Liesel Litzenburger
Author profile
born
Harbor Springs, Michigan, The United States
gender
female
website
About this author
I was born in Harbor Springs, Michigan. More precisely, I was born in Petoskey, seven miles down the road, and was swiftly removed to Harbor Springs to live out my childhood. If you make a mitten shape with your left hand, Harbor Springs is located along the western edge of your middle finger as it rises above the ring finger. It’s a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. That left hand of yours should be floating in water. I forgot to add that part. Si quaeris peninsulam ameonam, circumspice: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. This is Michigan’s motto and it has always struck me as fairly bossy—like, if you’re not happy here, you’re not really trying. But my point is that in Michigan we’re surrounded by water on three sid...more
I was born in Harbor Springs, Michigan. More precisely, I was born in Petoskey, seven miles down the road, and was swiftly removed to Harbor Springs to live out my childhood. If you make a mitten shape with your left hand, Harbor Springs is located along the western edge of your middle finger as it rises above the ring finger. It’s a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. That left hand of yours should be floating in water. I forgot to add that part. Si quaeris peninsulam ameonam, circumspice: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. This is Michigan’s motto and it has always struck me as fairly bossy—like, if you’re not happy here, you’re not really trying. But my point is that in Michigan we’re surrounded by water on three sides, and I grew up on the shore of a huge lake, an inland sea, in the midst of other lakes, and this childhood geography has had a strong influence on my writing. My family later moved to Fort Worth, Texas, then back to Michigan, and I spent my senior year of high school in Brazil as an exchange student. As an adult, I’ve moved and traveled frequently, but in my writing, my mental landscape has remained the same. At night, the sky goes blue-black very late and you can still see all the stars there, the full constellations. The great thing about remembered places is that they never really change.
I’ve always loved stories—written or spoken. As a child, I liked to listen to people talk, the way each person put his or her life into words, the way things were described or made funny or made sad, depending on who was doing the talking. I was a big eavesdropper. Later, as an adult, I’d remember something I’d heard someone say years before and think So that’s what that meant. I come from a long line of storytellers; I’m just the first one to get the sentences down on the page. Since I grew up without the benefit of cable TV—not much TV at all, cable or otherwise—reading was always important. I was one of those kids who tried Anna Karenina in the third grade. It made my arms hurt to hold it. That began my adventures with age inappropriate reading materials. I read In Cold Blood in the sixth grade and then all of Capote after that. I discovered Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Nabokov, Garcia Marquez, and Hemingway—whose sister was my grandmother’s best friend and lived down the shore on Walloon Lake.
I wrote my first novel in third or fourth grade. The Very Bad Man involves a kidnapping and espionage plot in Brazil. Ironically, when I ended up in Brazil years later, I found myself living in a town that looked a lot like the one I had invented in that childhood novel. I think the line between writing and life can sometimes be pleasantly blurred. Once in a while, I’ll see someone walking down the street and I’ll recognize her immediately, think I know her from somewhere. Then I’ll remember that I’m thinking of some fictional character I either read about or created myself. That’s an interesting moment. Books and the people in them have always been my friends.(less)
Sign in with Facebook
3.19 avg rating — 43 ratings
—
published
2001
—
3 editions
