can be more or less articulated as the smell of books. As services like Amazon out-supply big-name stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble with its unlimited capacity and as sleek e-readers pose as practical upgrades to thousand-page tomes, an independent bookstore like Flyleaf Books continues to thrive because it is an important member of the community for which simple convenience could never substitute.
The interior almost seems designed to facilitate a sense of discovery and opportunity. After meandering through the front area, browsing the newest releases and staff favorites, the staff-curated poetry section and various fiction and non-fiction sections, you are inevitably drawn towards the back of the store to discover the—again, curated—children’s section. The space is semi-contained by half- and full-sized bookshelves and resembles a play area. To the other side, an entrance opens up into a large, spacious room containing the used books section. This space serves as a reflection of the front, with bookshelves lining the walls and tables set up in the middle. This is also the space where the community engages itself in the events hosted by the store.
Flyleaf is clearly managed by people who care about what they do. Over the course of interviewing her, Jamie stopped several times to personally make sure that people in the store had help if needed. When speaking about the store, she mentioned that, growing up in Chapel Hill, she had always wanted someone to open up the kind of bookstore Flyleaf has become. One can’t help but think of Toni Morrison’s advice to write the book you want to read; the same can be said of the stores that sell them. It certainly isn’t the largest bookstore in the area, but with its carefully managed selection, that hardly matters. Each section is constantly curated, and Jamie joked that five different people touch each book before it makes it to the shelf. When browsing the selections, that level of care is obvious. Jamie worked to find the right mix of people to help her manage the store and noted how happy she is with the staff group and culture.
You move into a new house, and of course it’s a hell of a lot of work. We’ve been pulling fourteen-hour days, hauling boxes till our arms and legs ache. And you start setting things up, just so. This goes here—should we put that over there? A seemingly endless number of objects to be placed, to be positioned as the perfect slaves they are, never moving unless we bid them. And you start learning the little peculiarities of the place—the way you have to pull just so to get the shower to work—how the front door sticks a bit. Even the sounds of it, a kind of minor encyclopedia: the kitchen tile you keep stepping on, that makes an odd squelching noise—the way china rattles in the hutch when someone walks past.
I worried for days, unaware of it, that there were no mockingbirds here. So many in our old neighborhood—and just three miles away! The world alive with them in May and June, their songs filling me whether I listened or not. Then I heard one, here, from the branches of the Modesto ash in our front yard. Fool, I told myself—you just happened to move in early July, the season shifts, they stop singing then. Mates are already won, sex on hidden branches has filled the world with a different, silent kind of song—eggs are growing in feathered bodies, nests being built. They’re here too. Of course.
In the middle of our big moving day, sweating and dirt-smudged, she and I paused at twilight to glimpse the new crescent through vines and trees in the backyard. Nothing made us feel more at home.
