In Process With: Lisa Locasio Nighthawk

"Losing my mother taught me all about the finality of death; whatever comes next, our work here ends. So I try to get over myself and just do it, however I can."

This month’s In Process With…brings us to the Los Angeles desk of writer Lisa Locasio Nighthawk. She is the chair of the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing (a program that I’ve sent multiple students to, with much contentment on their part, and which I visited last winter and understood exactly why and spoiler, it’s Lisa’s direction) and the executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Lisa writes one of my favorite newsletters, Not Knowing How, which I recommend you subscribe to right now. This one gave me the framework I needed for watching Babygirl and this one, on what it means to work as a “professional” artist, I sent to multiple friends who I knew would respond the way I did when I read the following paragraph, which was to want to thank Lisa for seeing me and gently reorienting me to a complicated truth about my relationship between making art, making the money I need to survive and thrive, and my harebrained thoughts on achieving in this business and life.

How much of my life do I want to spend feeling bad? How much of yours do you want to spend feeling bad? What I’ve learned is that feeling of not enough, of striving, of longing for what you do not have is the opposite of writing, it is the opposite of art, it is the opposite of all of the things we attribute to the obscure beast of professional success.

I love that that newsletter ends with a set of declaration of Lisa’s wants, for this is what her work has done for me, and I know so many other readers: connect us to unabashed desire, to the wanting and the seeking that is, for so many of Lisa’s characters, and for many of us, the purpose of being alive and the way forward.

The propulsive force of desire, sexual and otherwise, is the heart of Lisa’s debut novel Open Me. Roxana, eighteen, due to Kafka-esque levels of bureaucracy mix ups, lands in Denmark instead of Paris for a summer abroad. Gravely disappointed, furious at her best friend who escapes the same fate, she takes up with Søren, technically her liaison to the program she will ditch in favor of well, living. He’s a decade older than her, fascinated and repulsed by her American-ness, and by her growing sense of self-possession that will quickly outpace him.

“I wanted to tell him that the days I had spent in the apartment were the most exciting of my entire life. Sometimes, walking between the rooms in the afternoon, I was overcome by wonder at where I was. At who I had become. And this feeling raised me, muting his moods and complaints about the sounds my mouth made when I ate, his lovemaking sealing me in my certainty: I was free but didn’t need freedom. I could do as I liked, and I did. Our life together, we often joked, was my real International Abroad Experience. The only place I wanted to go was between his legs.”

Open Me is about an education, but it is always Roxana’s own; she is not schooled by the men she takes up with—after Roxana outgrows Søren’s relentless bullshit, it’s also with Zlatan, a Muslim refugee from the Bosnian War—but by herself, by her willingness to become a woman who is attuned to her desires and where they will lead her. More so than a story of these particular romances or sexual awakenings, Roxana is discovering that this freedom, this pleasure, is not a single experience but a doorway, one opened yes, very much by sex, but as much by self-assertion, by a quest for self-knowledge that is what she will carry with her through the rest of her life.

“I buzzed all over, sore in a way I hadn’t felt since the early days with Søren. So it was possible to be broken into all over again, to be made anew So all my life I would open and close, and open and close again, and open again.”

There’s a matter-of-factness to Lisa’s work, on female sexuality in and rage (talked about here in this ❤️‍🔥 interview with Sarah Manguso) and bodies—bless the blood and the secretions that make themselves known in her prose!—and alongside that, joy and satisfaction that comes with for seeing the world, and ourselves, for what it is. Lisa’s answers below are like her novel, like her body of work: funny, self-respecting, honest— a real journey you don’t want to miss. In them, she asks us, Can I be real with you? and yes, the answer is yes, always, yes, please.

If you’re in Los Angeles, please get yourself to an event so you can witness her fierceness and compassion in person (there’s one this Friday). Buy Open Me. You can read recent essays by Lisa here—I loved this one about living and renting and trying to connect in Hollywood—and shorter fiction here and her brilliant book reviews here and find her on Instagram @senzaflash_. Landing in any such company of hers (and what choices we have, lucky us!) is sure to open you up.

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?