The Art of Intimacy: Crafting Connection in Memoir and Essay with Lilly Dancyger 

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Lilly. I am so honored to have you on the podcast today.

Lilly Dancyger [0:08]

Welcome. Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:13]

Well, it has been such a joy to read your essay collection, First Love. I’m going to hold it up for the people who are seeing this on YouTube. It is such a well-written book. I adored just every sentence that you wrote, and there were so many things that spoke to me. We’re going to talk about that in a few minutes, but I always like to give my guests the first chance to tell us a little about who you are, what you do, and what you would like us to know about First Love and any of your other writing, because you have an extensive publishing background and publishing history.

Lilly Dancyger [0:42]
Sure. Thank you so much. Yeah, First Love is my newest book. It’s an essay collection. I call them personal critical essays. There’s some hybrid stuff going on. They are all about friendship, but they’re also about what it means to be a woman in the world, and the different kinds of roles that we’re expected to fill, allowed to fill, and kind of the process of evolving into a self, which, in my experience, and I think a lot of people’s experiences, is something that happens in community, which is why that story ended up being told through stories of my closest friendships. My first book was a memoir. Negative Space is also hybrid, but in a different way. It’s kind of an art book memoir about my father, who was an artist, who died when I was 12, and so it’s the story of his life and art, and the story of the decade I spent interviewing everybody I could find who knew him to try to put together a fuller picture. In addition to my own writing, I teach at two MFA programs at Columbia and Randolph College, and I run a bunch of independent writing classes, and I’m a freelance editor, and I think those are, those are my main hats at the moment.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:59]
I can say that we have some shared clients, and anytime a client has worked with you, they always sing your praises. Thank you, because you bring such a sharp editorial eye to their pages, to all the ways that you teach, and you definitely brought it to this book. What spoke to me is there are so many ways that you comment on how friendships work that made me think about the roles friendships play in my own life. And then I think there are some points of intersection in our own personal experiences. There was a time in my life when I was roaming the streets at 3 a.m. and understand both the terrifying nature, and also the freedom of that, and then the music. I grew up listening to a lot of metal, going to different metal and punk shows, so I loved seeing that intersection of experience, in addition to all of the ways that you don’t just write so clearly about your experience, but that you infuse it with all of these other bigger themes or issues in cinema or tropes that people can fall into, so that we can think about this in a bigger way. And we’re going to talk about some of the writing pieces in a moment, but I want to start by talking about something that we discussed during our email exchange, which I think is so important for us to talk about, and that is the fact that you personally bristle at the idea of memoir being associated with catharsis.

I’m going to say right off the bat, I agree with you 100%. We are on the same team here, and I read an essay that Jane Friedman recently wrote for her blog post about why your memoir may not sell, and that’s one of the red flags she talks about—if your book, if you wrote it just to process your pain, then that’s not enough. So that’s her opinion, but I’m really interested in your opinion on this.

Lilly Dancyger [4:01]
I mean, I would agree with that for sure. I think processing your experience, and, you know, healing yourself is a great reason to write, but that’s a very different endeavor than writing something that you intend to publish and share with the world, you know, and I think a big reason that I tend to bristle at conversations that situate memoir in therapeutic language, or talk about it as healing and cathartic, and all of that, is that I think it often is a way to kind of belittle or downplay the artistic value, especially with women’s writing. You know, if a man writes about his life, he’s making art drawn from personal experience. If a woman writes about her life, she’s trying to heal herself, you know, and going through an emotional process, I tend to kind of take a defensive posture whenever that idea comes up, even though, you know, I have drawn from the most difficult experiences in my life to write my books. And there definitely was an element of like, you know, part of the reason that I come to the page to begin with is to make meaning of hard things, you know, and is to kind of try to make experiences that don’t make any sense, make sense, right? Try to find something beautiful in them even, you know, but that’s only a part of it, and that’s kind of like the entryway into it. But for most of the process, my motivation is much more focused on making art than it is on digging around in my own wounds. I go looking into my past for material, but then once I have that material, I’m more focused on making something out of it. I think I just tend to find that those conversations are often laced with condescension and misogyny. I get defensive about memoir in general, and especially women’s memoir, and especially, especially women’s memoir about traumatic experience as being art, you know, on the level with anything else that we talk about as art making and the kind of personal impact of it, and if it helps you make sense of your own experience, and maybe even sometimes helps you heal, although that has honestly not really been my experience, then that’s a great additional benefit.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:23]
Yeah, and I think it’s really important to separate the process of creating art and the process of telling a really great story with the process of healing. What I often tell people is that healing is about integration. It’s about finding out how whatever you’ve gone through fits within the story of your life and how you operate. And that’s an ongoing process, and writing can definitely help you do that. But I’ve studied the research behind this, and some of the research that gets thrown around is James Pennebaker’s research, which says that, oh, if you write about difficult life events, it’s going to improve your health. And yes, there is clinical data that that can work if you make new meaning from it, if you do not make new meaning from it, if you just, what I say is polishing your pain, which I do see a lot of in the writing space, where someone has written something horrific, and they think that if they’re just writing it better or clearer, or they make those details more precise or sharper, then it’s going to elevate itself to art. But we’re still in the realm of, this is what happened to me. And what happens is you can re-traumatize yourself in the process, and there’s a lot of data around that, that, you know, writing about traumatic events in particular, can increase symptoms of PTSD. It can do all these other things we want to be really mindful of, so that we’re not just trying to polish pain or thinking that healing is enough when it comes to publishing for a larger audience, because art is about meaning, and it’s about elevating it so that you are part of a conversation and that you’re contributing to that.

Lilly Dancyger [8:06]
Yeah, I agree. I agree entirely. And I also think even when you do make meaning out of an experience on the page, that doesn’t mean you’re all of a sudden healed, you know, the work of processing your experience and being okay, you know, getting to a place where you can move forward, that’s an ongoing thing and that that’s a big and extensive project in and of itself. That doesn’t just happen as a byproduct of writing a book about a difficult experience. Personally, I’ve actually found that sometimes writing about an experience and spending so much time crafting that experience into a narrative that arrives at some meaning at the end, right? It allows you to intellectualize and sometimes distance yourself from the experience. So, like most memoirists, I’ve been in therapy for a long time, you know, and I’ve had that experience many times of I’m trying to talk about an experience, but then I realize I’m just, I’m narrating the book version, and then I’m talking about kind of this narrative that I’ve created for myself, and I have to take a step back and kind of reform that connection with the immediacy of an emotional experience. So yeah, it’s not as simple as, like write a memoir about the hard thing that happened to you, and then you’ll be all better.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:23]
Yes, I love how you just said that, because I think people think about healing in terms of, I will heal and I will be okay, and it will be over. And that is definitely not the case for anyone. You may make meaning of it, and you may be able to understand it in a way that provides that distance, but you can still be reactivated and have those same feelings and go through whatever it is again. You’re just going through it at a deeper level, and you want to allow for the spaces where you can do that, so that your art can be a place where you’re doing something different. And you, I would say, are a master of the essay. You do such a good job with it. And I am curious, your first book was a hybrid memoir, and obviously you’ve just talked about how it was hybrid in a different way. Why did you choose to write this, which includes so much personal information, as an essay collection, versus, say, a more traditional memoir that had a straight narrative arc? Like, what did you hope to accomplish with this that you couldn’t have done if you had written it another way?

Lilly Dancyger [10:28]
There are a couple reasons for that. One was that I dove right into this project. I started writing First Love before Negative Space was even out. So I was, you know, rolling right from a memoir into the next thing, and part of it was just that, like writerly distractibility, or like the need for a new challenge, I didn’t want to just do the same thing again that I had just done, even though, of course, it wouldn’t have been exactly the same. But, you know, I didn’t want to just repeat the form. I wanted to try something else and find a new way into a project, but also because the content itself, you know, the subject matter of First Love, writing about friendships, a big part of kind of the central idea, like, if there is a, you know, a quote, unquote thesis to the book, is how complete the distinct universe of each intimate relationship is, including how distinct a version of ourselves that we get to be in that relationship is. So it made sense for the pieces in this book to be more, you know, discrete units, where each relationship is talked about in its own essay, and that essay is its own complete, distinct thing with its own kind of set of rules and its own sensibility and its own shape and approach and voice and style and all of that, you know. So, I think it just allowed more space for play and variation in thinking about essays rather than one continuous narrative.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:59]
Yeah, I love that you brought in play, and you said something that’s important, because people often ask me, okay, well, what will happen after I complete my memoir? Will I have arrived? Will I have some sort of feeling that I hope to have? Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But one thing that often happens, the next thing, is that if you are a writer, you’re going to find another project, and you’re going to want to do something different. You’re going to set a new challenge for yourself. You’re going to push your art in another direction and see what else you’re capable of. And I see that all the time with the writers that I meet with and that I work with, and I get to interview because there is no mountaintop we land on when we’re artists. It’s always about living with the discontent and finding out what that new challenge is, so that we can use our voice, or whatever the medium is, in a different way.

One of the things that you do on the page is you’re able to not just talk about intimacy and intimacy in friendships and friendships between women. You’re able to really show it on the page. That’s one of the things that I love. I felt like I really knew your characters, and I could feel the love for your characters that you had rendered, and I felt like there was an intimacy between me and them. And I think one of the best ways for people to experience that is to hear your words, because you do it so well. Would you be willing to read something so that people can hear that, and then we can talk about how you created something that is so intimate? For example, what decisions did you make as a writer to elevate an experience into art?

Lilly Dancyger [13:46]
Sure, yeah, I’d be happy to. And just, you know, one more thing about that idea of, like, how there’s no mountain top. It’s like, this is not a discouraging thing, like, you will never get there. This is a good thing, right? Like, thank God for that. How sad would that be to finish writing, to be like, okay, I’ve done it, check. Then what would you do?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [14:06]
The analogy that I would say is, what will happen if high school is the best time of your life, correct? I find that to be somewhat tragic. You know, absolutely no offense to anyone who had a great high school experience— that certainly was not mine.

Lilly Dancyger [14:23]
Okay, so I’m going to read this paragraph that you pulled out earlier. I’ll say before I read this is a paragraph that is talking about intimacy, but it’s also a paragraph that’s talking about cocaine. So that’s why the cadence is the way that it is.

I can see us so clearly, two pale girls, dressed in black, skinny as street dogs, approaching a favorite stoop and both slowing down instinctively, not even the briefest break in the torrent of stories. We were balling back and forth as we had a second simultaneous conversation with only eyebrows or jutting chins agreeing it was time. Time for another smoke break. Smoothing the backs of our handmade mini, mini, miniskirts as we sat, perching on the very edge of the concrete step, knees touching or almost touching as we angled ourselves toward each other, still talk, talk, talking so quickly, like we were on a phone line that was about to be cut, taking our packs of Lucky Strikes out of the pockets of our leather jackets and tap, tap, tapping them against the heels of our hands exactly three times before each taking out a smoke and squeezing it between our lips, jittery with our jaws stimulant, clenching, flinging curtains of curly hair out of our faces, a few rare seconds of silence as we both focused on controlling the jerking, vibrating motions of our mouths and hands for long enough to get the cigarettes lit before shoving our matching black mini Bic lighters back into our bras. I can see our bony knees bouncing up and down and up and down. Fingers, flick, flick, flinging ash off our cigarettes whenever we weren’t taking drags, which we did perfectly in sync, sucking our smokes down to the filter and flicking them into the street in parallel arcs before rising and continuing to pace the neighborhood, both aimless and hurried at once.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [16:07]
It’s just lovely. Thanks. You talked for a minute about the cadence and how the cadence is related to the experience, which is about being on cocaine, and so, you know, that’s going to be something that’s going to be edgy. It’s going to be fast paced. How did you create that? Because when I was listening to you, I felt that sense of edginess, that urgency, that hyped-up feeling. What did you do on the page to illustrate that?

Lilly Dancyger [16:34]
Yeah, I love that you called out that paragraph, actually, because that’s—I rewrote that paragraph many times trying to get to that feeling. I think at one point, it was one really long sentence, and I was like, okay, that’s too much. That’s, like, too hard to follow on the page. You know, it’s like trial and error of experimenting, of how do I get this, like, kind of frenetic relentlessness of that feeling, also like the syncopation. And, you know, it wasn’t just fast, it was like, fast and coordinated. This was a ritual that was repeated so many times. And I was also trying to get that across with that one paragraph of, like, okay, I’m going to describe this once, you know, one time of us sitting and smoking a cigarette. But I wanted it to be clear that this was, like, actually a description of hundreds of times that this happened. And so, getting the kind of the specificity of, like tapping the cigarette pack three times before taking one out, and even our cigarette inhales were in sync, and we would finish them at exactly the same time, and then kind of look at each other and flick them at the same time. And there’s a lot that I was trying to get across with that paragraph, the sensation of, yeah, that edgy kind of restlessness, yeah, and a frenetic feeling, but also that feeling of being so very in sync with another person. But as for how, I don’t know. It was just rewriting, rewriting it many, many times until it felt that way, you know, and reading it aloud while revising.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [17:56]
Yeah. And some things I noticed is, like, the length of your sentences, how much you were packing into them. And then just even some of the words, like the jutted jaw, the tap, tap, tap of the cigarettes, there’s this sonic component. Do you know Athena Dixon? Yeah, I love Athena. She has a poet’s sensibility, and she’s always thinking about, what is the sonic component? What is it that the reader is going to hear, even if they’re just hearing it in their minds, and how does that affect their experience of things? And I think that you do that in this paragraph. It also has this sacred feel to it, like that sense of ritual that you mentioned. Because, yeah, we can tell just the fact that they are so in sync, and that it’s the eye contact, it’s the proximity of the knees that tells us it’s time for another cigarette. And yeah, it’s that whole process of writing and revising. And I don’t know what your revision process is, but sometimes I have to actually walk around and even do whatever the action is out in the world, you know, and almost recreate the scene physically to tap into the specific details that I need so that I can bring it to life on the page. I’m wondering if you do anything like that.

Lilly Dancyger [19:13]
It’s funny. I think when I do kind of experiential stuff like that, it’s usually earlier in the process for me, of like, trying to access memory enough to get details on the page, and then by the time I have the scene written, you know, I have my details, and I’m revising which, you know, first I revise for, like, flow and is the story following the trajectory I need it to follow? Am I taking too long or not long enough in certain parts and all of that? But then the later stages of revision are definitely for sound, as you mentioned, and at that point, it’s just a lot of go over and over and over and over and over it, print it and read it on paper and make notes and then input them. And then leave it alone for a week, and then I’ll, like, send it to my Kindle and read it there, like, just trying to encounter it in different ways, you know, change the spacing or the size of the font or whatever, you know, just trying to trick my brain into seeing it as a new thing, so that I’m really paying attention to each word, rather than, like, skimming over it because I’ve read it 100 times already.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:23]
Yeah, I love that you have the strategies, because we do get blind to our work. And something that I will do is I will record myself reading it and then listen back to it without the words in front of me. Then I will listen back to it with the words in front of me. And I notice that each time I have different experiences. And I was in a class once with Sharon Harrigan, and this was a good, long while ago, but what we did is we traded pages, and we had someone else read our work because they aren’t going to interpret it in the same way. And it was fascinating to hear how another reader interprets your sentences. Oh my gosh, you see it and feel it in a different way.

Lilly Dancyger [21:03]
That sounds exciting and terrifying. I would love to do that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:07]
That’s exactly how it felt. Yeah, it was a both-and experience. So, we’ve talked a little bit about this granular nature of editing, and how you approach things like intimacy and how you do it on the sentence level. But one of the things that you also do really well is you zoom in and then you zoom back out, and you talk about these larger themes. You’ll talk about movies, you’ll talk about pieces of writing, you talk about other things, so that it’s not just this narrator’s experience on the page. We’re dealing with ideas. And, you know, a lot of agents right now and editors are enamored with memoir plus, which, if you don’t know what that is, listener, we’re talking about memoir as in your personal story of transformation in addition to something else. So that could be research, it could be a connection to something happening out in the world, it could be a lot of different things. And if you have a really nice definition of memoir plus, please feel free to share it with us. But I’d love to know what you do to zoom in and zoom out, and where does that show up in your process?

Lilly Dancyger [22:13]
Well, yeah, I guess I’ll circle back. The third thing I was going to say to your earlier question about why this is an essay collection rather than a memoir is also that I didn’t want to just talk about myself, you know, I had just finished a memoir, I was feeling very exposed, and I was like, I don’t want to just, you know, open my veins onto the page. I want to talk about things that are interesting to me, you know, I want to turn over questions about what it means to be in relation with other people. You know, what it means to depend on other people and how we become who we are? And I wanted to talk about Sylvia Plath and the niceness, and not just recounting more of my own experience. And that to me, a lot of times, it’s that kind of external thread of bringing in, yeah, other writers or music or film or, you know, I interviewed friends for some of these pieces. It’s a lot of times that external stuff that keeps me interested. It’s easy to kind of, I think, get bored of your own story, right? Or to wonder, like, is anybody? Is this even interesting? And I know now, you know, after like, writing enough about my own life and talking to enough other writers who write about their own lives, that kind of feeling of like, oh, this isn’t even interesting, is not always true. A lot of times it’s not true. It’s just that, you know, we have distorted views of our own value in the world.

But even if it is false, if I start to feel disinterested in the thing I’m writing, I’m not going to keep writing it, you know. I have to find a way to, like, keep my own kind of curiosity alive on the page. And a lot of times that comes from reading other things, you know, and going to a museum and looking at art and listening to music that I loved at a certain time in my life, and thinking about the feeling that that evokes, and how that connects to the thing I’m trying to talk about in the essay. Or, you know, whatever it might be, I don’t know, it just makes it feel more layered and richer. And I’m talking about, like, in the writing experience itself, feels more layered and rich, but I think that that is often also true for the reading experience, you know, and readers like to feel like they’re either learning something about something they’re already interested in, or, you know, a lot of times I consider that material as like an invitation, a connecting point for a reader, right? So, like in the essay where I’m talking about Janis Joplin, or where I’m talking about Heavenly Creatures. It’s like, kind of an under-the-radar movie. Not everybody knows about it, but people who do know about it love it. That essay that I just read from opens with that film, and so readers who might not have had the experience of being like a teenage punk cokehead with the obsessive relationship with her best friend in New York City might have the experience of watching and loving that film, you know. So that’s another way for them to connect, and a way for them to kind of feel like the essay is for them and speaking to them, and that I think has a lot to do with why agents and publishers are interested in that style, is that it theoretically at least broadens the audience. Quote, unquote.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:31]
Right? Yeah, so creating those intersection points for you as the writer, so that the work continues to feel interesting, and then also broadening the audience by providing different intersection and connection points with your readers. There are two reasons why you might do that, and what I can say for myself, one piece that I found to be compelling, and so I’m just going to offer a little confession. I’ve loved your work for a long time, and I remember when you were pitching this book, and we happened to be part of a group, and I was able to see your book proposal, which was fantastic, by the way. It was an amazingly written book proposal. In it, you were very fierce and very clear, and one of the things you talked about was the dead girl trope. And I immediately started thinking about, like, wow, what is that? How does that play out in the world, and in how I’m engaging with different stories or different things happening in the world. And then, of course, there’s this very personal piece for you that you lost your cousin to a murder, which is something that you start out with and that shows up repeatedly in your book, and what you also talk about, and I don’t want to give too much away about that part of the story, because I want people to read your book. You know, if I love a book, I want people to go buy it. One of the things that you do really well is you create this super intimate scene in the beginning that brings her to life, and then she shows up throughout. Though we do know early on that she is tragically murdered, and that serves as this launching point for talking about this, and it creates this sense of tension. You know, what are we going to learn about this? But you talk about this idea of the dead girl trope, and how often these stories that become murder mysteries are about either the murderer or the investigator who’s solving the crime, but it’s never about the girl. The girl becomes this silent piece, and you don’t allow that to happen, and that’s an intentional thing you talk about in the book. So when you were thinking about organizing this essay collection, and you were thinking about it just even as a project, how did you know that Sabina’s death needed to be a part of this project, and how did you think about the role she was going to play in this book so that we don’t learn early on, “Oh, by the way, she’s gone,” and then she’s just kind of a piece of furniture, or, you know, she’s part of the scenery, but she’s not part of the story?

Lilly Dancyger [28:01]
Yeah, she was part of the project from the very beginning. There were always kind of two entry points, or, you know, two seeds of this project that grew together. There’s the idea of close female friendships as like a site of identity formation and as like a central love story in our lives. And then there was the story of Sabina’s death and the story of our relationship, right? And I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write about her death, right? I’ve written about her, and her death is part of that story, but it’s not the focal point, and that’s why, yeah, with that first essay, the title essay in the book First Love is where we start, and we start with me and Sabina as young kids and show our relationship developing through our childhoods and teen years. And you don’t find out until late in that essay that she dies, and that was very intentional, because I wanted her to be a character alive on the page, first, you know, and I wanted readers to fall in love with her and to be invested in her as a person, and to be invested in our relationship, rather than kind of meeting her as a dead girl like that trope, right? I mean, I love Law & Order. Have seen every episode 500 times, but you meet the victim as a victim in every episode, right? And that’s just like one example of that trope where it’s like, it is a story about a murder, right? But a story about a murder starts with the murder, right? Or often starts when the person is already dead, so we never actually see them. It’s about their absence and about the impact of their absence, but not about them. And so that was kind of a central challenge of this whole project, was how to do that differently and how to not fall into that trope. Because it’s, you know, there are reasons that those stories are told in that way. It’s very difficult to push against it. And in some ways, I don’t think I fully did what I was trying to do in that way. The murder still is very much kind of at the forefront. And I do talk about her death and talk about my reaction to her death a lot. So, yeah, I think if I had spent five more years writing the book, I might have really turned that trope all the way inside out. But I nudged it at least, you know, I pushed against it and kind of, at least made it invisible, and made, I think the pushing against the trope part of the story, which was kind of the best way that I could find to do that, was to just engage directly with, like, here is this kind of narrative trope that this story could very easily fall into, right or map onto. Here’s all the reasons I don’t want to let it do that, and here’s how I’m trying to not let it do that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [30:47]
One of the things that I think you do that does defy the trope is that number one, you call it out, and in a later essay, you talk about the different writers that inspired you. Sarah Perry, Rose Anderson, I have read both of their books. I love their books, and they are gorgeously written. In the case of Rose Anderson’s book, it is the death of her sister. In the case of Sarah Perry’s book, it is the death of her mother. And they bring those characters to life on the page in the same way that you do, but the fact that you call out, like, hey, there’s a certain expectation you’re going to have for the story. There’s a certain way that this story is told, to me, brought a different lens to it and made me take a more critical eye to both how Sabina was portrayed in your story, and you do keep her alive in the same ways that Rose and Sarah do, by having stories where she is present, she’s there. And, you know, yes, the murder is there in the first pages, but it’s not really discussed again a whole lot until later. So, she gets to live for a good long while. And when I talked with Sarah Perry, one of the things she said was, “I didn’t want to start this book with my mother being dead on the first page or in the first chapter, and then she’s gone, and you don’t get to hear from her again.” So, she was very meticulous in the research she did to both render their lives together, but also her mother’s life before she was born. And so, I think you’re doing similar work, but the fact that you call it out brings an additional power to it.

Lilly Dancyger [32:30]
Thank you. You know, that’s part of where the personal, critical essay idea comes in, right? And that’s one thing that I love about the essay form, is that I think in a lot of ways, it’s like, uniquely positioned to consider itself while it’s unfolding. I mean, you can talk about the story you’re writing and how you’re writing it in memoir also, but there’s something about the essay form, because it is so often like driven by question, right? And driven by, like, an attempt to make sense of something. And there’s all this space available to talk about the story you’re trying to tell and why it’s difficult, and to kind of go back and try again and examine what you’re doing and examine how you’re maybe not succeeding. And that’s very appealing to me, because that’s often the solution I lean into if I find the story is really difficult to tell, for whatever reason, I end up talking on the page about why it’s so difficult, and kind of examining what the roadblocks are, and ideally making those roadblocks part of the story, to actually make the story richer and more interesting, rather than constrained.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:40]
And I would say you definitely succeed in that area.

Lilly Dancyger [33:42]
Thank you.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:45]

You and I both work with stories all day long, other people’s stories, our own stories. I often ask people this question in terms of, how are you taking care of yourself? But I’m really curious, as a person who works with stories all day and needs to make space for your own story, how are you cleansing your palette or clearing your mind so that there is room for the writing you need to do, especially as we are navigating 2025?

Lilly Dancyger [34:16]
Yeah, the news is definitely a bigger impediment to me. You know, I occasionally feel overwhelmed by the amount of like, other people’s work that is inside my brain, and, like, the amount of creative energy that I’m expending on other people’s stories. But that only happens once in a while when I’ve taken on too much, like, okay, I need a day off. Most of the time, I feel energized by it, actually, you know, the fact that I get to think about stories all the time helps my writing.

I’ve definitely become a better writer through by noticing and explaining things to students and editing clients, you know, or like, things that I noticed, that I always call out in other people’s work, that I can see so clearly, like a “Hey, this isn’t working because x, y, z,” right? And then I’ll see myself doing that same thing and be like, “Oh, okay, yeah, right,” but I’ll be able to see it clearly because I’ve seen it so many times before in other people’s work. That said, I do have to be very intentional about carving out time for just my own work, and my kind of, like, bare minimum for sanity is one day a week that’s for my own writing, ideally more than that. But if I can get one writing day a week, I can, like, survive without becoming harried and resentful and anxious and all the things that writers who are not writing become. So right now, that’s Fridays. My whole planner is color-coded, but Fridays are like, blocked out in pink so that I can’t put anything else on there. You know, if I try and schedule something on Friday, there’s this immediate visual clue of, like, “Nope, sorry. That whole day is blocked off.” And I try to not even look at my email on writing days. I just like, I wake up and I have my coffee, and I am just in my bubble, and I don’t think about anything else. And knowing that I don’t have to stop at a certain time to get back to other work or whatever, gives me that spaciousness that I need so that the rest of the week, I can go all in on like clients’ manuscripts or students’ pages or whatever, and not feel like I’m taking from my own creative well, because I know I have that time designated.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:28]
Yeah, it’s so important to be able to fill our creative wells in whatever way works for you but making sure you are carving out time to write and create, especially if that’s the thing that makes you feel alive. I don’t know about you, but whenever I make time to write, it doesn’t matter what else I’m going to do. The rest of the day goes well because I made the time, yeah?

Lilly Dancyger [36:49]
Yeah. And even, like, the rest of the week, I don’t know, like, I’ve had a busy week this week, when we finish this call, I have a bunch of student work to read, but I’m not stressed out about that, because I know tomorrow, I get to write.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:02]
Exactly. Well, if people want to connect with you, they want to learn what you’re up to. And I know you have several things you’ve talked about on Instagram. We are recording this before you go to AWP, and this will probably air around the time you’re at AWP, or maybe a little after. So, people may or may not be able to catch those things, but I know that you are a person who’s always doing something. What is the best way for people to connect with you, to learn what you’re up to, and, most importantly, buy copies of your books?

Lilly Dancyger [37:30]
Yes, my website is just my name, lillydancyger.com, and that’s kind of the best place to find all the different things I have, like event listings there, and all my books are available there. My Editorial Services have a page there. I’m also on Instagram and Blue Sky. I’m off Twitter and Facebook, and Instagram is probably soon to go as well, but for now, I’m on Instagram and Blue Sky, both are just @LillyDancyger. And Substack is another platform that is full of issues, and I’m probably going to migrate off there eventually. But for now, my newsletter, The Word Cave, is at Substack. I have a couple series there. I write museum pages about looking at visual art and thinking about writing, and What is a Novel, just a series of musings as I try and teach myself how to write fiction. And that’s also where I send out, like, class listings and like my editorial availability and stuff like that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:25]
All of those things will be in the show notes. And Amelia Hruby, she has a podcast called Off the Grid, which is about getting off social media. She’s also an author, and she’s a business owner, and she edits podcasts, and she has done this beautiful podcast series on how to get off social media without losing all your followers, which is really important if you’re a writer, you know you need to still be able to connect with your readers. And how do you do this in an age where a lot of these platforms that people have been relying on are changing, or people are finally seeing behind the curtain and saying, what’s really going on here, and do I want to engage with that? So, yeah, I will be interested to see where you end up. Someday…

Lilly Dancyger [39:10]
I’ll have my Pynchon era where I’m just not findable anywhere and never seen in public. But not yet. For now, I still need to be findable, so…

Lisa Cooper Ellison [39:20]
I happen to share that dream. I think a lot of writers too. I also think there’s a life that we can have when we are not doing those things that is vastly different than when we are putting ourselves out there all the time. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It has been an absolute pleasure and thank you again for sharing so much of your wisdom about First Love. It was such a gift to be with you.

Lilly Dancyger [39:47]
Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.