Lucy Ives

A Conversation

---

An interview between the writer Lucy Ives and the Editors of L’Esprit.

Lucy spoke with us about her influences and process, her literary ancestry, and the spirits that inhabit her work.

Find coverage of Lucy’s latest book, An Image of My Name Enters America, in the L’Esprit Fall 2024 Quarterly.

---

L’Esprit Literary Review: In your essay for The Baffler, “The Weak Novel,” you argue for fiction that, in some particular ways, challenges the literary status quo: books that ‘not only do more [themselves] but also ask more of [the] reader. Here, of course, is what constitutes the weak novel’s counterintuitive weakness: it is a type of writing that does not allow one to simply “sit back and enjoy.”’ In teaching my undergraduate courses, I’ve drawn on that piece generally and, more specifically, in conversation with Life Is Everywhere, which strikes me as an especially strong example of the novelistic tendencies for which the essay advocates. I have two questions surrounding this pairing; the first is, how do you see a connection between the two, if at all? That is, in your mind, is Life Is Everywhere an example, or perhaps a working out, of the ideas in “The Weak Novel”?

Lucy Ives: I see the easy questions are first, so that I will have a chance to get warmed up! Well, as a way of delaying just a little, let me first say thank you for teaching this essay and my novel. I hope the students are doing OK. When I wrote this essay I was actually looking for a way to try to think publicly about how writers can enter an important space of ambivalence. This space of ambivalence is one in which they both do and do not make things up. And they both do and do not obey the laws of genre. They are being bad fiction writers because they are talking about their own lives or not changing people’s names and so on, or the book is not linear or it has too much allegedly unnecessary description of outfits in it or something. I think Life Is Everywhere is a pretty disobedient novel. I mean, it begins with an extended passage making fun of professors of literature and then proceeds to do a series of unpredictable and traditionally disallowed things, such as its main plot point is that someone misaddressed an email or then the protagonist just sits in a chair for a couple hundred pages. There is also a section in bad taste on pirates, etc. I’m not sure if the novel is so much a working out of the ideas in the essay as it is an attempt to do as much of what you are categorically forbidden to do in a novel as virtuosically as possible (given my skills at the time). The essay might be a more polite formulation of something that’s a bit more volatile in the book.

LLR: The second question is a compositional, somewhat broader, one; I’m interested in how your critical and creative practices inform each other. To what extent—again, if at all—did the writing of the essay work with the writing of the novel, perhaps less (for this question) about one being a reification of the ideas of the other and more about how the craft behind each piece was influenced by the process of producing the other?

LI: I wrote the essay after writing the novel. The essay was initially intended as a way to say “thank you” to other authors who had done things that might have given me permission to write the book I wrote and to try to look for some sort of community or lineage there, in case anyone else was interested in that sort of thing. I guess the essay struck a chord with some people, because it’s often the first thing people want to talk about. That is nice, because the essay is a pretty good expression of how I think about what is interesting about literature. Maybe writing a long, complicated, weird novel made me more patient with myself and this had something to do with composing the essay about this particular thought (i.e., that I like “weak” novels), but I’m not sure if there is a clear or significant causal connection between the two, save that I happened to write both things and I have certain preferences.

LLR: Related to your conception of a weak novel, a very fun and multivalent element in your novels is the incorporation of “found documents,” intra-textual layered texts that play with the, perhaps, meta-narrative impulses that seem to suffuse your work. Wikipedia entries in Impossible Views of the World, poems and stories of Loudermilk, or complete novellas and monographs in Life Is Everywhere, for example. Can you talk a little about that element of your fiction, including maybe your inspirations and/or compositional goals behind them?

LI: When I was in college someone came to a poetry reading and read an ATM receipt. Some people got mad at that person. I don’t remember my own reaction in the moment, just that later I knew that the person who did that resembled characters I wanted to write about. And maybe that person resembled me in some way, too. I think many of the texts we take for granted or crumple up and leave in the bottom of our tote bag contain some eerie grain of reality that I’m interested in excavating and ventriloquizing, so I tend to do that a lot in fiction, like try to make the apparently inanimate aspects of humanity speak.

LLR: What is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work, including perhaps the revision process?

LI: I am not a very, er, creative writer. I set a word count for the day and then write that number of words. Someone else seems to do the creative things. I hope I get to meet her one day!

More seriously, the way writing seems to work for me is that I develop a “feeling” (these terms are provisional/imperfect) that is similar to an “image” and, almost always, also “narrative” in nature. I have no idea where this narrative feeling-image or image-feeling comes from. The novel I’m working on now was germinated by a dream I had a few days after giving birth, but it is actually set in a different world than the original dream at this point in its development (I don’t know exactly how or why this location change happened; it seems to have to do with a certain conversation I had with a stranger one afternoon in August two years ago; it is all really quite mysterious). But, in short, I live with a given narrative image-feeling for a number of years until I have time to execute the book. Then I start to develop strategies that include bibliographies and other forms of research. I read things, take notes, but there is also a stranger aspect of this developmental stage where facts of the book just start to become manifest to me and it seems like there was no time before they existed. Sometimes I feel like I’m working very hard and making no progress, and at other times knowledge of nonexistent things is just given to me without any perceivable effort on my part. When I actually have something written down, then it starts to be very clear to me what I want the text to be, and I have various strategies for shaping writing that exists, most of which involve crossing words out and writing other words in their places. Dreaming remains paramount throughout: I use the part of my mind that is between waking and sleeping all the time. It’s something I’ve taught or maybe convinced myself to be able to access pretty directly and concretely while I’m awake—and that’s the main thing I’d recommend to any writer or really any person, for that matter. It’s a useful shortcut when making decisions and assessing situations, as well as something nice for art.

LLR: At L’Esprit we like to talk about literary ancestry, a concept—related to but not identical with influence—that encompasses the work that, much like genealogical ancestry, finds its way into one’s writing—intentionally or otherwise. Are there writers and/or specific works that you might see as your literary ancestors?

LI: I think my ancestors might be impatient or disappointed with me, but, speaking aspiringly, I do spend really a lot of time thinking about Gustave Flaubert’s vagina, so it could make sense that I might have passed through it at some point.

LLR: Related to the question of literary ancestry, something that stands out to me in reading your oeuvre is the trajectory of your fiction, and the way in which your novels are all conversant with a skepticism of conventionality, we might say. Tracing a line of composition from Impossible Views of the World to Life Is Everywhere, there seems to be a greater willingness to take chances, in narration and otherwise; to be, perhaps, increasingly more weak. Do you think about your career in such large-scale terms, and have you felt at all that as you’ve continued to write and develop as an artist you’ve become more comfortable / adept / willing to push your work further in this respect?

LI: I am flattered that you notice that I’ve become weaker. I think that’s a really high compliment. I’d like to be weak rather than skeptical, if I can be. Weak rather than clever. Because I live my life in the U.S., I feel aware that it’s a strange thing to want to be the sort of writer I want to be and yet I’m totally convinced that this is the only kind of writer I can be. I used to be angry about how impossible the task is, but now I’m kind of like, “Yeah, this is going to be like that.”

LLR: You’ve written novels in both first and third person. How do you approach each, and are there aspects of their respective strengths and weaknesses to which you are especially drawn, maybe specifically relative to a given set of compositional goals?

LI: After a while I realized that I don’t have a pronominal point of view when I think. I don’t think “I’m sitting on my bed at 12:33am typing these words,” I think only in between words and among possible temporalities. That is really what my consciousness and self consist of, a sort of capacity not to be in language and not to be in time as it is constrained by/described in language. I sometimes tell my students about this, and they freak out. They want to know how I get through the day! But to answer your question, both first and third person are totally artificial to me, and I approach them accordingly.

LLR: One thing that strikes me in your fiction is the relationship between the narration and the narrative of your books; the way that the manner in which the novel is written interacts with and indeed is united to the things that happen in the “plot”—the histoire and discours, in narratological terms. A somewhat straightforward example might be the extended sequence on botulism that opens Life Is Everywhere, and the focusing of readerly attention it demands at the inauguration of a story which very much focuses on the details of Erin’s life and evening. How do you think about that relationship, both during your planning of a novel and in your actual writing?

LI: I guess I think about what would make me feel good if I were reading a book. It would make me feel good to learn a lot of detail about how the practice of Botox injection was discovered by a poet who was also interested in shadow puppetry and the paranormal. Learning those things would establish a feeling of trust for me—like, the notion that such things have actually happened on this planet is somehow comforting to me, the notion that things really can be and are that bizarre.

LLR: You both attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature, a blending of worlds that are very often kept separate. Can you talk a little about how your theoretical-academic understanding of literature and your creative praxis intersect, and the relationship between scholarship and artistry?

LI: Another easy question! I wish I had something brilliant to say here, however much of my interaction with universities has to do with necessity. This necessity has, however, started to make me think that I would like to renovate of the art of literary criticism, so please stayed tuned and cross your fingers for me that I can finish a book-length project in the next few years. I see literature as a kind of tool for divination. It’s a way of thinking things that can’t be thought otherwise and has traditionally included methodologies like ESP, aka free indirect discourse, and time travel, aka narrative, among other useful shortcuts. Our society is very foolish for denigrating poetry and blindly touting AI—as people reading this have probably had occasion to reflect. I mean, these are just two pieces of low-hanging fruit to accuse it/ourselves of. I’ve done various things in academia because people who like poetry hang out there. I’ve made friends and some enemies. I intend to keep hanging out (sorry, enemies) because I’m a person who is concerned with teaching and ambiguity. Probably to my own detriment, I don’t see much of a distinction to be drawn between scholarship and artistry. To me, it’s all about trying to figure out what is going on, what our condition is, how we can offer attention to the various situations we find ourselves in. That might mean writing a book on esoteric furniture styles or composing a space opera. I know I’m supposed to say something here about how knowing more about intellectual history has helped me be a better fiction writer, but to me scholarship is just another genre—like sentimental memoir or sci fi. It has an audience, and that audience can expand or contract.

LLR: More specifically, in reading An Image of My Name Enters America (forthcoming from Graywolf Press), I was struck by the scholarly rigor presented at times in the essays. I found you managed to interweave academic study into personal narrative quite effectively, bringing a depth of research not often found in autotheory. What was the process of putting that book together, and how did the scholarship you did come together with the life stories you wished to tell—in the nonfiction format—or the ways in which the one helped to work out the other?

LI: This is a book that very much started with an intuition, with a sort of narrative image-feeling that was related to remembering a certain style of idea I used to have as a little girl and wanting to write about that and connect it to bigger things, like irony or history or the problem of violence. I write a fair amount of art criticism in essay form and had always, or at least since reading Hilton Als’ White Girls, wanted to write a book of original essays, so I felt like that “narrative image-feeling that was related to remembering a certain style of idea I used to have as a little girl” could be applied to the genre “essay collection.” That seemed like fun to me—and unusual to do. And then I did that, and it turned into something larger. I am interested in detail and the relationship of meticulous detail to sweeping feelings and realizations. To me, when a writer can help you navigate between fractured daily life and some other level (it can be any level), they have done their job with language. I tried to do that job in these essays in a way that was challenging and interesting to me. Scholarship is one tool. I’m interested in supporting a style of thought that historicizes things that seem relatively straightforward, like My Little Pony and the figure of the unicorn, for example. These things are coded as female and I like following them through other codings where they become concertedly male and associated with power and even human sacrifice. Most human things that seem benign or fey have also circulated with very different resonances, in my experience. It is enjoyable to find out such secrets. These things are probably, on the one hand, just inherently interesting and curious, but, on the other, they hold significant lessons where human nature and politics are concerned, if you care to read them that way. 

LLR: What was the last book, story, poem, or work of art that moved you?

LI: I probably cry daily watching artists’ talks on YouTube and reading poems and novels. I’m easy. I’ve recently read Percival Everett’s James, Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan novels, and a few days ago I was writing about Rita Keegan’s art. 

LLR: Finally, given your eclectic background and disparate interests, as well as the scope and depth of your work, we’d love to ask about your thoughts on the potential—and, perhaps, responsibility—of art to do philosophical work.

LI: Oh boy. Oh lady? Um, I will try to keep this brief. I have been—and sometimes still am—a person who can find living in their own head unbearable. I continue to walk this planet by the grace of the discipline known as writing, which I can only relate to as a mode of philosophy. I think we have to help one another. I do the work I do because without it there would be no life for me. That in itself is mysterious and for me the goal is to keep it mysterious, to keep myself interested. The alternative is not something I want to explore. If anyone can relate to this, then I am also doing this with them and possibly for them. These are contingencies I can live with.

---

Lucy Ives‘s first essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America, was published by Graywolf Press in October. She is also the author of three novels, including Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf). She teaches at Brown University.

Photo Credit: Daniele D’Andreti on Unsplash