Author Interview ~ Lesley Dormen

Lesley Dormen was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and other literary magazines and anthologies. She teaches fiction writing at The Writers Studio in Greenwich Village, where she lives with her husband.

Tell us about your latest project.

It’s a novel in stories called THE BEST PLACE TO BE. The heroine, Grace Hanford, tells each story, and each story is drawn from a pivotal moment in her life. We see her from age 15 to age 50-plus by the end of the novel, though not in chronological order. Grace is an unreliably reliable narrator. Each story is funny and sad and touches on life moments that any modern woman could identify with.

We love to hear about your journey to publication. (How long were you writing, did you have an agent, etc.)

I wrote the first story in 1999. I already had a well established a career as a magazine journalist, having put aside my fiction aspirations some years back. I was already in my forties when I enrolled in a creative writing program in Greenwich Village called The Writers Studio, and that was when I decided to focus once again on my first love, fiction. That program (I’m now the Associate Director of the school and teach fiction writing there myself) gave me the writing life I had deferred.

I was in the workshop for several years before I wrote my first short story. It was only 5 pages long. I sent it out to a few literary journals, even as I was still workshopping it, and it was bought within a week. Then I altered the ending slightly and the periodical decided they didn’t want it! I felt like Cinderella sent home from the dance. I ultimately sold it to Five Points.

I sold my second story to The Atlantic Monthly in 2000. When I finished that story, I contacted an agent I knew from my magazine work and asked her to submit it to The New Yorker. (I had an uncharacteristic burst of confidence.) That story came very close there, and was ultimately taken by The Atlantic to my great delight. As I continued to work on short fiction, I was discovering a voice and a character and thought I ought to have an agent who specialized in fiction in case I some day wanted to collect the stories I was writing.

Around that same time, an agent who had read a personal essay of mine in a magazine contacted me. Her agency specialized in fiction. She cheerleaded me on and was instrumental in helping me shape what turned out to be the novel. I also continued in the workshop at The Writers Studio. It took me six more years, though, to finish. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Several of the individual Grace stories were published in small literary periodicals along the way.

What is one weakness you have as a writer and what do you do to overcome it?

On top of being a late bloomer, I’m slow! I’m a terrible procrastinator with little day-to-day discipline, for one thing, and the smallest obstacles or rejections set me back horribly. Journalism has its own carrots and sticks built in. Writing fiction, I have to connect with the pleasure of writing through reading in order to escape my own personal demons. Letting myself read and be excited by other writers is what gets me feeling competitive and ambitious and excited. Then I feel emboldened to dig deep.

What is one strength you have as a writer and to what do you attribute your success in this particular area?

I’m a tireless reviser. I think that comes from my career as a journalist. I don’t sit down at my computer without going back and revising what I wrote ten minutes earlier. I know that good writing is revising, and I’m ruthless about not letting a sentence out of my grasp until I feel it’s right right right.

If you could go back to the young writer you were when you were just beginning, what advice would you give yourself?

Become part of a community of writers! I quit writing fiction right around the time I began to get good rejection letters. I didn’t know that good rejection letters were a phase on the way to becoming a published writer of fiction. Many writers are both grandiose and completely insecure. I wish my young self had tilted just a tad more toward the grandiose side but I wasn’t in an MFA program (there weren’t many then) and I didn’t know fiction writers. I was too alone, and that can be deadly for a writer.

What’s one publicity tip you can share that you’ve gotten a good response with in promoting your work?

Be a blabbermouth. The work has to be worthy, of course, but you have to put it out there, whether that means adding it to your signature line in your e-mail or dropping it into a conversation at a party. You never know who can offer a helping hand.

What do you to improve as a writer?

Read, read, read

What are a few of your favorite books not written by you?

I like any writer who can make move me and make me laugh. Philip Roth. J.D. Salinger, Julie Hecht. I love the poet Tony Hoagland. I just finished Then We Came to the End, a first novel by Joshua Ferris, which was stylistically risky and succeeded in spades. And the women who write deeply about female lives: Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Susan Minot, to name just a few.

Have you received a particularly memorable reader response?

I liked the reader from Elle magazine who called me “a cross between Virginia Woolf and Candace Bushnell.”

Do you have a pet peeve to do with this business?

The marketplace itself is a pretty awful place for a literary writer. It’s got nothing to do with the work itself, and coming under its spell, in complaint or congratulation, can be deadly.

What’s your favorite part of being a writer/least?

Not having to leave the house/Not having to leave the house.

What has surprised you most about this industry?

It’s still pretty much peopled by book lovers.

Advice to aspiring authors?

Get a dog.

Parting words?

Sorry. Still revising.