Q & A with Summer Festival Speaker Lisa Brackmann and San Diego Writers Festival
SDWF: What inspired you to write Black Swan Rising now?
LB: I actually wrote the first chapter of Black Swan Rising in mid-2014. I’d just moved back to my hometown, San Diego, and was finding it much changed from the conservative military town of my childhood. I was living in a community called Clairemont, and at the time, it was a swing district with a contested congressional seat. The spending on that race was unreal, a record at the time. The ads were unrelenting and really nasty. I’ve always been a political junkie, and I found it fascinating, as well as kind of repelling.
Another thing going on at that time that caught my attention was GamerGate. In case you missed it, “GamerGate” was ostensibly about ethics in journalism covering the online gaming industry. What it really was about was attacking and shaming women involved in that industry who dared to advocate for more inclusive and more women-friendly games or even examine the kinds of sexist and racist tropes common in gaming. These attacks ranged from constant online harassment of women, people of color and at times, their male allies to doxing, “swatting” (calling in a fake police report to provoke a SWAT team response on a target) and real-life death threats.
The attackers? Mostly young, angry white men.
The third element was mass shootings. In particular the constant drumbeat of these stories, of deaths, of a media storm over a particularly violent incident that quickly subsides and is replaced by the next mass slaughter, to the accompaniment of meaningless “thoughts and prayers.”
I started researching mass shootings as a phenomena. I found that the great majority of mass shooters have domestic violence in their backgrounds (in fact, most mass shootings are “domestics,” with the victims primarily being the male shooter’s family). At the very least, these shooters have documented sentiments of hatred of women.
I think there’s a lot more awareness of this connection now, with the increased public awareness of “incels,” and also of the link between incel culture and white nationalism, but at the time it wasn’t much discussed.
I decided to place all this in the context of a highly polarized political campaign, wrote the first chapter and an outline, and then put the book aside to finish another project.
I wrote the bulk of Black Swan Rising in 2016. I can honestly say that I had no intention of writing a “ripped from the headlines” kind of book, and it was very unsettling to watch things play out the way they did after I’d finished it.
My agent has told me I am not allowed to write about World War Three.
SDWF: Which writers have influenced you most?
LB: I am a terrible list-maker and have a hard time remembering favorite books, films, you name it. But I’d say Lydia Davis (as a teacher, see below), Ursula Le Guin, for her wonderful prose and fusion of politics, culture and story-telling, Joan Didion, again for prose—her book, The White Album, made a real impression on me, Doris Lessing for The Golden Notebook, a work that like the best of Le Guin’s work combines the personal and the political in a way that is not didactic, and interestingly in this female-centric list, Ernest Hemingway, another one who makes my list because of his prose style. He was the one of the first of these authors whom I read, in junior high or high school, and I was really struck by his use of language.
SDWF: What do you wish you’d known before you started out as a writer?
LB: I knew this but you have to experience it before you really know it – publishing is a really difficult business. It’s hard to get published in the first place. It’s even harder to maintain a career. Your talent as a writer and the quality of your work only gets you so far and is no guarantee of prolonged success. It’s very difficult to separate your ego from this reality, at least it was for me. I had some success with my first book, Rock Paper Tiger, and I think I assumed that I would continue to have some modest success after that, maybe even build on it. Six books in, I’ve learned that it’s just not that smooth or logical a path. Finding the emotional resources to deal with that reality – that it doesn’t matter how good you are, or that this is at best only one factor in how your career goes – is not easy. I highly recommend that new writers find other outlets for their creativity that aren’t connected to “success” or “failure” in a career – that are purely self-expressive and fun. I went back to playing music again after a long layoff and it’s been incredibly therapeutic. I’ve also been learning more about cooking, which has given me a lot of pleasure.
Oh, and be sure you’re moving around enough. Go outside. Get fresh air and exercise. It’s really important.
SDWF: Which of your life experiences have shaped you most as a writer?
LB: I don’t think I could point to one. But several stand out. The first is that I was brought up in a house of readers. I wanted to write from the time I understood that you could use words to make sentences.
The second was accidentally finding myself in the People’s Republic of China in 1979 for six months, when I was quite young. At that time, China had been isolated from the west (and really, most of the rest of the world) for 30 years. There was no internet. I was in an utterly different place, cut off from just about everything familiar to me. And where I came from was as unfamiliar to the Chinese as their country was to me. This forced me into an observational mode, where I was constantly taking in all of these new experiences and not taking much for granted. I think this was useful training for a writer.
The third was that shortly after my return from China, I took a writing class from Lydia Davis. She emphasized attentiveness and precision in prose. I didn’t take all that many writing classes, maybe a half dozen in total, but this one had a real impact on me.
SDWF: Is there a line from one of your books you’d be willing to share? (opening sentence(s) or something that gives flavor of the piece?)
LB: This is the last line of BLACK SWAN RISING.
“Everything looked normal, if you just looked straight ahead.”
SDWF: Where can we find your blog/website or any other online links (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)?
LB:
Website: www.lisabrackmann.com
Instagram: otherlisa
Twitter: otherlisa
Facebook: www.facebook.com/lisabrackmannauthor
SDWF: Thanks, Lisa!
