An Exclusive Interview With Lisa McLemore
Lisa McLemore writes poetry with a dash of horror/sci-fi and lyric essays. She is a hybrid author who published her chapbook, Photolingua, was by a small, experimental press called Beard of Bees Press.
“I decided to go the traditional publishing route,” she says, “ because I really loved the books that press put out, and I would feel honored to have my name in their lineup. But in general, I prefer self publishing. It gives me more freedom, and it’s less stressful than playing the expensive contest game that getting published in poetry so often requires.”
Lisa McLemore lives on Guam, but despite living in a tropical paradise, she loves the granite and cold woods of New England where she spent her childhood. Passionate about color, synesthesia, and surrealism, her poetry is often otherworldly.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What made you want to write your currently untitled work-in-progress?
Lisa: I wanted to write a book that combined poetry with stream-of-consciousness with dried flowers with short stories with hermit crab essays with photography and with memoir (and more!) To incorporate 3D things, it will probably be a one off or two off copy that I will sell or give away. What I’m after is absolute freedom to tell the story I want to tell through collected fragments of my life and my mind. Can literature breed with scrapbooking or collage? Can poetry speak more meaningfully when combined with typography and color experimentation? What would I write if I was untethered from genre and the insistence that each book should have only one, an idea common in some quarters.
Confessions of an Indie Author: How long did it take you to write this book?
Lisa: I’ve just begun this one. I meant to start it a year ago. But instead began writing nothing but prose poems and little magical realism and horror stories.
Confessions of an Indie Author: How long have you been writing and when did you start?
Lisa: I have been writing since I won the town newspaper essay contest in 4th grade. I started writing novels, and in 8th grade I proudly one a novel writing competition and got a computer! But that same year, the teacher who ran the novel writing club also introduced me to poetry in a class assignment where we had to write a small book of poems. I found I enjoyed a genre I used to think was boring. In high school my focus became divided. By college, where I majored in creative writing, my focus was almost entirely poetry. I fell in love with poetry in college. I ate, slept, and drank poetry. My favorite place to spend an evening was the university library.
Confessions of an Indie Author: How many books have you written and which is your favorite?
Lisa: I have written several chapbooks, and at least 10 collections worth of poetry. My favorites are the collection of prose poems I just finished, my stream of consciousness book I wrote on Aquidneck Island, and Photolingua.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Would anyone in your family disapprove of anything you’ve written?
Lisa: Yes, on my blog, I have written negative things about family I was estranged from. I regret that now. While I do firmly believe that if a person doesn’t want you to write bad things about them, they shouldn’t treat you wrong, make sure you leave room for reconciliation if that is at all a possibility. And remember that, in most cases, even if you think it’s not a possibility, it really might be at some point in the future. And you don’t want to have written anything that cannot be taken back. In my case, it was a blog post, and I was able to take it down. But if I had published it in a book and put it on Amazon or something, there would be no taking back what I said, and people I love would be painted in a negative light for things I have forgiven from the past. So honesty is a tricky thing in memoir. In telling your life story, you are also telling someone else’s more often than not. Also, your feelings about the person may change or you may be saying things out of anger that when you cool down, you won’t mean. So if you’re going to write something negative about real people, make sure some time has passed to give you clarity and distance.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Have any of your scenes came from your life?
Lisa: I often call my poems, particularly my prose poems, my “visions.” They typically have elements from my real life mixed in with the fantastical and surreal. The images come to me and I record them and form them into poems.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What is your schedule like when you’re writing a book?
Lisa: My schedule has changed drastically over the years. For several years, I was a stay at home mother with a small child, so I wrote in small batches of time as they became available. Three times I have homeschooled and my writing schedule was the same -- whenever I got an uninterrupted minute. Now my schedule is more open and free. My only child attends school. My day, although I have housework to do, is pretty much open. However, my mental health sometimes gets in the way. So I go through periods where I write all the time because I have a pretty open schedule. And I’m obsessed and then I go through periods where I pretty much shut down and I don’t output nearly as much.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What is the most difficult part of your writing process?
Lisa: Handling my own instability and low tolerance for stress. It affects my creative output so much. I’m not someone who ever dreads sitting down and writing, but when my brain isn’t working from bipolar I disorder, mood swings that can inspire me can also leave me feeling flat and out of touch with myself, which makes it very hard to access the part of my mind I need to write my poetry. Or anything really.
Confessions of an Indie Author: How do you develop your plot and characters?
Lisa: As someone who is predominantly a poet, plot doesn’t usually apply to me. But when I dabble in science fiction, horror, or magical realism, it depends. For magical realism, I think about a what if scenario that I want to explore. What if my betta fish turned into a little girl? What if the rustle of falling leaves was a language in nature, and someone could understand it? For science fiction and horror I think about what I fear and what I’ve experienced.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What do you do to get inside your character’s heads?
Lisa: I use sensory details.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Can you tell us about a time when you had to revise a piece of writing multiple times? How did you handle it?
Lisa: Yes, some of my poems have been revised over and over again, while some come to me as though from God, fully formed.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Do you see writing as a kind of spiritual or therapeutic practice?
Lisa: I see it as central to my identity and my functioning.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Does writing energize or exhaust you? Or both?
Lisa: It energizes me! It fulfills me in a way. I feel my brain light up like a Christmas tree with shoots of joy bouncing around in my head. When I finish writing, I feel in tune with myself, sharp, and grateful. Without God I could write nothing.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Have you ever tried to write a novel for a genre you rarely or never read?
Lisa: No. Absolutely not. I think it’s hard to write well in a genre you don’t study, and you should ask yourself why you would want to write a book in a genre you would never want to read. I can understand being paid as a ghostwriter or something like that for someone, but not writing horror if you refuse to read it, or penning a romance if you never read romances.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What’s the trickiest thing about writing characters of the opposite gender?
Lisa: I struggle with that, so I typically limit myself to mostly focusing on female characters. I understand femininity deep in my soul and can feel it. But masculinity is a foreign world to me. When I have to characterize men, I try to do so with depth and consideration of them as whole human beings. But I know that I probably fall short on accurate depictions of their inner emotional landscapes because I just can’t step outside my femininity far enough. That’s a shortcoming with me.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Do you play music while you write — and, if so, what’s your favorite?
Lisa: No. I prefer silence or background noise. I used to write to dark instrumental music, like film scores and gothic rock. But now I strongly prefer silence.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What are the most important elements of good writing?
Lisa: Imagery, imagery, imagery! In poetry, I read poems for the imagery. If you don’t have interesting and compelling images, I’m going to put the book down. It needs to sound fresh.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What’s your favorite and least favorite part of publishing?
Lisa: I have chosen not to focus on publishing mass produced books as much as one offs or chapbooks, or just blogging my poetry. The reasons for this are many. In poetry to get a full length book published, you often have to submit to contests. Entry fees add up, and at the end of it, you could have no book because thousands of people applied, and only three were chosen, or because the judge picked someone they know. Maybe your book was good enough and maybe it wasn’t, but even if it was good enough the odds just weren’t in your favor. Whereas with self publishing, I know that if I pay a certain amount of money I can walk away with a book. For me, the goal is not to make money. And as somebody who doesn’t write mass marketable material, that’s probably smart.
And that’s where the blogging comes in. I do eventually think I want to have some books up on Amazon, but because they cost money to make, I have to sell them. And honestly I’m happy to give poetry away for free. Believe me I am not downing authors who want to make a living. Writing is a skill, and if you can get paid for it and you’re willing to manage the business side of things, then by all means go for it. But poetry, except the stuff that is super mainstream, isn’t likely to turn a profit anyway. And I know that times are hard. I’m not in academia, so it’s not publish or perish. I’m married and fortunate that as of right now I don’t need to work. The most important thing to me is that someone reads my poems and resonates with them or gets inspired by one of them or see something in a new way. So I blog. And my blog readership is not huge. I won’t lie. But I get visitors from across the world every day, and in a world where even some traditionally published books don’t sell a hundred copies, my poetry blog has been read thousands of times. So I’d say I don’t like having to charge, or be charged and end up with no book.
But my least favorite part of the process is definitely formatting and doing the final edits before publishing. I love the writing and I enjoy the. Revising, but the making sure that every eye is dotted, and that all the margins are going to be correct drives me crazy and frankly intimidates me. I’m afraid to put out a book because I don’t know of anybody who handles the formatting for poetry and just puts the book up on amazon for you. And that’s essentially what I’m looking for. But I don’t know if anybody who offers the service to just deal with finalizing the book and I don’t know if I could afford it, if they did, so I would have to really think about it. It would depend. But dealing with programs like Microsoft word stress me out. To this day, I can’t seem to get it to stop double spacing my poetry lines even when I don’t want it to. I have to go back in my blog and fix the lines when it does that against my will.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What do the words “literary success” mean to you? How do you picture it?
Lisa: Someone reading my work deeply, really pouring over it and savoring it.
Confessions of an Indie Author: How important are book reviews?
Lisa: If you are publishing on Amazon and you want to be recommended to people, they’re extremely important. But other than that, I don’t think they’re important. I have seen reviews absolutely panning books that I love. I’ve also see books get panned because the author is disliked and the work is perhaps not even being read. And I’ve seen people rave about books that I have read and thought were absolute crap. At the end of the day, I write what I write. Take it or leave it. I will say that if you notice a consistent pattern in the criticism like this person uses boring imagery, or this novel switches POV too often, you might want to write your next book differently. But ultimately, you have to have a vision and you have to carry it through. This is not to say that it’s not extremely valuable to get feedback before you publish a book from writers or editors whose opinions you value. Getting feedback on your work before you publish is fantastic. But once you’re published, I don’t think the reviews matter that much.
Confessions of an Indie Author: Has any hugely popular novel left you thinking you could write it better?
Lisa: The first Harry Potter book. I hear the later books were better than the first, and to be fair I was unable to read the whole thing. My parents did not allow me to read books about witchcraft, so the only time I could read the Harry Potter book was when a girl I babysat asked for it as a bedtime story. Then I could read a chapter or two. JK Rowling tells a good story, but her prose itself just leaves me cold. I was 12 when I read it. It may be that it just isn’t lyrical enough for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. And that goes back to what I say about reviews, not really mattering. JK Rowling wrote the book she set out to write, and obviously it has been well received by many people. And there’s undoubtedly reason for that. But it did not do it for me personally, and I felt like I could tell a magical tale with much more poetic imagery. And like I said, I hear her later books were better than her first. So maybe if I read her later books I would have a different take. I’ve thought of doing that. I have considered re-reading the first book and finishing it, and reading the rest of the series. But fantasy is not really my genre as an adult like it was sometimes when I was a kid, to be fair. So I think to read her work now and judge it would be ungracious. I wouldn’t want someone who disliked poetry to read my work, and then pan it because, essentially, it’s poetry.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What do you think of NaNoWriMo? Worth it?
Lisa: I think the concept is great but the organization is not.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What do you like to do when you are not writing?
Lisa: Photography, collage, painting, mixed media art.
Confessions of an Indie Author: What books did you grow up reading?
Lisa: Historical fiction (TONS of it), fantasy (like Lord of the Rings), a bit of romance. As well as parenting magazines. I used to leave my parents in the grocery store and go to the magazine aisle and read Parents religiously. I wanted to get inside my parents’ heads! Ever since I’ve loved psychology. I read a lot of nonfiction and biography and autobiography as a kid as well. And when my mother was in college, I used to enjoy going to her university library with her and reading the journal articles there.
You can learn more about Lisa on her website. You also can follow her on Substack at Miniature Moon Poetry. Her chapbook, Photolingua, can be purchased at Beard of Bees Press or on her website.
Behind every book is an author with a unique story waiting to be told. Authors, your voice deserves a spotlight. This series explores the journeys, inspirations, and challenges behind writing. If you have a passion for words and a story to share, this is your moment to shine. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting your career, I want to hear from you.
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this wonderful series 🩵