Interview with Danielle Lazarin, author of “Back Talk,” a short story collection on what it’s like to wait.

We all know it can take months to hear back from publications after we submit a short story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece, but a full manuscript on submission can take longer. I recently had the opportunity to discuss what goes through the mind of an author when their manuscript is on submission, and they haven’t heard back. Especially when the manuscript is so timely. Here is the candid interview with Danielle Lazarin, author of a short story collection titled “Back Talk” on what went through her mind as she waited to hear back.

PL: In your essay The Ambiguous Loss of (Probably) Not Selling My Novel, you write that “when your book is on submission, there’s a pressure of silence till you know the end.” Why did you feel compelled to write about the ambiguity of your novel selling or not, since I assume you are still in submission?

DL: I was on submission when I wrote the essay, but I’m not any longer. It was important to me to talk about it in the middle of it, knowing that any ending, whether it was a sale or not, would color the whole of the experience. We put too much weight on the end or results of things and most of the experience of something is going through it, not the processing of it, which tends to flatten it some. To put it in fiction terms, it’s the way that retrospective narration can sometimes add a false layer to a story, one that wants the story to mean a certain thing, so it’s told through a lens of (sometimes too absolute) knowing and leaves out the complicating parts because they don’t fit the story; I suppose that’s true of any sort of narration, isn’t it? It feels most honest to me to write about the spaces where we don’t yet know, and it adds an interesting craft challenge, too, to tell a story without knowing the ending.

PL: In your essay you mention Pauline Boss’s work “…ambiguous loss, the fraught space of what no longer exist but isn’t concretely gone.” You wrote that essay nine months ago. Are you still in that space of not knowing how to “mark or mourn” your novel not selling yet?

DL: Overall, with time it has mostly become less powerful, but like any grief, it depends on the day. Being in the headspace of a new project I’m excited about helps tremendously. What’s been most difficult, given that my unsold novel is about the obliteration of abortion rights, is to be living through what is now undoubtedly the collapse of Roe and I’m certain a future onslaught of privacy rights. As a citizen, I feel constant waves of anger and grief both for the despicable way this country destroys its own people. As a writer, there’s still a lot of loss knowing that my book could have been part of a larger conversation, an access point, perhaps, for understanding or thinking about what we owe one another. It’s frustrating and weird to be sitting on something that is relevant to right now and will not be read right now or maybe ever. In some ways it can feel like I never wrote the book, and writing the essay was a way to remind myself I did; it’s the marker and the mourning itself.

PL: You’re a teacher as well as a coach for aspiring writers. How do you motivate your students to continue moving forward with their work and not be discouraged if they enter long periods when they don’t know if something they’ve written will ever be published?

DL: I ask them to consider what it is they want from publishing: money, admiration, validation, other opportunities? Asking what the end game is is itself enough for most of them to realize that the aforementioned is either not coming from a single publication or won’t be enough to sustain them through the long haul resilience of being a writer when it does. That even the most “successful” writers still want all for those things; the pursuit is perpetual. To keep writing you must learn how to sustain yourself outside of these short-term rewards. We talk about how linearity is a ruse, in both the arc of a writing life and within the process itself; it can be helpful to recognize that a writing career starts at some A and ends at some Z (Z being…a Nobel Prize? Posthumous fame?). Working on novels or other large-scale projects is particularly hard because there aren’t nibbles of validation or success along the way as there might be with shorter pieces. Practically, I tell them to take breaks and work on shorter things so they can feel the satisfaction of finishing or having a breakthrough on something---a short story or poem or essay or even a visual piece---to simply get out of a mode of voice or whatnot they’re in a long-term relationship with. That, too reminds you that your writing is not your current single piece of writing. If you have only one story to tell in one way then---I hesitate to say this as declaratively, but I think it’s true--- you’re not a writer. Writers have lots of stories and a multitude of ways of telling them, many of which they don’t yet have access to, but will come if they keep working, if they let themselves see what they want to try and can try it for the sake of—the thrill, the joy, the intellectual exercise of--trying. With time this becomes the thing you seek, that satisfaction of an idea or an experiment gone well or the learning when it doesn’t so you can carry that forward to what’s next.

PL: When you wrote this essay you said there are times when you try to work on your new novel, but “can’t get a grip on it.” We are now in June of 2022, nine months since you wrote your essay, over two years since your book “The Pathways” went into submission. Are you able to get into your new novel now? How has your work been affected by this experience?

DL: Things are moving along with the new novel! I’m rolling towards a first draft. Crawling? I’ve started tracking my time and process over the past year and have come to terms with the reality of my pace. If anything, overall this experience has reinforced my drive to write what I write. Knowing how unpredictable and wholly uncontrollable the publishing end is, what else is there to do? It’s been said many times over that the only thing you can control is your work. In my class on claiming your own process and practice I quote a line from the book Art & Fear which takes it a bit further into process: “Your job is to learn to work on your work.” I try to do my job the best I can, to dig into the regular practice, which is all I can control.

PL: In your essay you also mention that in the past when self-doubts emerge “…I’ve always managed to find the smallest shred of faith and let it carry me through,” but now you are considering “giving up all together.” What makes this particular time of self-doubt want to make you give up writing? What changed from before when you could pull yourself through the self-doubt?

DL: Thankfully I don’t feel like giving up anymore, though it was very strong feeling during the earlier periods of the novel passes. So much was going on then: living in New York City at peak pandemic, adjusting to working with three other people in an apartment with barely any doors, general disconnection from a lot of people and things that kept me grounded and motivated. I’m in my mid-40s now, and like many writers at this age, there’s a sense of in betweenness I have about being neither a young writer nor an established one in a culture that fetishizes youth. This is compounded by being a parent, which makes getting work done as I’d like to very difficult, just much slower than is ideal or that I know I’m capable of. So there became a sense, especially with my kids suddenly literally in my working space again indefinitely, of the futility of the work I was doing. I think I wrote a good book, one that is relevant and compelling; as I said above, I did my job the best I could, just as I feel I did with my first book. But this time the job I did didn’t cut it, and there was no singular reason why, nothing I could point to to understand how I might have more success. It was painful to have spent a near decade struggling to accept that as a parenting writer I’d eek out the book the best and fastest I could given my circumstances and then still be in this in between space career-wise. Was I willing to spend another 5-10 years doing the same, knowing it would likely feel even worse to repeat that failure? Apparently, yes, I am. I can’t say this makes any sense; it is not a logical profession.

Danielle Lazarin is the author of the short story collection Back Talk. Her fiction can be found in The Southern Review, Buzzfeed, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Her non-fiction has been published by The New York Times, The Cut, and Lenny Letter. A graduate of Oberlin College’s creative writing program, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, Hopwood Awards, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Freya Project. She teaches fiction for Catapult and the 92Y. She lives in her native New York, where she is at work on a novel.

Paola Lastick is currently a student at the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. Her writing has appeared on blogs as well as the newspaper, The Real Chicago. She lives in a suburb of Dallas with her husband, daughter, and three small yappy dogs.