What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Ericka Lutz

author

Ericka Lutz (website)'s short stories and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Green Mountains Review, Scrivener Creative Review, Pindeldyboz, Kaleidoscope, Sideshow: An anthology of contemporary fiction (Somersault Press), and several Seal Press anthologies. She is two-time fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the author of seven nonfiction books including On the Go with Baby and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Stepparenting, and she's the fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama. Ericka teaches creative writing at U. C. Berkeley Extension, Mediabistro.com, and privately.

 
This seems to be my year of public readings -- a lot of appearances in the Bay Area, New York, and, in June, at the Boston Fiction Festival. I'm currently sending around my collection of thirteen thematically-linked short stories, San Andreas: Short Fiction on Shaky Ground. Five of these stories have appeared in journals, anthologies, and online. I'm in the beginning stages of writing a column about my upbringing as a fourth-generation Red Diaper Baby and my transition to the pseudo-skeptic new-ager that I am today. I'm continuing my work as a writing teacher and consultant and as the fiction editor for the online magazine Literary Mama.

And, finally and most importantly, I'm one-fifth of the way through the first draft of a new novel. In April, I'll spend four weeks at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I think I'll work on this novel. Then again, my intention for this fellowship is simply to show up every day to write, and to stay open to what might happen creatively. So if I end up working on something else, so be it.

 
What's your book about?

The novel is -- so far -- about poisonings: global and personal, deliberate and inadvertent. A hip Oakland family's carefully constructed life is disrupted when the dad's previously-undisclosed daughter from a teenage fling arrives on their doorstep, strung out on methamphetamines and dragging along a disabled child.

I'm far enough along to see the themes and characters I want to work with but not so far that I really know everything that is going to happen. And that's a scary and exciting place.

 
What led you to this project?

I've completed two novels that are unpublished -- though I've published widely in other areas -- so this one is the keeper. The seed for the story was an acquaintance's deliberate ingestion of pesticides. I'm also disturbed by the rural methamphetamine epidemic in the United States, and the fracturing of American society into left wing/right wing, rural/city, liberal/fundamentalist.

My mentor, the writer and feminist Alix Kates Shulman, says to write about what worries us, what we don't know about, what we need to know about. I need to know how to live in this fractured world. How to focus on the beauty, to inoculate ourselves. So I'm exploring all of that.

 
Does your novel's theme of poisoning serve as a metaphor? Even beyond the literal environmental threats that you mention -- does the theme of poisoning have a larger meaning in our lives?

In my book, as in our lives, poisons are everywhere, not just in the larger physical environment. My characters have this odd, intrigued relationship of horror-sorrow and thrill around poisonings. They poison themselves and each other literally and emotionally, even while they're trying to lead these safe, non-toxic lives. If you go into a bar, the bartender says, "Name your poison," and the primary characters in my novel do name their own poisons -- sometimes out of self-destruction, sometimes as inoculation.

Sometimes the mere fact that something is poisonous makes it intriguing. I see such a strong relationship between poison and magic; personal poisons like drugs and misplaced passions provide magic in mundane life, even if it's a dark magic. People, in general, use self-poisoning to play on the edge of darkness and mortality because they yearn for wizardry and transformation. Poison is a little bit of death in a (hopefully) controllable container, so maybe people also play with poisons for the thrill of control over death.

And poison is not always a bad thing. Poisons taken in small doses don't always destroy us, sometimes they protect us or heal us. The American Indians used to eat Poison Oak leafs to build up a resistance. Medically, we poison ourselves to make us stronger or to get the results we want: chemotherapy; Mifepristone and Misoprostol (the early abortion pills). All societies take stimulants and mind-altering drugs which, in the wrong quantity, can poison. The Japanese eat blowfish sashimi -- which can be mortally toxic if not prepared correctly. We poison selectively (rats, weeds) to improve our lives.

Not that my characters understand any of this clearly, or why they're behaving the way they are. Not yet, anyway -- they're deep in the thick of the experience.

 
What's been challenging about this project?

Well, I have process issues. Getting-back-on-the-horse issues -- it's hard to write another novel when the first two remained unwanted. It's a challenge to leave myself at the studio door, to get out of my own way. To "allow."

Technically, I'm working on the book's scope -- I've spent the last few years learning how to write good short stories, which require a tight focus. Novels are a bigger canvas, so while you get to make bigger strokes (easier!) you also need to cover more ground (harder!). So I'm working on finding this novel's pace and voice. The beginning stages -- and this means many months -- of a project don't always feel rewarding as I struggle to answer the big questions: what am I writing about? Why? Who cares? But in retrospect it's always exciting -- that spacious feeling of wide unknown possibilities and the intellectual challenge of wrestling ideas and demons into art.

The biggest challenge may be how to make this book life affirming and enjoyable while dealing with mercury, meth, and pesticide poisonings, and a family in crisis. All that. There are many mini-moments of inspiration, of true creative flow. But most of it is in-the-trenches slogging away. Inspiration is highly overrated, anyway -- it doesn't necessarily lead to good writing.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what's next for the project? Do you have a book contract, or prospects?

No, no, no, I'm deep in the unknown here. I don't know what's going to happen. And I'm learning to be okay with that. Trés Zen.

Links

Ericka's story San Andreas

Ericka's story Abandoning Nature

An essay, Why My Garden

A short short story: Fair Game

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 29 Mar 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco