I first met Lisa Russ Spaar in December 2012, when some friends and I drove from Richmond— we were poetry students in VCU’s MFA program—to Charlottesville to attend the launch event for Lisa’s fourth poetry collection, Vanitas Rough. But neither of us can claim to have a good memory of that encounter. It was only thirteen years later, when I was preparing to speak with her about her novel, Paradise Close, for her paperback release event in New York City in March 2025, that I pulled my worn copy of Vanitas Rough off the shelf, and opened it to find her signature and inscription from that winter over a decade ago. Seeing that, and suddenly having the full memory flood back, was like a scene right out of Paradise Close.
When Lisa and I met, for “real” this time, in New York City, we already knew that we were planning to interview one another about each other’s books—my debut poetry collection True Mistakes had just come out a few days before Paradise Close’s paperback launch event—and we knew that we wanted to do something out of the ordinary for our conversation. At the bar after Lisa’s reading, someone suggested that we do the Proust Questionnaire, named after a series of probing personal questions that Marcel Proust answered when he was nineteen years old; it’s since been marketed as a way for an “individual [to] reveal his or her true nature,” and co-opted by magazines such as Vanity Fair (each issue features different celebrities taking the Questionnaire; for example, in June, when posed with the question “What do you dislike most about your appearance?” Kevin Bacon answered: “My nose looks like a two-car garage.”).
We both thought a conversation in the style of Proust would be a fitting homage considering how both of our books are concerned with the way time collapses the past and the future, and the multiple selves that populate one’s interiority. Out of the thirty-five questions that Vanity Fair uses for their Proust Questionnaire, Lisa and I cherry-picked the ones that appealed to us the most and used our answers as jumping off points to discuss Lisa’s novel, Paradise Close, and my poetry collection, True Mistakes.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
The ability to think without friction. Or, less abstractly: a pot of coffee and a whole day to either write or paint, along with the mindset that allows those activities to feel enjoyable instead of frustrating. And knowing that, at the end of that day, I’ll be able to puncture that productivity and solitude by getting to have dinner with friends.
Lisa Russ Spaar
When I was younger, I used to think that one day I would “grow up” and reach a level of wisdom and maturity that would bring me peace, something akin to (haha) “perfect happiness.” I’m pushing seventy, and that hasn’t happened yet, at least not for protracted periods. But I certainly have moments. A perfect day for me would be one in which I awoke knowing that all of my grown children and my grandchildren and my nonagenarian father were all healthy, safe, and fulfilled, emotionally and creatively. And if that day also held time for reading and writing, time outside in the garden and in the kitchen and at my easel, visits with loved ones (especially grandchildren), and decent sleep, I’d consider myself beyond blessed.
One of the things I love about True Mistakes is the way it grapples at every turn with moments when “thought and experience collide” (“The Water”). I feel that your poems confront this nexus, this conundrum, of feeling and cogitation in a way I’ve never seen explored with such intelligence, complexity, and passion before in poems. In an almost impossible way, your poems manage to do what Anne Carson says happens when viewing Velazquez’ famous painting, Las Meninas. Carson writes (in Eros the Bittersweet): “When we try to think about our own thinking, as when we try to feel our own desire, we find ourselves located at a blind point . . . Then we notice [in the painting] some faces in a mirror at the back of the room. Whose are the faces? Our own? No. These are the king and queen of Spain. But now, just where are the king and queen located? They seem to be standing precisely where we are standing as we gaze into the painting at their reflection there. Then where are we? For that matter, who are we?” Velazquez manages to triangulate our perception, Carson continues, “so that we all but seen ourselves looking.” (Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998, p. 71). Something similar happens in the poems in True Mistakes, I think. As the poems pitch back and forth between field and ground, other and self, present and future, acts of “interference” (often taking the form of very meta details about the page, the line, the mark) intrude, and this triangulation allows the reader to not only to read about the speaker’s yearning or loneliness or fear, but to experience it somatically and intellectually as well. This is no mean feat! I admire it greatly. Perhaps all of this suggests that there can be no thinking without friction? Does any of this ring true for you in your experience of crafting the poems?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Yes, absolutely—and I’m so glad you had that experience while reading the poems! I do think I’m most interested in writing poems that capture how thought moves—poems that “think about our own thinking.” I believe you’re right that there is no thinking without friction—thinking is entirely friction; friction is what makes a thought. I suppose, in my original answer, what I really meant is that I covet thinking that does not feel dangerous. Part of the reason I’m probably drawn to writing about thinking and consciousness is because I give thoughts and thinking too much power. Maybe writing poems “about thinking,” where I attempt to map the way a thought travels and moves and morphs (and feels) is a way to release some sort of pressure valve, or to get the thought outside of me—to make it separate from me, and therefore new instead of stale and threatening.
Lisa Russ Spaar
I think that’s spot-on, Lena. And certainly there are so many ways the mind can be drawn into “dangerous” thinking these days, where everyday and temperamental anxiety is exacerbated by the heavy burden of despair that today’s political climate already ladles out. I’ve simply quit reading the news some days. By foregrounding the process of thought itself, your poems do create for your speaker—and your reader—a safety valve of sorts, allowing you to “other” sentience and consciousness in a way that makes it bearable.
2. What is your greatest fear?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I have so many greatest fears that I literally have a poem in my book called “Great Fears” where I poke fun of myself, ha. If you had asked me when I was in my mid-twenties, my greatest fear was simply just dying, which is not to say that’s no longer something I’m afraid of (even if there’s no point in fearing it).
This question reminds me of something the poet Robert Hass said in an interview with The Paris Review about form: “I had in mind that misery is the absence of form—probably a pretty good definition of depression, the inability to tell yourself your story.” I think ultimately that is my greatest fear—the idea of not being able to understand myself and my life or what is happening around me, and an ensuing loss of agency.
Lisa Russ Spaar
“Great Fears” is one of my favorite poems in your book. “My greatest fear is writing a poem / that will make the reader wince & quickly turn the page / to escape,” you write, and later in the poem, “I like thinking of my fears as wonderful, / distinguished–capital G Great in the way of Beethoven / or Vermeer.” Seriously, though, yes: “I think ultimately that is my greatest fear—the idea of not being able to understand myself and my life or what is happening around me, and an ensuing loss of agency.” I share that fear, especially since I watched for over a decade as my mother’s agency and sense of self disappeared into the ravages of dementia. But I also think this kind of existential dread is a preoccupation of True Mistakes, and each poem feels very much engaged in something that John Barth wrote about Sheherezade—we tell stories because we live stories, and to cease to narrate is to cease to live, or something like that. I feel this in lines like these from “I’ve Been Running the Same Loop Every Morning Since January” (and btw, there are so so many salvific trees in these poems! “The black lace / of trees pasted against the sky at dusk / off the interstate, foliage open to the blue / inside them as if the very tore them to ribbons” in “Dear Future Me #10, for instance). In “I’ve Been Running,” the season of Spring, the speaker writes, “demolishes me”:
I’m not being dramatic.
I don’t exist. The sun is everywhere
and I can’t see. Thank god
for the trees and their attendant darkness.
Throughout the book, we see a speaker grappling with a Hockney-like romance with oblivion and the often small, bright impertinences that intrude upon them, creating a punctum, a point, a story that allows us to feel (those shimmering turquoise expanses of swimming pools). Of one of his paintings you write, in “The Water,”
A bright red circle rests on the water.
It shocks against the blue, vibrating my vision.
It’s a floatie painted two-dimensionally
With no shadow–it must be noon–
& with no depth it becomes a target.
No, it becomes a plan, blessing the future.
Dive here, it beckons. Put your body here.
But God, where do I put this water, all this water?
Here, form doesn’t efface the nothingness, but it helps make meaning in spite of it.
My greatest fears involve my children and grandchildren—are they well, safe, happy? I’ve been accused at times by them of worrying too much. Worry, for me, is a kind of prayer, I guess. In a related fear: my mother had protracted and severe dementia, and for well over a decade didn’t know, or appear to know, her husband and her children. Of course, I can’t know what her inner life was really like, but I am afraid of losing the ability to interact meaningfully with the people in my life and with my surroundings, mainly because of the burden and pain that might bring to them. Not being able to communicate with others in speech and writing is probably more terrifying to me than I want to admit.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
It’s interesting to me that both of our fears have to do with loss of narrativizing (I love that quote you loosely cite from John Barth, that to cease to narrate is to cease to live) and of understanding. I also think that (for me, at least) worrying is about giving narrativizing too much power—it’s the idea that if I can narrate and outline every problem, every fear, and every possible outcome, I will be able to somehow gain the upper hand (The fact that this has never once turned out in my favor does not prohibit me from worrying.).
All of this (plus you mentioning the inability to access your mother’s inner life) makes me think about interior monologues, and how you wrote the interiority of your characters when writing Paradise Close. The novel jumps around between characters, and is told in the third-person—how did you settle on that POV, and how did you approach creating and accessing the inner life of these people, especially from that distance that third-person allows?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I think that the first-person would have put me too close to the myriad characters in Paradise Close. Some of them—Marlise, Emma, Bea—feel very close to me, autobiographically—not in all ways, but in some crucial ones, and the third-person felt like it gave me more access to things I might not know about my characters and more freedom to invent or to guess things about them. This was especially important, too, for writing characters like Cole, with his OCD and cancer, and the malevolent Zeno. It was a challenge and great fun to make the third-person “limited,” so that while a passage concerning the inner thoughts of different characters are all delivered in the third-person, I tried to massage and tweak the diction, syntax, and so forth to “body forth” various consciousnesses close to the characters I was creating.
6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Lisa Russ Spaar
Here I am with the grandchildren again, but I do make purchases on their behalf from fancy clothing companies and toy stores that were beyond my budget when I had my own three children. I do, ahem, also have a shoe and coat and black dress problem . . .
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Boring answer, but: buying books (Or, maybe living in California for the last seven years, which always felt like an unbelievable luxury my life somehow gave to me, and now living in New York, which feels like a luxury in a different way.).
Lisa Russ Spaar
Yes, books! I assume you’re thinking of real books, material ones with bindings and pages for marking up and for pressing flowers, etc. I have no room on my bookshelves anymore so many are piled up on the floor these days. I’m always surprised when, if they can afford to do so, many writers don’t actually purchase books. We write books, they’re embodied, we hope people will find and hold them and spend time with them. It is, or should be, a gift economy. How do you feel about marking up books when you’re reading them? I can’t help myself, I always want to be in written conversation with what I’m reading, so I’m always underlining and putting things in the margins (every time I do this, though, I still feel the “tsssk-tssssk” of my Great Aunt Ruth, who was a school teacher and who taught me how to properly turn pages (from the top right corner, between thumb and pointer) and how not to crack the spine of a book, all advice I’ve ignored my whole life. I have many volumes slightly swollen from having been read in the bath).
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Always real books! And I always write in the margins of books when I’m reading (at least if I love them). I have absolutely no scruples about dog-earing pages—the more dog-eared, the better. Marking books up makes reading feel like a conversation. I want books to feel real, and lived in. For this reason I like paperback books more than hardcovers—they’re easier to hold, more malleable; they feel more like a body, a mind, and less like a product you can buy in a store.
Something that I loved about Paradise Close is how it’s in conversation with other books—the characters make their world legible through language and books, especially and particularly Marlise. I’m wondering what were the books you read that made the writing of the novel legible to you, or that helped you toggle between fiction and poetry? What is it you think that Marlise could find in books that she couldn’t find in real life?
Lisa Russ Spaar
First: I love what you say about paperbacks. They’re just so much more “like a body, a mind,” as you put it, than hardcovers, which are nice especially for libraries, but which do feel more packaged, commodified. They don’t soften as well through rereadings, and because they can appear more formal, I have trouble taking pencil to the margins. They can also do some damage if you fall asleep reading them and a hard corner happens to catch you in the face.
You’re so right that Paradise Close is in many ways a book full of other books and texts—Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hayden are just a few of the authors who get ink time—and Marlise reads so much as a girl that her admiring godfather calls her Bronte (sorry, don’t know how to create an umlaut—which has been a problem in this new novel I’m trying to write, which involves, among other things, an Emily Bronte cult). Orphaned and often farmed out to various schools, books become friends and guides for Marlise, as books are wont to be for many of us. And it is, after all, a quotation from Dickinson that she sees in a museum exhibit that she ponders as a reflection of self-forgiveness at the novel’s close (No pun intended!). I would also say that the various plots of Paradise Close itself owe much to the nineteenth-century authors I’ve been reading since girlhood—writers like Dickens, especially, and the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy. These are stories of mirrored and disguised identities, orphaned children, plot twists and turns. A friend, the novelist Jane Alison (who has written a marvelous book about form in fiction called Meander, Spiral, Explode), called the ending of Paradise Close Shakespearean, which I think she meant as a compliment ;-).
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Definitely a compliment! Without giving too much away, the ending of Paradise Close is my favorite part of the novel, for how meaning coheres and explodes outward again. I found it very moving: Marlise is finally, for one moment, able to see and reconcile all of her disparate selves, all her years and chapters and phases; it’s as if she encounters her life as a painting—shimmering before her, entirely whole, on a canvas, where she can take it all in at once, and therefore, understand herself at last (it’s not lost on me that what activates this moment is literally Marlise seeing Silas’s paintings in a gallery). It’s a moment I think a lot of us, consciously or not, wish for: a fleeting instance of perfect comprehension. And it’s also when all the narratives of the book “click” into place for the reader, too. It’s a brilliant movement (For some reason, I’ve always thought of the different sections of your book as “movements” instead of sections.).
And I love Marlise thinking of books as friends and guides, perhaps also maybe even as parental figures or as surrogates for the self—when I’m especially drawn to a book the characters also provide me with relief from myself. It’s a feeling of enlargement.
Also side note but I cannot wait to read your novel with the Emily Brontë cult . . .
7. What is your current state of mind?
Lisa Russ Spaar
Haha, worried! About the obvious elephant in the White House, the climate, wars, famine, evil, the travail that is always with us and feels even more than usually so. Closer to home: since a large tree hit our centuries-old house in a freak storm last year, we’ve uncovered many structural issues with the house that we didn’t know existed. I’m a house person, as Bachelard would say, and so I’m feeling a bit vulnerable. There’s a precarity that’s always there, but which feels maybe a bit more so now that everything is italicized by the big awful picture. I want to be a good steward of my “rented” time here on the planet.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Currently on a seven-hour-long Amtrak train from Richmond to New York; I am tired. But I sort of love being tired.
Lisa Russ Spaar
I think you and I share a problem with occasional insomnia. So there is that kind of tired that can feel rather wretched after a few days of sleeplessness. But I agree that there is a very particular kind of tired that comes from having worked or traveled or taken a long run or put in a long waitressing shift that feels like a kind of rest. Readers of our conversation might not know that you are, in addition to being a poet, a scarily good artist AND a figure skater, a good one, and have written and drawn about it. I’m wondering if you experience tiredness (if you do) differently after an intense spell of writing, drawing, or dancing/skating/running?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I think the tiredness that comes after writing often feels a little fraught—if I’m exhausted after writing (instead of, say, floating or excited) it usually means it’s been a complicated writing session, full of more obstacles and problems than progress. The tiredness that comes after drawing can be similar; it means I’m tired of grappling with my own limitations. But drawing also involves my body in a way writing doesn’t—I’ve been drawing a lot this past week, for example, and my right shoulder and elbow have been in pain for the last few days.
The worry you talk about in your original answer is so real, Lisa, and it’s easy for me to spin out in anxiety and despair about the world’s many unfolding tragedies. Action always helps (writing letters, making calls, protesting, volunteering) and I think dancing/skating/running, while not a form of communal resistance, are a different kind of action that can also often lift me out of anxiety—the exhaustion that follows dancing and running is one of elation, one that renews me so that I’m able to grapple with and greet the world again. And it’s a sort of antidote to the exhaustion of writing and drawing because movement silences the mind—or at least, the mind in your head (I always remember this amazing line by the poet Linda Gregerson, when thinking about the mind/body relationship: “Poor brain. It’s body too.”).
9. On what occasion do you lie?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
To spare someone’s feelings. Or out of fear of hurting someone.
Lisa Russ Spaar
I’m not sure if this will resonate with you or not, Lena, but I see you taking this kind of care with yourself in your epistles to a future you (interesting: there are 7 such numbered letters in the book, and they are not given sequentially nor is the list inclusive–numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 9,13, and 14) are not offered. Do they exist?). There is a tenderness toward that future self mixed in with bemusement, concern. “I’m afraid. What if you’re someone / you don’t want me to know?” the speaker asks in #12, “What if / I’m someone you’ll wish to disown?” In #4, the speaker asks, “What do you need to hear to make you happy?” I feel that the speaker is being very courageous when asking these questions.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
That’s so nice of you to say Lisa—thank you. I wrote that series of “Dear Future Me” poems during a period in my life when I was struggling with depression and anxiety—lockdown (and the whole year following lockdown) made this bout particularly heavy. I was also living in California at the time and the wildfires were very bad that fall of 2020. The notion of “the future” seemed to vanish entirely. I think I started writing those poems with the hopes that, if I wrote to a version of myself who was in the future, that I could make her exist.
Of course I don’t think I learned anything about this future self as I wrote the poems—she was not yet real—but I do think, while writing them, I was able to put myself into a compassionate, curious, and imaginative headspace, one I could not otherwise access at the time (And yes—the other numbered poems do exist, but never felt quite right for the book!).
Speaking of selves: when we first meet Marlise in the first section of the book, she is fifteen years old; she comes back in different forms (and via different perspectives) later on throughout the novel. And of course you also have instances of different characters seeing themselves or each other through different lenses too. Tee, the main character in the second movement of the book, has this moment where he has a dream about his former lover, Emma, and he approaches a glass cottage—first he sees two bodies making love,and then as you write: “The bodies fall apart, and then it’s just one body, and the face gazing back at him, implacably, impassively, from within the sugar house of ice, is, at first, the face of a little girl. Then it is his own” (Lisa Russ Spaar, Paradise Close, Persea Books paperback edition, 2022;2025, p. 169).
There’s also this moment when Silas and Marlise are at the Institute together as teenagers and he tells her that he sees her in all her ages at once: daughter, mother, lover.
I’m wondering if you can talk about this idea of the multiplicity of selves that seems to appear again and again in the novel—which I find also interesting now that you are a poet who is also a novelist. Is writing fiction a way of exploring how an author is multiple characters, multiple selves? When did you feel your most poet self when writing this book? Or perhaps that’s the wrong question; maybe a better question would be: when do you feel most like yourself when writing? What different selves does each genre activate for you (if they are indeed different)?
Lisa Russ Spaar
Such a great question. The reason I began to write the prose pieces that became Paradise Close (which started off as two separate things until I realized they were related) was because I just couldn’t or didn’t want to—no, I think it’s couldn’t—adequately treat the characters and their complexities and specular overlaps and transformations—in the kinds of poems I write, which are lyrical and often in the first-person. I feel I lean in closer to my own experiences/feelings in my poems, and in fiction, I felt invited/allowed to lean into the experiences of others, real and imagined. But whether writing fiction or poetry (or lyric essays or reviews, which I also write), I feel most myself when I feel that I’m utterly engaged in the material at hand, that I’m learning as I go, when I’m engaged in something I myself would want to read. If that makes sense.
To answer the original Proust question, I lie to avoid unnecessarily hurting someone. Was it St. Augustine who said that “No one should consider anything his own, except a lie?” I suppose there is some intrinsic bending of the truth in the writing of fiction and poetry. In a way, a lie is an act of creativity—you can make up a story about something and even make others believe it. I remember the first lie I ever told. It was fairly innocuous, but for a hot minute, before I confessed the truth to my mother, I felt a combination of terror and thrill that I could make her believe something that wasn’t true.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I remember the first lie I ever told, too—I was about five or six years old and I did it almost as an experiment, maybe as a way to test my own selfhood, and to see if I could get away with it (in my case, my mother knew right away I was lying, ha).
Lisa, I’m wondering how you think about this notion of “truth” as it pertains to fiction versus poetry—obviously emotional truth is one thing, but I know that both your poetry and fiction have slight elements of your real life in them. I had a friend (a memoirist!) recently ask me if I considered my poems to be autobiographical, or whether they were in a certain poetic voice that was outside autobiography, which made me start thinking about “the self” (and by extension, “truth”) when we are writing—how for me, when I’m writing both poetry and nonfiction, it’s only a part of myself that I’m leaning into—a real part of myself, but only one dimension. I’m telling the truth, but it’s a truth that might contradict another truth.
Is there a genre in which you feel more free to “tell the truth”—whatever that means for you? What is that like, when you’re switching between poetry and fiction—do you feel different responsibilities towards telling the truth in each genre? And do you think the notion of “truth”—as it pertains to your own feelings that you’ve encountered or experienced as a result of your life—freeing, or limiting, especially when writing from the point of view of different characters? I guess I’m also wondering, when writing fiction, how do you make up “true” things—i.e. how do you lie while telling the truth?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I think about this a lot, Lena. It’s interesting that with “fiction,” which, by name anyway, implies something fictive, made-up, we usually feel compelled to include some sort of language indicating that any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is coincidental, etc., and we DON’T do that with books of poems, in which the “speakers” often feel very close to the author. I guess I have, haha, duped myself into believing that inside my poems I have what Dickinson would call “more veil”—perhaps I feel that the baroque textures of the text protect me somewhat. What I found, to my surprise, something that I loved about working in fiction, is that while I could use elements of my own and others’ stories, I could also make up things about them in service of a larger, different story. Since significant aspects of Paradise Close draw from my own experience, a friend asked why I didn’t write a memoir instead. In part, I think this had to do with our thinking about “lies” as possibly a way of not hurting people. A memoir might have done that. But also, while aspects of my life seem worth exploring, my “real” life isn’t finally that interesting. In the novel, I hope I was able to conjure up worlds that are, ultimately, compelling. Even if they didn’t happen, to me, I want to give them the ring of truth.
17. Which talent would you most like to have?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I wish I were musical, could play several instruments, and had a beautiful voice. A close second: I wish I could draw!
Lena Moses-Schmitt
The ability to play music, sing and write songs. I’m so jealous of musicians—they’re like poets but more powerful, and can channel more energy.
Lisa Russ Spaar
I hear you. My husband is a musician—a bass player, jazz and classical—and we sometimes debate which is the purer art form. Perhaps it’s a cliche to say this, but I do finally feel that what is powerful about poetry is its ability to be both musical and linguistic, if that makes sense. Your poems are so rich, sonically as well as visually. They’re acrobatic. They traffic in leaps and twists and voltas. They often soar (I’m thinking of the dancer in “Arabesque”):
While I was running
toward those hands, I let my eyes loose
on a fistful of pink rhododendron,
kneaded into its shocking nest
of green leaves and thought: my face
is still new when I look out of it.
That’s what I thought
before I hit the air.
It’s easy to forget that music is rhythm, movement, as well as sound. You’ve got it going on.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I feel the same way about the musicality of your own poems, especially the new poems/sonnets in Madrigalia! I really relish how rhyme and rhythm operate in those poems; how the language so deftly breaks into pure sound—many seem to toe this threshold of familiar/unfamiliar and abstraction/figurative that I’m very drawn to in visual art, except in these poems, the abstraction stems not necessarily from the meaning of the poems but from the way they sound in language. Am I making sense? I think it is this quality about your work that makes it so fun to return to and sit with—I love when a shorter poem (in this case, sonnets, or “sonnet-haunted poems,” as I’ve heard you describe that new work in Madrigalia) becomes longer simply through the mystery of its own language and rhythm; I find that because those poems slip between abstraction and figurative I could sit with them forever, they keep refreshing themselves.
I know that you paint (I was lucky enough to see photos of some of your beautiful paintings!) so I suspect you do have a hidden drawing talent, Lisa! And art and artists play a big role in Paradise Close as well. There’s Silas, who is a painter prodigy, and Em, a printmaker (in one particular passage, when Em is older and teaching lino-cut workshops to teenage girls, she guides her students to think about “what it means to mark and be marked,” a line that has really stayed with me) (PC, p. 183). Why were you drawn to writing about visual artists, and how did you approach channeling visual art into writing? And maybe more broadly, I’d love to know about how your painting practice intersects with your writing life.
Lisa Russ Spaar
First of all, thank you for this: “I love when a shorter poem (in this case, sonnets, or ‘sonnet-haunted poems,’ as I’ve heard you describe that new work in Madrigalia) becomes longer simply through the mystery of its own language and rhythm; I find that because those poems slip between abstraction and figurative I could sit with them forever, they keep refreshing themselves.” It means a lot to me that my poems affect you this way, and I certainly love this about shorter poems, anything by Dickinson, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” (“Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed, / What heart heard of, ghost guessed” —what?! And yet I think I meditate on those lines every day).
As for visual art, I’ve always been interested in it. I drew a lot as a child and adolescent, drew before I could write (writing is a kind of drawing, at least in longhand) and loved looking at books of paintings and then at artwork in museums in places like New York City, which was just 45 minutes from where I grew up. About ten years ago, when I realized that I couldn’t really garden the way I wanted to because we co-exist with a herd of hungry deer on our property, I found that I needed, craved, another “art”—something non-verbal. And so I took up oil painting, for which I’ve had no training. I did buy an easel and had the staff at a local art store help me build a palette of colors and show me how to care for my brushes, etc. And then I just jumped in, working at first on gessoed boards and painting silver things, to train myself to see how something that appears silver is really comprised of many colors. Anyway, I loved this praxis, and would often turn to it after time at the desk. It helped alleviate some of the obstacles and frustrations I might be having. I could also listen to music while doing it, something I can’t do when I’m writing (listening for other musics, I suppose). Then, in 2020, two of my now four grandchildren were born, and I got nervous about possible toxicity of the oil paints. So I put that aside for a while and tried water color, a medium I so admire (your paintings, for example, Lena!), but just couldn’t make that work without training. I kept trying to treat the medium as oil! Anyway, it’s all on pause now since the room where I painted was damaged in the storm I mentioned earlier, and is still tarped up (a year later, I’m still finding shards of glass from blown-out windows), so until that room is made safe and fast again, I won’t be setting up my easel. I can’t wait to be reunited with it, though. I dream about a little studio for playing around in . . . .
21. What is your most treasured possession?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I have three big folders containing poems, drawings, and comics my three children made long ago. I’ve got them in a place where I can grab them and go if need be. I should probably digitize them . . . but I do love the objects, the paper, the fading markers. What I didn’t keep: three fourth-grade iterations of the “map of Virginia,” with different counties depicted by different legumes . . .
Lena Moses-Schmitt
My stack of journals and sketchbooks dating back to 2011, when I first started taking poetry, and writing in general, seriously.
Lisa Russ Spaar
In a way this answer answers my earlier question about your feelings regarding handwriting in books. I love how, in your elegy for the late, great Claudia Emerson, you write about holding on to every piece of paper on which she made a mark. And since we’re having this conversation for Blackbird, the intrepid online journal at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Claudia taught before her untimely death, I would just like to shout-out to her luminous life and work. I know that you were lucky to be able to work with Claudia both at VCU and Mary Washington before that. I wish for so many reasons that she were still alive outside her amazing books. How proud she would be of what you’ve made in True Mistakes.
Lena Moses-Schmitt
That means a lot, Lisa, thank you. I don’t think I would have become a poet if it hadn’t been for Claudia, both because I literally didn’t even know what an MFA program was until she mentioned the possibility to me when I was in her undergraduate workshop my senior year of college, and also because she modeled for me what kind of life a poet could have. And this is all to say nothing of the impact her work and teaching had on the way I write and think about poems and incorporate them into my life. It’s been a long time—ten years?—since I wrote that elegy, but I remember the immense comfort, in the months following her passing, of seeing her handwriting in the margins of my old poems. She was an incredible poet and person.
25. What do you most value in your friends?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Curiosity, a sense of humor, and silliness.
Lisa Russ Spaar
I think that the opening poem of True Mistakes, “Opening Questions for God or the Artist,” embodies all of these qualities, which I’m sure your friends value in you. What could evince curiosity more than a question?
How do you maintain a sense of awe?
A hill, or a skyscraper?
When do you sense you’re finished?
How do you know you’ve begun?
I most value loyalty, humor, intimacy, honesty . . . It’s a bonus if they’re a good cook 🙂
Lena Moses-Schmitt
Ha, I think it will be no secret to anyone who reads my book that I’m a little obsessed with asking questions! When I was first starting to write poems seriously, an older and more experienced poet once told me you should never ask a question in a poem that you can answer, and while I totally understand that advice, the other, more poet-y part of me was like: how is it possible to be able to answer a question with one, refined, certain answer? As a formal device, I find questions (and uncertainty in general) very generative, because that’s how I can write toward surprising myself. For me, question-asking is not necessarily about finding the answer, but about exploring and peering into the energy and implications that the questions open up.
Lisa, how do you think your attachment (or valuing of) these qualities find their way into Paradise Close? Do you think about what you value in friends when you write characters?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I’m not sure that I do so consciously, but I know that I want to write characters that I find interesting in ways that I often find my friends fascinating. I’m not sure I would be friends with all of the characters I created in Paradise Close, but I find each of them compelling in various ways. A fiction writer once told me that a novel or short story needs to have at least one sympathetic character. Of course we all sympathize with different sorts of character traits—some of us like sass and a whiff of recklessness; others don’t. Your good question makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I adore her poetry and have even dreamt about her, but I think that as a friend she might be . . . taxing. She asked a lot of her intimates. After author and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited her for the first time, he wrote a letter to his wife that evening saying something like, “She is fascinating but I’m glad I don’t live near her.” And perhaps she’d find me very boring!
32. What is your greatest regret?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I tend not to believe in regrets, if only for my own self-preservation. But I also know it’s unrealistic to expect to live a life without regrets—and perhaps I have not yet lived long enough to truly understand what kind of regrets I do have. I think if I do have a regret so far, it’s about spending so much of my time in fear of things I cannot control, or panicking about the idea of making mistakes. Looking back, I constantly wish I allowed younger versions of myself more lightness and more room.
Lisa Russ Spaar
My greatest regret is not forgiving those who have hurt me or been forgiven by those I have hurt.
I feel that your book is a breviary or field guide for those of us who fear making mistakes. In poem after poem you explore why it is okay to make them. I wonder if this has something to do with your praxis as a visual artist (and here I just want to praise and praise again the way these poems take shape as drawings, as paintings. It’s dazzling to witness). Some years ago, I team-taught a printmaking/poetry workshop with a colleague in the Studio Art Department. We poets learned so much from the printmakers, perhaps chief among them that it was okay to make mistakes, and that in fact a mistake was often a doorway to a new direction or vision for the work at hand. In the poem “Figure Drawing: Future Me,” an art teacher tells the speaker “Just use your intuition . . . . Mistakes aren’t possible here.” I think that the speaker in True Mistakes has learned that not only can she narrate everything about herself, but also maybe that it’s better not to. There is so much power in silence, which is perhaps something you bring to your poems from your work in graphic narrative. In comics, for example, there is so much charge outside the pane. You write about Joan Mitchell quite a bit, and I think of paintings like Les Bluets, which actually kind of looks like a page of a graphic novel. So much happening in the white spaces. As you put it in the book’s last poem, “the surrounding emptiness is not empty. / / It’s full of comprehension– / knowing, and never surprised, / like I once was, that so much life is let unused. That it’s supposed to be that way.”
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I’m so glad all of this came across. These poems, and the title in general, came from the realization I needed to relinquish my perfectionism before it stifled or destroyed me—I had to re-frame my concept of mistakes. They don’t always signify failure; they can also be sites of rejuvenated seeing, or new doorways. It was my experience drawing and painting that really helped me reconceptualize mistakes in this way—often when I make a mistake in a drawing, the drawing suddenly feels more real and more true. More alive.
And yes! I think about line breaks and white space in poems a lot when I’m working on graphic narratives; for me, poems and comics are paced very similarly, with each panel of a comic functioning as its own line. The silence between lines and stanzas has always felt incredibly loaded to me—almost as if the speaker is going somewhere else, experiencing life, and returning to the page recharged.
Lisa, what you say about your own regret makes me think about the role forgiveness plays in Paradise Close, particularly in the relationship between Em and Tee (and maybe also the relationship each character has with themselves). How did you think about forgiveness—the importance of it, or the lack of it we may have encountered in our own lives—as you were writing the novel?
Lisa Russ Spaar
It wasn’t until I found myself in the midst of writing the last pages of the novel that I realized that, in fact, the need to offer and receive forgiveness was perhaps the chief engine of the book: not just for Marlise and Silas, Bea and Otto, Em and Tee, but perhaps most importantly when Marlise forgives herself. And it is only now, reading and thinking about your question, that I see that any lost opportunity for forgiveness has shaped me and my psyche as well, apropos of my response to the “regret” question posed by the Proust template. Certainly my own need for some self-forgiveness worked its way into my creation of Marlise. I do think that there are some acts, or lack thereof—some cosmically egregious and some petty—that feel unforgivable. At least right now. You hear about people finding that kind of absolution or exoneration, even of the most unfathomable and unpardonable offenses, as the result of really big epiphanies or crises. As you say, life is full of surprises.
34. How would you like to die?
Lena Moses-Schmitt
My friend recently told me the story of a friend’s father who passed away unexpectedly one evening in his late seventies, doing what he did every night: sitting in his backyard and watching the sunset. As soon as I heard that story I knew that’s the kind of death I wanted, and vastly preferable to something like dying in your sleep (speaking of great fears, one of my great fears as a child was falling asleep because it felt so much like dying). I think I too would like to go while sitting peacefully somewhere, surrounded by beauty (and hopefully, satisfied that I had lived the kind of life I wanted to live and been there for the people I hoped I could be there for.).
Lisa Russ Spaar
You’ve certainly been there for me, Lena. Thank you.
I’d like to die knowing that those I love know how much I cherish them. I’d like to feel that along the way I’d helped some people live happier, more fulfilled lives. Loren Eiseley, the great science writer, has on his tombstone something like this: “I loved the world but could not stay” (Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature,” Vintage, 1959, “epigraph”).
Lena Moses-Schmitt
I love that quote, Lisa. This question—the idea of death and how we might live on—makes me think a lot about the characters in Paradise Close; they are dealing with this question about how to move forward into a new life after the worst has already happened. To me, this novel is in so many ways about the ideas of heaven, limbo, and hell—one of the main locations in the book is called “Paradise Close,” the crumbling family estate where Marlise goes after leaving the psychiatric hospital and nearly dies; the other is called “The Hole,” where Tee banishes himself after his affair with Em (the estate he used to call “Handel Hell”)—and both act as sort of mirror images for each other. What do you think the idea of paradise (and/or hell) means for these characters? Do you think paradise can be found on earth or only after we die?
Lisa Russ Spaar
I’ve been sitting with these questions for a while because I think they are at the heart of the novel. They have something to do with the “so what?” of it, with what’s at stake, and certainly with my motives for taking the time to write the book. The novel takes its name from the name of the Marlise’s ancestral family farm/vineyard (the “close” signifying a “clos,” or winery), and I think that whoever originally named the property wanted it to be in some ways paradisiacal, a place sheltered, Edenic, out of time. And there is a large ancient pear tree in the middle of the house, which was built around it, and clearly I had some “tree of knowledge” resonances in mind when I created this image. By the time Marlise is quartered there, of course, the tree is long dead, though still standing at the heart of the house, and Marlise is in an imperilled state, which at first feels ecstatic (freedom!) but then turns very dangerous. It will take her a long time and many transformations before she experiences anything like paradise. For all of the characters who have those kinds of ecstatic experiences (Marlise, Bea, Otto, Emma, Tee), however transient, the means to that ecstasy is always love. Hell is a state of no love (Zeno by temperament, Cole trapped by physical illness, Silas eventually by his mental illness) and purgatory is maybe being stalled, waiting without hope or purpose (Tee at Handel Hall, Marlise in the old house). I do think “paradise” can be experienced in this mortal coil, and more than once and in different iterations, but I think by its essence, it is perforce transitory, and all the more precious for that. It’s not paradise “found” or “lost,” but “close,” within reach if sometimes, however fleetingly, believed.
