How to Keep Writing: An Interview with Lisa Locascio Nighthawk

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk’s first novel Open Me was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. Her writing has also appeared in Electric Literature, Tin House, n+1, Wigleaf, Bookforum, The Believer, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Locascio Nighthawk was raised near Chicago and earned BA and MFA degrees at New York University and a PhD at University of Southern California. She is Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Since 2020, she has been the core faculty member in prose the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing program. In 2022, Locascio Nighthawk will become Interim Chair of the Antioch MFA.

I spoke with Locascio Nighthawk in October about Open Me, the writing and publishing process, what she loves about teaching, and more.

Kevin Cummins: You grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, where Ernest Hemingway grew up. Was he celebrated in the school culture of your childhood?

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk: We went to the same high school, so I was always aware of Hemingway. While at that high school, I was assigned to read The Old Man and the Sea, which is a terrible book to assign to teenagers. It has no sex and is effectively a meditation on mortality. Given that Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, it’s bizarre that’s the book they gave us. A favorite restaurant I used to go to with my family had entirely Hemingway-derived décor. Despite his omnipresence in my hometown, I  never really got into Hemingway. When I was completing my MFA, his short story “Cat in the Rain” impressed me. The Garden of Eden is my favorite Hemingway novel; I read it because Toni Morrison writes about it in Playing in the Dark. He did good work, and I enjoy it, but I never felt like I was trying to live up to him.

KC: How might you introduce your novel to readers who have not read it?

LLN: My novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, or woman depending on your nomenclature, who, in a summer, has two emotionally complicated sexual relationships with men she hasn’t known very long. I wanted to write an adventure like those young men often have in literature, but with a woman at its center. It’s also a story about emotional abuse. If you look at my Goodreads page, many people think my book is a dark story of trauma and bad decisions, and there’s a lot of judgment of the character. The fact that she is having some fairly monogamist sexual adventures didn’t occur to me as controversial. A lot of people who read my book were like, “Where are this girl’s parents?” I was like, “Well, they’re not there. That’s part of the premise of the book.”

KC: How did you feel about its being published by Grove Press?

LLN: Grove wanted to acquire the book because they felt it was in line with their list. I am honored to be on that list. One of the most influential authors in my young life was William S. Burroughs—I read his books between ages twelve and sixteen. He was a Grove author. My dream for the book was that it would have power behind it, and because it was published with Grove, it did.

For me, the publication process was more about my relationship with my editor Katie Raissian, who was instrumental in crafting the book. I am grateful for her and for my agent Marya Spence’s commitment to the book. Their conviction about Open Me made it a novel, and I know how lucky I am to have their support.

KC: Do you think writing the book or publishing the book was a more life-changing experience?

LLN: Open Me took me seven years to write, the same years I was married to my first husband and completed my PhD, a momentous seven years in my life. I wrote the book out of personal pain. I was trying to write something I didn’t see anywhere else. There was triumph in finishing the book and publishing it, but none of that prepared me for what it would mean for the book to be received into the world. What I saw as a thinky feminist book about the body became a story that a lot of readers came to with assumptions that maybe left them feeling misled. It was revelatory to have the book published and to see it in the world. Still, the process of writing the book changed me more than the publication.

 I wrote the book out of personal pain. I was trying to write something I didn’t see anywhere else.

KC: You grew up near Chicago, studied in New York, and now live in Los Angeles – three big cities – yet your novel is set in a small town. Could you talk about how, in your novel, the imagined world you build is an interior space in a provincial, foreign town?

LLN: When I was a kid, I was really into captivity narratives. I loved I Am Regina, a book for young readers by Sally M. Keehn, where a settler white girl in early America is abducted, taken into a tribe of indigenous people, and made one of them. At the end of the book, she’s abducted back, or “rescued.” Someone destroys her home with her adopted family and returns her to her birth family. I read that book over and over.

I’m always interested in the interior. I wrote Open Me during my PhD. My critical dissertation was about a style I observed in writing by American women after 1970 in which a fantastical event occurs in an otherwise realistic plot, a wall melts or someone travels through time, in stories that are not speculative or fantastical. These events, I argued, were an attempt to reorder and undo the sexism inherent in the idea that writing by and about men is public facing, exterior, political, and important, while writing by and about women is interior, domestic, private, and unimportant.

At the same time I was writing Open Me, a psychological thriller about a sexless relationship. I was interested in creating a story where the drama took place inside the character. The book began life as a time-traveling YA romance with Vikings. I wrote 200 pages, and it felt inauthentic. My mentor Aimee Bender said, “What if the magic you’re looking at is more like internal realization?” That was the key for me. 

The material conditions of Roxana’s world in Open Me mirrored my own when I was writing it. While I was never deprived of the key to the outside world that Roxana is, that feeling of being trapped inside, not able to go out, was familiar.The book compresses the degree of claustrophobia I experienced in a marriage that became more difficult over several years into six intense weeks. That is the gift of the illusion of fiction. 

KC: Your journey as a writer includes a parallel journey as an educator. How does it feel to divide your creative energies between being a writer and being a mentor to other writers?

LLN: From an early age, I loved reading and knew I wanted to be a writer. When I was in high school, Young Chicago Authors trained me to take my writing, and the idea of myself as a teacher, seriously. I loved my teachers but thought that being a teacher would be risky. What if I became like the bad teachers who had messed me up?

In college, I thought I would work in publishing and interned at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but I found that internship did obstruct my ability to write. I headed into an MFA program, because I wanted more time to write.

When I taught for the first time—Intro to Creative Writing, at NYU—I was surprised to find it was this social corollary to the solitude necessary for writing. Teaching fed me. I loved to work closely with my students. Out of that, a career path opened. I was lucky my PhD program gave me training and opportunities to teach, but I was also dogged with the rhetoric that I would never get a job. For five years, I was on the academic job market. I applied to over 200 jobs, each of which required forty to one-hundred pages of writing. Twelve times, I was a finalist for a job, flew to some other part of the country, went on a real estate tour, and didn’t get the job. I finally got a visiting position at Wesleyan University, where I taught for two years after my PhD. I felt that if I left Los Angeles, where I loved living, and moved to Connecticut, it would yield a tenure track job—that the next job I was a finalist for, I would get. And I didn’t.

When the Wesleyan job was over, I moved to Northern California and became the Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. That job was a big gift and a big responsibility. It enabled me to live in Mendocino, a place I had loved since I first went there. I had been a student at this conference, and later faculty. So I had this new job designing this writing conference. I was teaching at the local community college, having fulfilling experiences with my students. I was as poor as I’ve ever been, my book had just come out, and I started writing my next book. 

In the middle of all of that, my mom’s health started to fail. On my thirty-fifth birthday, two years ago now, we found out she had stage four cancer and her death was imminent. On the same day, I got my job at Antioch. I couldn’t really grok any of it, but I knew I was lucky. Victoria Chang had been poetry faculty at the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference a few months before I applied for the position at Antioch.So the conference earns credit for me not just because I love doing it, but also because it created the venue where Victoria observed me in my role and decided I might be someone she could work with as core faculty. Victoria is a heroic person and the best professional mentor I’ve ever had by a mile.

Antioch is a great place for me for the same reasons it’s a great place for students. I care about doing the right thing, not the easy thing, or the politically expedient or most profitable thing. While Antioch is not a perfect institution—because I don’t think that exists—it is the place where my values serve the institution.

KC: When I write, I’m groping in the dark to figure out how an idea becomes meaningful. There’s coughing up new words, and there’s changing and rearranging words already coughed up. Could you talk about the back and forth between coughing up new words and changing existent words?

LLN: I prefer revision to writing a first draft. I struggle with the first draft. There is some joy in it. I’ve neurotically thought—if you don’t like writing a first draft, do you really like writing? Yes, I do, but for me, the first draft is foggy. I’m drawn forward by something I struggle to name. I have more structure in my drafting than I used to. Crucial was the experience of editing my first book, which I revised five times before my agent saw it. I revised it three more times for her. Revision with my editor took a solid calendar year and ended in a period where she and I worked on the manuscript every day for ten days straight, five hours a day, going line by line through the book. That process changed me. I understand and am more capable of conceiving plot than ever before. Plot becomes clear to me in revision.

For me, revision is my friend because it enables me to fix anything, to change anything. Sometimes writing students resist revision, and I’m like, “Man, revision is your friend.” Imagine being stuck with your writing the way it came out when you first wrote it. There is a magic of creation, but the magic of being able to bang something into shape is just really cool.

Since my mother passed away, I’ve wanted to write about her, about our family life, about my own life, but it’s been harder than I thought it would be. Writing is hard for me. I’m not someone who would characterize writing as easy. Trying to figure out how to let someone in on my memories of my relationship with my mom, with whom I was close, seems impossible. But I’m going to keep trying. 

KC: I appreciate thinking about the difference between writing and publishing.

LLN: A positive side effect of finishing and publishing my first book is it made it easier to write my second novel, because I believed it was possible that a book could exist. That will help with this creative nonfiction project, whatever form it takes, because a book’s length and shape is a space of possibility.

A positive side effect of finishing and publishing my first book is it made it easier to write my second novel, because I believed it was possible that a book could exist.

KC: From reading your essay about visiting his widow, I learned Roberto Bolaño is a writer you admire. Is there a work of his you might suggest to a curious reader?

LLN: When people talk about Bolaño, they often talk about his massive novels: 2666 and The Savage Detectives. I love both of those leviathan novels. But I want to rep his shorter novels: The Skating Rink and The Third Reich are concentrated cool hits of Bolaño. My favorite book of his is Last Evenings on Earth, a collection of short stories that includes the beautiful story “Sensini” and my favorite story, “Last Evenings on Earth.”

KC: In another interview, I read of your love and respect for David Lynch as an artist. Where would you point someone new to his work?

LLN: Wild at Heart is a beautiful, fun, dark, sexy movie. His best movie is probably Mulholland Dr. You should see Dune, the new one, then see the original Dune, made the year I was born, 1984, by David Lynch, and read Dune because Dune is part of our cultural heritage, and I have a Dune tattoo. If there was a holy book in my house when I was growing up, it was Dune. We read Dune a lot. I know the “Litany Against Fear” by heart. I’m excited to see Dune in the public eye again because it’s a fascinating story. The movie didn’t let me down.

KC: Finally, as I have heard you ask writers on LitCit: Is there a question you have always wanted to be asked?

LLN: I’ve always wanted to be asked about the writing process. For me, writing is primarily an experience of the sentence. I’m very dug into my word choices and my diction, and all of that is like the whole vibe for me. Beyond a descriptor like lyrical, I never see that discussed in treatments of my work. I don’t mean: “I’m such a brilliant user of words, and why aren’t there more essays about it?” What I mean is—it’s interesting to consider: What is your experience of writing? What keeps you in it? What drives you crazy while you’re doing it? And then ask your workshop mates, ask your friends, ask your teachers about that thing. Because the thing most visible to you isn’t an accident, and there’s probably a message or a lesson in it that can help you figure out how to keep writing. Which is the important thing, right? That’s what I want to do.