Ask the Author: Lisa Marie Basile
Answered Questions (5)
Lisa Marie Basile
Write for yourself. Don't replicate others because there is no one formula for success. There is only one of you. Find your voice and believe in it. Your voice is your everything. Nurture it like a plant. Give it space and light and water. You will be rejected hundreds of times. That's normal. Keep going. Get a website. Learn how to market yourself. And spend time supporting other writers.
Lisa Marie Basile
Being able to exist in the physical world with one foot, with the other foot in some liminal, unknowable place of imagination and creative surges. It's like divinity is something we can always tap into. It's half work/craft, half something mysterious. That's an intoxicating feeling.
Lisa Marie Basile
I'm working on a memoir of my experiences in foster care, and also a novella for Clash Books.
Lisa Marie Basile
I am ALWAYS grateful to have the muse running through me when she does. I never coax her, I just wait (unless I'm under contract, which often means I'm always working and it feels very natural to me). I know this is not your standard writing advice. Eventually I become a sort of medium; I know when I have The Work to do. The muse is the poet, I’m just the vessel. Maybe she’s the subconscious, maybe she’s the ancestral, maybe she’s the great mystery. I don’t ask too many questions when she’s here. So, I often just let myself feel, exist, and live — trusting that the ideas will flow when they're ready. Living and experiencing is part of the job, too!
Lisa Marie Basile
During the the summer of 2014 -- I remember because I was blasting Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence -- I started writing about my personal experiences with family addiction, separation & my eventual move into foster care.
It's wild to think, but before then, I managed to write poetry and essays that rarely if ever touched on it, which meant my voice and my self and my expression was always half-real, half-honest, untouched by the very thing that made me me. That trauma was such a big part of my foundation and the lens through which I saw the world.
So one day in 2014 I wrote a piece about how foster kids belonged to no one & everyone, how we existed in a liminal space legally and physically. The thought of sharing this essay made me shook me to my core. Because then the world would know my past. It would reveal me as the traumatized thing I was before I wore a new era over my wounds. Yes, this essay said, I came from somewhere very real.
After finishing it, it was as though a spell were cast. I felt like the weight of a hundred galaxies came off my back. Because some of what I wrote were words I'd never even uttered to myself. And when I did write it it fell out of me like rain.
Fast forward to 2018. Light Magic for Dark Times, my book of practices and rituals for coping in a crisis, came out. My publisher asked if I had other ideas, and I felt both ready and compelled to write about writing as magic. This was the book I was meant to write.
It's wild to think, but before then, I managed to write poetry and essays that rarely if ever touched on it, which meant my voice and my self and my expression was always half-real, half-honest, untouched by the very thing that made me me. That trauma was such a big part of my foundation and the lens through which I saw the world.
So one day in 2014 I wrote a piece about how foster kids belonged to no one & everyone, how we existed in a liminal space legally and physically. The thought of sharing this essay made me shook me to my core. Because then the world would know my past. It would reveal me as the traumatized thing I was before I wore a new era over my wounds. Yes, this essay said, I came from somewhere very real.
After finishing it, it was as though a spell were cast. I felt like the weight of a hundred galaxies came off my back. Because some of what I wrote were words I'd never even uttered to myself. And when I did write it it fell out of me like rain.
Fast forward to 2018. Light Magic for Dark Times, my book of practices and rituals for coping in a crisis, came out. My publisher asked if I had other ideas, and I felt both ready and compelled to write about writing as magic. This was the book I was meant to write.
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