Q & A with Alex Lemon

Author Interview with Dr. Alex Lemon

Alex Lemon is a writer, editor, professor, husband, and father. The following interview is a look into each of these aspects of Alex's life, inspiration, and efforts to balance it all. 

1. Who or what inspires you as an author?

• I think at a basic level, just reading and writing as I grew up. I was raised in a house that did not have a lot of media. We didn’t have TV or movies. I was reading a lot. First and foremost, I was inspired by books, just seeing books around me and hearing stories. My mom is an artist, so I think being around a creative imagination inspired me not only to think about how amazing storytelling is, but also how amazing it is to create your own stories. Seeing my mom do that through her own art was inspiring.

2. Who or what motivates you as an author?

• I think first and foremost, I have to write. I am compelled, for whatever reason, inwardly to always be creating. Even though it’s incredibly hard, it feels not only powerful, but also really important that a writer can create hugely important and life-changing things out of nothing. You don’t need a computer, you don’t need tools, you don’t need oil, and you don’t need a machine. Stories can move people to their core. They can change people’s lives. First and foremost, I am compelled inwardly. For whatever intangible reason, I have to write. Now, there are external motivations too. It’s part of my job. I’m sure there are cultural influences that are motivated by the success of my peers. I also just want to get better at what I do each day. 

3. What author[s] or book[s] influenced you as an author the most?

• It depends. I work in different genres, so it depends on the genre. For poetry, I think I was first moved by reading the work of the early modernists or the people right before the early modernist- authors like Dickinson and Whitman and Stephens. Also, contemporary poets like Yusef Komunyakaa, Nick Flynn, Brenda Shaughnessy, and even now Terrance Hayes. I have three copies of Some Ether, Nick Flynn’s first book. I can pick it up and read a poem from it, and it will make me want to write. It will inspire me to write. The same is true for prose writers. For writing memoirs and creative prose, I think I am inspired a lot by the fiction of Dennis Johnson. The memoirs of Mary Carr have been really influential to me. Also, the contemporary prose of George Saunders, both his fiction and his nonfiction.

4. Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

• It’s changed, as I have gotten older. When I was in graduate school, it was my computer in my bedroom and I would stay up all night. I wouldn’t sleep at all. I would write late at night. I would probably start at 8pm and then write until 3 in the morning, all the time whenever I could. Now because my life is so different, I actually get up really early in the morning. I had an office at home, but we are having another baby, so our son now has my office and the baby is going to have her own room. Right now, I feel kind of homeless as a writer. I am writing with a laptop on the kitchen table. I get up at about four in the morning and work until somebody wakes up, usually Felix. I make sure to start my day that way because it feels like a positive force to be able to privilege myself and my creative work, but it also informs everything that I do. It informs my teaching; it informs my parenting; it informs what kind of partner I am- all in really positive ways. Before you came in, I was revising a poem. I used to need lots of sustained hours and hours and hours to work. Now my life is so fragmented and I’m being pulled in so many different ways that if I can get twenty minutes here and there, I can work on poetry. It’s different for creative nonfiction and prose. I need blocks of time. I can work in the mornings often because I’ll have a couple hours to sink into the project. I need no distractions to write creative prose. With poetry, I can kind of have distractions. I think that’s why there is something similar to writing all night long and then working in the morning before anyone is up. It’s totally quite; there’s no one in the world. It feels like I am the only person alive in the world. So maybe I’ll get four hours on Saturday when Felix and my wife go do something; I’ll have four sustained hours. Really, a lot of my creative prose gets written during breaks, longer periods of time like summer or on vacations. 

5. How is technology changing print culture, specifically regarding authors and readers?

• In tons of ways, in both good and bad ways. There are so many more venues for publication. Let’s say we are talking about literary journals. So many more poems and stories are being published and so many more people are reading them because it is so easy to get access on your phone or the web. When it comes to book publishing, I think we are still in this muddy area where people are trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. I think in a lot of ways, it’s meant authors are making less money for books. It’s a hard thing to answer. There are stats that fewer people today are reading. I think Dr. Williams told me only 40% of college graduates will ever read a book again after they graduate. That is so depressing!! A part of me thinks that technology is killing the book in a way because it’s really privileging the image. We are becoming a more and more visual culture. Pretty soon we aren’t even going to talk to each other. We are just going to make faces; it’s all going to be like emojis or something. In some ways, I think that it’s awesome. There are so many more opportunities and there is so much more for people that are interested, but it seems like less people are interested. That is sad. I think it also opened opportunities for people that want to write because it’s easier to communicate with editors and publishers. It hasn’t figured itself out yet. I think it has tremendous amount of potential, but it also ahs the potential to kill everything that’s ever happened. Technology is changing so rapidly, that the answer is not going to happen over night. We have to adapt and think about how we are going to adapt. People are getting more comfortable reading on tablets or iPads. I think because of the print culture for poetry, poets will always buy books. I think that will always be the case. I wouldn’t be surprised, especially with trade books and genre books, if more people buy them on Kindles and iPads. I buy more books or check out specific books from the library because I can download them digitally; however, the some books that I want to have. I want to hold the substance. If I’m traveling, I’ll read on an iPad for sure. 

6. When you write, who is your intended audience?

• I don’t think I have a specific audience, especially when it comes to my poetry. I don’t think about audience at all when it comes to my poems. Hopefully, I am exploring something personal in a way that makes the personal transcend and become public. I think for my memoirs and creative nonfiction, it is for specific audience. I think about audience. I think about if I am articulating this story in a way that makes sense to people. Who are those people? I guess it depends on the project. My first memoir, Happy, I definitely wrote for young people. It’s a young-persons book. I did not write that book for my grandfather to read. It is a book about a young person’s experience with life and depression and trauma, and it is for young people. I am working on a book about fatherhood right now, and somewhere in the subconscious I am thinking about talking to other young fathers, but I don’t think that’s at the forefront. I think privileging what is important to me comes in first, and then the audiences come later during the editing. I never think, well I guess I have, I want to write a book that cross audiences. It’s going to be teenage, lesbian, vampire, magician, and school- like I want it to cross all and sell a billion copies. So, joking I have talked about audience, but I don’t think it play a big role in what I’m doing. 

7. What would you say is the hardest thing about writing?

• Time. I think to write the way I want to write, to write well, I have to spend a lot of time doing it. The world that I live in, the life I have created does not always allow that time. I have to go shopping…I have shit I have to get done. As much as I want to be like, “Oh my art is sacred,” I also have to make sure that my family is alive. That is a struggle. I can kind of joke about it, but I’m starting this book project and at the core it’s trying to figure out if being the father that I want to be is compatible with being the artist I want to be. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I can’t be the dad I want to be, if I want to be the writer I want to be, or vice versa. It’s a really, really hard thing to think about. Anytime I’m hanging out with my family, that’s time I could be writing. That makes me really sad to be honest with you. It’s hard. 

8. How is the current technological revolution changing your audience? 

• I think that more people are able to read. Technology has made my work available to a wider audience. Every semester I probably get ten emails from high school kids that are working on a project and they are either talking about a poem form one of my books or my memoir. They write me. That would not have happened when I was in high school. I couldn’t have done that; there wasn’t email. I also think in some ways, it is easier to print books. It has also changed writing process. I use a voice recorder, much like you are using right now. I don’t have to keep my notebook with me at all times. I can just turn something on and make voice memos to myself if I’m feeling lazy or driving somewhere. I always put it down in my notebook, eventually. I also have a visual disability and I didn’t really relearn to write with a pen or pencil after I had brain surgery, so I used voice-recording software for a long time to take notes in my early writing. That is just something that I have stuck with 

9. What do you think reading and authorship will look like fifty years from now?

• I hope people are reading. It had no idea. Technology or information doubles every four years. We could be downloading stories…there will be stories. There will always be stories in the form of…who knows. They will always be. Maybe we will be downloading them into our brain chips. Even though society has been regressing artistically in an ugly way, everything right now is focused on business; I think there will be a pushback. There is always an ebb and flow. I think it will all still exist, but who knows what kind of technology will be bringing stories to people. In the same way there is a hipster resurgence of vinyl, there will always be fine pressed books and limited edition books for a certain segment of culture. I think they will always last

10. How did you find a publisher, and how long did that process take?

• My first book of poems, Mosquito, was published in 2006 with Tin House Books. I found my publisher because I started publishing individual poems in literary journals in 2004. I was also awarded some nationally recognized fellowships, and usually editors of publishing houses care about book. They are reading. The editors at Tin House had read my poems in other publications, and then they solicited work from me. They asked me if I had any poems for their magazine. I sent them poems, and they like the poems. That led them into asking if I had a manuscript because they were just starting Tin House books at the time, and they wanted to have a poetry collection. The process from me starting to publish poems to winning awards and grants was a three-year process; I was very fortunate. For the memoir, I had been publishing books of poems that were getting recognized at a nationally level. Through conference and friendship, I had been meeting agents as friends, and through conversations I was having with some of my other author friends they asked if I was ever thinking about writing a memoir. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I started to free write and doodle ideas and started to feel more and more compelled to write the memoir. I began to navigate through my poetry in prose. I used friendships and networks to communicate with agents. I sold Happy as a proposal; it only had about twenty pages. I was given three years to write it, but I got a contract up front and in advance. That process probably took five years in total. 

11. How much did your manuscript change during your publisher’s editorial process?

• For the memoir, it changed from being just twenty pages of notes with a few scenes diagram and fleshed out with an outline of where I saw the book going to an actual book. It fluctuated from twenty pages to a first draft that was 400 pages and a hot mess to subsequent thinner and thinner drafts until the final project. Because I had been trained as a poet, I had to learn how to write clearly in a way that could be received by a more general audience. Poems are like reading and speaking a different language. It changed tremendously from notes to a huge, ugly thing and back down. My poems- my first book was edited pretty heavily from the line level, going line by line, to the book as a whole, the ordering of ideas. My most recent book, I had a paragraph of thoughts and that was it. I don’t know why that is. I’m just aware of that huge difference. 

12. Do you have a definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing?  If so, how definite and specific is your outline?

• It depends. For my poems, the imagination is open. I may have an image in my mind or a line or a few words or a turn of phrase. I might just kind of go with it and see what happens. For my creative prose, I have an idea. It’s still kind of wild and organic, but I have an idea about what I am writing about. It’s much more defined. Using Happy for an example, I knew what the story was. I don’t know necessarily all of the little stories that need to go in to telling the big picture. With poems, I’m really just finding a way to open the door into a dark room and then feeling my way into the room, feeling the room and trying to see what’s there. I really have no idea where I’m going. Only through revision and spending time with it can I revise or more clearly articulate what I found in that room. 

13. How would you describe your writing process?  

• It depends on the genre and focus. Writing memoir is more guided and more focused, I know what I’m doing. With verse, I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing at all. 

14. Do you have any writing habits or rituals that help your writing process?

• **Did not ask because this had already been addressed

15. Do you write in multiple genres?

• Yes. Poetry and creative nonfiction. I’ve ben writing a little bit of fiction, but it’s not as fun. I’m just not as compelled I guess. I’m lucky that I feel like working in poetry and creative nonfiction that inform each other in positive ways. 

16. What was your first publication, and what do you think of this publication now?

• My first publication was a poem in our college literary magazine. It was really surprising because nobody on campus knew. I was a guy that played baseball and hung out with jocks. I had six poems published in this magazine, and people shit their pants. In college, my first publication was a poem called “Love is a Very Small Tsunami” in Black Warrior Review, and then my first book publication was Mosquito with Tin House Books. I am fond of them today. I am such a different person today then when I wrote those poems, but I still like it. I’ll go back and read them and I’m energized in a certain way because there is a certain wildness that I probably don’t have anymore. There is certain strangeness because I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just went. There are also some really ugly lines and clunky turns of phrase that I wouldn’t do now. So, I am fond of it. I adore it, but I am also embarrassed by it. 

17. Have you ever started writing something and ended up throwing it out?

• All the time. You have to dig through the manure to find the diamonds. I feel lucky if I write 24 lines and a few of them are good. I have had huge projects that I’m 60 pages into and then think, “ew this is not good.” I think that is just part of the writing process. One has to have that filter.

18. Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

• I edit. I work as the editor for the literary journal, and I am the poetry editor here. I am also an editor for a book publisher, a small poetry press called Saturnalia Books. I serve on the Texas Commission for the Arts. I work with funding writing projects. Every year, I usually judge a couple on contests and serve on other literary committees. Last year I served on the Oregon State Commission for the Literary Arts, so I judged who got the grants for the year. I try to be as active as possible in promoting the arts and working in other ways.