Straight from my mouth to God’s ears, an interview with: Alisha Wexler
I hope Ottessa Moshfegh reads this one
Alisha got mad when I asked her about her book is how Alisha Wexler said this interview should begin. She was joking, of course. She, like most great writers, is a bit high-strung and was anxious about what impression this wall of text would leave in the mind of the reader. After I sent her the transcript—a courtesy I don’t allow most of my interlocutors for this very reason—she sent me back a bunch of edits, some of which I’ve honored, but only for the sake of flow and clarity.
As for the rest, I told Alisha she needs to get a grip. “I think your urge to self censor is dishonest to who you are. I’ve never once heard you get shy about saying the darnedest thing,” I texted her. That’s Alisha: épater le bourgeois and then retreat. Alisha is feisty, she doesn’t pull any punches, but she isn't afraid to throw one, too. She’ll promise you $100 to edit her work and she’ll give it to you—most of the time anyway. I’d trust her with my life, but not to remember my birthday. Alisha is a fiction writer born and raised in Las Vegas. Vegas is a place for freaks and as the daughter of a psychic, Alisha fits the bill. Not her mien. She looks like a normal, pretty, big-eyed girl. But her sensibility is darker than you’d think until you learn where she’s from. Had she been from L.A., she’d be working in marketing. Thank god that isn’t the case. We’d all be all in on some stupid new water trend and we wouldn’t even know why.
Maybe I’m totally wrong about Alisha. We’ve been friends too long. I can’t get the same read I can get on someone I barely know. But here’s what I do know: Leesh sent me some text she wanted me to organically include in the interview as if she said it off the cuff. It doesn’t read like something said extemporaneously so I want you to read it here. While I wrote this intro and edited the text below, I had a cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s opus Darkness on the Edge of Town playing on repeat and when I read what she wrote below, the song “Racing in the Street” was playing. It gave the words an epic edge. I highly recommend it.
After I left for New York from Las Vegas a few years ago, I started to become really fixated on how bizarro of a city it was. Dave Hickey has a quote about Las Vegas being the perfect lens to view America. Growing up there, in a family that worked in the service industry, the glitz of the city was lost on me. Everyone seemed to be loners, drifters, grifters caught in this mundane loop. Before and after the financial crash there was this weird phenomena of wealth appropriation, this kind of shattered American Dream. Everyone was broke but decked out in luxury clothes and cars even though they just filed for bankruptcy. It was interesting observing how people try to seek fulfillment in the things they desire. When I write about it, the derelict buildings, crime, and alienation, I almost feel like it's in the lineage of Southern Gothic literature.
Read on. Alisha and I see how many times we can Ottessa Moshfegh’s name before we summon her; we talk about auto-fiction, Sparknotesing books in high school, and we don’t talk about her book.
Me: What was the last good movie you saw?
Alisha: I could name the last bad movie I saw.
Me: That’s even better. I think an important skill to be able to determine what’s good and what’s bad art. And I’d like to hear what the bad movie is and what made it bad.
Alisha: I saw The Card Counter (2021)
Me: I don’t even know what that is.
Alisha: The Paul Schrader movie.
Me: Oh right. I read about it in The New Yorker.
Alisha: I didn’t mind it while I was watching it. It was a little slow. But then, at the end—I was the one that recommended the movie —my friends were like, “Oh my god, that was so boring. I was falling asleep.” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess it was kind of boring.” There was something off about it. Should I give spoilers?
Me: I don’t care.
Alisha: OK. I’ll give a spoiler. It hints at him being a prisoner of war before he started counting cards. But at the end, when he goes to confront the officer—the Willem DaFoe character—it just cuts to a scene of them going into a room and it’s implied that they take turns using torture techniques on each other. But the camera stays in the living room so we don’t see it and it goes from night to day. He comes limping out, drenched in blood. And I’m like, “Why the fuck didn’t you show that? Why don’t you show the torture scene?” It seems like it’s building up to that.
Me: Maybe because it’s a lot more powerful to allow you to determine what type of horrible Abu Ghraib shit went on there than to actually show you what happened.
Alisha: I get that sentiment but I don’t think it worked.
Me: No?
Alisha: That is a good counterpoint, but in the viewing experience it didn’t make it stronger.
Me: [I reference Taxi Driver]
Alisha: I think a funny thing about Taxi Driver is that people New York the hell out of that “You talking to me?” line. But there’s no New York accent at all when he says it. He’s just straight up like “You talking to me?” That’s how he says it in the movie. It’s not even a New York accent at all.
Me: “Youse talkin’ to mees?” It’s probably because most people have seen a parody of that scene more times than they’ve seen the actual scene.
Alisha: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
Me: When did you see that movie?
Alisha: I saw it pretty late. Maybe a couple of years ago. When I go home for the holidays, I’ll catch up on a bunch of movies ‘cause I’m bored in the suburbs.
Me: Do you think film informs your writing at all?
Alisha: I realized recently that it didn’t. I was writing something—a poem for the zine accompanying this film festival that’s coming up at the end of October [NPCC Fest]. I submitted it to [editor] Ann [Manov] and she was like, “It has to be on the topic of film.” And I was like “Oh, OK, I’ll send you something I wrote on the topic of film.” And I’m going through my archive of things I’ve written and I’ve never written about film before unless it was in a journal. So then I was on the spot, like, “What can I write about right now?” I couldn’t think of anything. But the poem I wrote was inspired by a headline I saw about how Warner Bros. is now using this A.I. management app to determine the value of characters, to determine box office projections, so they can figure out what to greenlight. I thought that sounded really dark.
Me: This is a similar concept to the novel you’re writing, right? The A.I-ificiation of entertainment.
Alisha: The novel, I don’t want to talk too much about. I feel like it’s a bad omen to talk about something before it’s done. I don’t think anyone would steal my idea or anything. I don’t think anyone would see the vision the way I do.
Me: There are no original ideas but there are original ways to frame those ideas. I’m sure if you were bored and wanted to re-write The Grapes of Wrath, start to finish, using all the same characters, but not typing word-for-word what Steinbeck did, (I’ve never even read the book) but I’m assuming you’d come out with a completely different version of what it’s like to be poor and desolate in the Great Depression—if that’s what that book’s even about.
Alisha: I think it’s Dust Bowl. I tried to read it when I was younger because it’s my dad’s favorite book
Me: My grandma loves those books. That one and East of Eden.
Alisha: Just kidding, East of Eden is his favorite book. I dunno. I didn’t go to a very good public school.
Me: My school, we had these two teachers: Freshman and sophomore year was this woman Priscilla Adler and my junior and senior years was this guy Marc Leeds and they both had weird connections to my favorite authors. They were both really good but we didn’t read the average curriculum. At the other schools they’d read 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Frankenstein, and The Scarlet Letter. My school was like, “No, we’re not fuckin’ reading that.” We read The Kite Runner,—this one’s pretty popular—Things Fall Apart…
Alisha: Things Fall Apart is one of my favorite books.
Me: I really liked it, too. We read a lot of Shakespeare with Adler. She took a class at Penn with Philip Roth and I thought that was really fucking cool.
Alisha: That is really cool
Me: And then the other teacher, he would bring in original art from Kurt Vonnegut that Vonnegut made for him specifically. They were pen-pals.
Alisha: Nerds
Me: My teacher in high school wrote this encyclopedia about Vonnegut and Vonnegut wrote the foreword for the book. So in high school, we read three Vonnegut books, which I liked at the time, but it’s kind of crazy looking back. Like, imagine you had a Pynchon professor teaching your high school class.
Alisha: I think Vonnegut got popular again because of the Tumblr-ification of “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” [from Slaughterhouse-Five]. Didn’t it seem like there was a period in your adolescence where everyone was reading Vonnegut and you just saw that quote everywhere?
Me: Definitely on Tumblr and then the tattoo, which was hella corny.
Alisha: Why hasn’t that become a meme. I tried to make that become a meme. “Everything was based and nothing hurt.” “Everything was cringe and nothing hurt.” You could have a field day with that and I haven’t seen it.
Me: Do it and I’ll post it on the meme account.
Alisha: My meme finsta is for the real heads
Me: Now’s a good time to plug the finstas but I don’t want to be on record as running the account I run. I like the anonymity. But sorry, we’ve made this much more about me. I had a big coffee before I started and some Adderall.
Alisha: That’s my personal hell.
Me: Coffee and Adderall?
Alisha: Yeah. Anxiety attack.
Me: OK. So what are you willing to talk about on-record? You don’t want to talk about the book?
Alisha: I can talk about my short stories; I can talk about themes in my work; I can talk about music.
Me: Does music inspire your work? Do you listen to music when you write?
Alisha: Music for sure inspires my work, but I don’t listen to music while I write.
Me: What do you do when you write? What’s your setup? Are you one of those freaks who from the hours of 11-4 just sits down?
Alisha: No, I would like to develop that habit. I mostly write on my phone. I’ll write scenes while I’m walking down the street or sitting at the park or on the train. I get my best ideas when I’m not in front of a computer. It feels like too much pressure.
Me: I was talking about this with one of our KGB friends: How it’s impossible to write on the computer. At the very least, it’s impossible to write in Google Docs. Google Docs feels like you’re in front of a scroll with a fountain pen with a feathered tip. It’s so authoritative. Do you ever do pen to paper?
Alisha: I journal. Usually, I’ll sketch out a scene long-hand and then transcribe it.
Me: When you write, do you have a beginning and an end picked out and shade in the middle?
Alisha: Usually, all of my stories start with the ending.
Me: That’s pretty unique.
Alisha: Usually, I’ll get very fixated on a sentence (or two to three sentences) and it’s not like I’ll build a narrative around it. But it’ll be the first part of the story that I’ll have and I’ll write the story for those three sentences. Usually, it’s something I’ll write while I’m journaling and after I write it I’m just like, “Oh, that one hit the right notes for me.”
Me: What are these ideas that you turn into stories? Do you ever have found dialogue or found text and that becomes your starting point? Or is it all an Alisha Wexler original? An idea that pops into your head. I know you were saying that sometimes it’s a tweet and then you’re like, “This would be better in a story.”
Alisha: Yeah. That’s exactly what it is. I haven’t written anything based on found stuff. Technically, the poem I wrote for the zine was based off of a headline from The Hollywood Reporter. It says almost verbatim what the headline was in the poem but it’s been completely abstracted.
Me: I think you’re allowed to do that.
Alisha: Yeah. But I haven’t had a lot of found stuff yet. What I find very generative is reading. Usually, when I’m reading a book, I’ll find the thing I didn’t know I was looking for. I’ll be like, “Oh, fuck ya.” It could be something as simple as a piece of dialogue that reminds me of one of my characters. It’s not so much using it as a found literature but it’ll spark an idea for me. It’ll remind me of something I already had somewhere, in my brain, that I just hadn’t fully acknowledged yet if that makes sense.
Me: That makes sense. When Hachette markets your book and they’re like, “FFO” who are they gonna list? Do you know that acronym?
Alisha: No
Me: For fans of…
Alisha: For fans of?
Me: When I get records in my inbox they’ll say FFO: Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, bullshit like that.
Alisha: Oohh, for fans of, hehehe. I was trying to think of a funny answer and I couldn’t think of anything.
Me: Are you going to be called the millennial Ottessa Moshfegh?
Alisha: I have a bone to pick with that
Me: With Ottessa Moshfegh?
Alisha: No, she’s great. I love her. But I think any writer now, any woman writer, who comes out with anything that’s slightly dark or transgressive or has an unlikeable protagonist, they automatically compare her to Ottessa Moshfegh. Like Ottessa Moshfegh-meets-this. It’s just an unlikeable character in a dark story. It’s not really like Ottessa Moshfegh. I think she gets overused a lot. I would love it if Ottessa Moshfegh fans loved my work. I wouldn’t use Ottessa because I think she’s overused. By the time I put out my book, people will glaze over that comparison.
Me: So who do you want to get compared to?
Alisha: Well, you said I sound like Denis Johnson, didn’t you?
Me: I’ve never even read him but that sounds right. Wait, Denis Johnson. You’re right, I did say that. I was thinking of the gay poet from the 1980s. What’s his name?
Alisha: ‘80s? David Wojnarowicz? Did he do poetry?
Me: Yeah, for sure he did. Dennis Cooper, that’s who I was thinking of. Do you know that dude?
Alisha: I don’t know Denis Johnson or Dennis Cooper. I’m kind of a philistine, I think.
Me: That’s OK. You also have a Bret Easton Ellis thing about you. But Ottessa Moshfegh is just the body-horror version of Bret Easton Ellis. People always think Moshfegh’s thing is unlikable characters, but that’s everyone writing right now. It’s not like Ben Lerner’s characters are likable. At least not in the one I read [Leaving the Atocha Station]. I think Ottessa Moshfegh’s thing is like this weird, abject, body-horror. She’s been on record as saying she was severely bulimic. I see the thread of like she hates her body so she writes these weird affective…
Alisha: I wouldn’t say she hates her body
Me: Maybe hated her body, but has that affect thing going on.
Alisha: Maybe she didn’t personally hate her body but understood on some level what it’s like to be disgusted with one’s own body or confused by it, or maybe you’re right.
Me: Yeah.
Alisha: My characters definitely don’t hate their bodies. That hasn’t been a theme yet. No body-horror. Maybe [FFO] Leopoldine Core. I write a lot about relationships. A lot of the things I’ve written so far—most of my short stories—they’re not auto-ficiton-y but they somehow always end up with either drugs or a break-up or a desert or art as a theme and it’s a little trite now. I’m trying really hard not to write something that’s about a break-up.
Me: Yeah, but do you think Georgia O’Keeffe was like, “Fuck, I’m so trite. I did another flower painting”?
Alisha: You’re right.
Me: I wanna give you pep-talk. You gotta write what you know. It’s the Emily Dickinson thing of “Tell [all] the truth but tell it slant.” But maybe it’s more like, “Tell a lie, but tell it truthful.” That’s what I think writing is. Everyone acts like auto-fiction is this new thing whereas all fiction has always been sort of auto-fiction-y. Even Nabokov wrote things that were about a professor at an Ivy League university. It’s like, “Where did he come up with that idea?”
Alisha: I think the term auto-fiction gets overused because what my understanding of what auto-fiction is is you’re basically writing you as a character. The character is even named you. Like Marie Calloway would be auto-fiction.
Me: I don’t even know who that is.
Alisha: Or like Sheila Heti.
Me: Why do you write?
Alisha: I hate that question!
Me: Yeah, but you could just as easily be working a social media account for someone.
Alisha: Working a social media account is my idea of hell on earth
Me: What I mean is you could have an office job and be cushy but you’re deciding to dedicate yourself to this arcane art form that requires so much dedication. How do you find that dedication?
Alisha: If there’s an idea I want to work through, a moment I want to capture, or if I want to make sense of an emotion, almost always, the way I do that, is by ascribing a narrative to it and exploring it from there. Building a story around an idea or one emotion or one interaction. It kind of makes it come to life. It helps me understand things better. It helps me understand myself and the world and my friends better. It started like that. That’s why I like writing stories. It’s a human drive to want to tell stories. To be a storyteller.
Me: Isn’t that why Joan Didion said, “We tell [ourselves] stories in order to live” or whatever.
Alisha: Of course she said it much more eloquently than I did.
Me: People only know that quote because it’s the title of her book.
Alisha: Is it? I thought it was the first line of her book.
Me: Well, I guess it’s both. It’s a line from The White Album but also when they collected her nonfiction they called it We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. What would you do if it weren’t for writing? Would you become Travis Bickle?
Alisha: I’d go full fucking Joker mode because I didn’t learn how to play an instrument when I was younger. I didn’t learn to paint when I was younger.
Me: Do you think painting can offer the same kind of catharsis?
Alisha: Everyone has their own art form. I obviously would say no but who am I to say? Who’s to say writing offers people catharsis? I think writing sounds like a nightmare to a lot of artists. You sit there and you type and type and you create into a void. Whereas, if you’re painting or playing music, there’s more instant gratification with it. You’re seeing what you’re producing in real time. Writing is a slog. It’s a marathon of an art form.
Me: There’s a Balzac story about a painter who tries to make the perfect painting and he goes insane. I could kind of see how painting and writing are similar. I always think painting would be so fuckin’ easy. You just take your brush and do your fuckin’ thing. I’m sure painters think writing is so easy: “Just put the fuckin’ words down.”
Alisha: Yeah. If there was no writing, I would maybe have gone into film when I was younger.
Me: So you’re back at film, but you said film doesn’t have anything to do with your art making.
Alisha: It does in a subconscious way. I like film, but no one has inspired my subject matter. But, in terms of my own writings, I see them cinematically: I see them playing out as scenes when I’m writing them. One of my biggest problems with dialogue is that I write fucking scripts and then I have to cut it down because it doesn’t work in the novel medium.
Me: Sometimes, I think there isn’t enough dialogue in books. Maybe because I’m reading Tao Lin right now and it’s all third-person narration. There is dialogue but characters aren’t engaging with each other meaningfully. It’s more like people talking at each other.
Alisha: It’s third-person narration?
Me: The character’s name is Li. And he’s just like, “Li went to the store and did this” “Li did that” and it’s like, “But this is all about you so why don’t you just say I did this I did that?”
Alisha: I’m writing in third-person right now, too.
Me: Yeah, which I think I told you you should change.
Alisha: I shouldn’t do it?
Me: It suits certain things, of course, but that last story would benefit from being in first-person.
Alisha: It’s from a dude’s perspective so I feel weird. Maybe that’s something I need to get over.
Me: I don’t think we really choose the characters; the characters choose us, as stupid as that sounds. And I think if the character is a dude it just has to be that way. And if people can’t read books without thinking this is your transgender self then they really need to rethink their understanding of writing.
Alisha: I like writing from a guy’s perspective, personally. I don’t really believe in…I’m trying really hard not to put my foot in my mouth.
Me: Neither of us seems very relaxed.
Alisha: I just don’t want to be considered an auto-fiction writer because I don’t write auto-fiction at all. Taking inspiration from one’s life isn’t auto-fiction.
Me: I agree. I think auto-fiction is similar to how you described it before but also a little more free than the definition you gave. You don’t have to use your name. You could use a different name that represents you. Regardless, I don’t think what you do is auto-fiction. Just because it has elements of who you are in it doesn’t make it auto-fiction. It’d be fucked up and weird if you were so far removed from yourself that you only wrote about Iranian refugees or whatever. It’d be really cool for one story, but if all your stories were about that, it’d just be like, “What the fuck is going on?”
Alisha: Yeah, yeah.
Me: I feel like we need to get a little loose. Sorry if I’m dominating too much.
Alisha: You’re a little dominant of an interviewer. You interrupt a lot, but that’s OK.
Me: Hehe. We have an established friendship so it’s different to interview a friend than a total stranger.
Alisha: Right, right
Me: What phase are you on…oh, you don’t want to talk about the book?
Alisha: It’s not finished. What if I never finish it? I don’t want to get into the habit of…sorry, it’s kinda pissing me off a bit because I don’t want to talk about something incomplete. I’d be so fucking mortified if I talk about it and never finish it.
Me: Am I pissing you off?
Alisha: No, getting asked questions about it annoys me.
Me: OK, so then let’s go to “Lizard Blood”…
Alisha: I’ll say something briefly: Yeah, I’m working on a speculative fiction plot. But I don’t talk about beyond that because the thing doesn’t fucking exist yet. It’s not out there in the world.
Me: OK, well then, do you wanna talk about “Lizard Blood.”
Alisha: Sure.
Me: Remind me which one that is again, [laughs]
Alisha: That one was a flash fiction piece about a girl who lives in Arizona.
Me: That was the bathing suit one?
Alisha: Yeah, and she hangs out by the pool.
Me: There was this one image in it that stuck with me: the wet bathing. It’s tactile. I can still think about the prune-y, wet feeling of putting on the same bathing suit day after day. Is that something you pulled from your own life?
Alisha: Yes. There is that distinct feeling of going swimming in the morning and then going swimming at night. The second time, the wet bathing suit is its own particular feeling of physical cringe. It’s interesting how that line sticks out to people I talk to because it was one of the parts of the story I didn’t really think twice about. It’s interesting that that resonated with people.
Me: I think people respond a lot to the five senses.
Alisha: I almost wish I didn’t call it “Lizard Blood” and I called it something else because people refer to it as the bathing suit story.
Me: Maybe in your greatest hits collection you can call it “Lizard Blood (The Bathing Suit Story).”
Alisha: I love that. I love when artists so that. Or when musicians do it.
Me: How much editing does your stuff go through? You were saying, in a source I’ll not disclose, that you go line by line. Are you really critical of your own writing?
Alisha: It depends. Something like a short “Lizard Blood,” which is non-conventional in structure, that didn’t go through any edits. Jen [Greidus] at X-R-A-Y cleaned it up a bit. That was straight from my mouth to God’s ears. That was my journal into the word processor. But in my short stories that have a narrative and a plot and a subplot and actual character development, that’ll go through three rounds of edits. The first draft is a vomit of my id. I wear my heart on my sleeve in a bit of a cringe-y way. I’ll clean that up and take out the cliches. Then it’ll be a draft and I’ll send it off to my writing group. They’ll edit it and point out what’s funky about the structure and what I need to lean into character-wise. They’ll point out if a subplot is working or not working and why. Then I’ll go in and change the structure and then the last thing will be like my friends will line-edit a bit.
Me: You don’t accept all your edits, you said. How do you know when something is right and when something is wrong?
Alisha: You just have to know what feels good to you. What do you love and you don’t want to sacrifice? You know your story better than anyone else knows it. You have to be confident and know you can always make the edit later.
Me: Are you fastidious? Do you go back and change things after they’ve been published?
Alisha: Yeah. If I read something that’s published right now, there’s a 99 percent chance I’m cringing as I read it. Like, “I wrote that? Eww. Why did I describe it like that? That’s a cliche phrase.” I think everyone’s hard on themselves, though. But if I read something that’s already published, for a reading, I’ll edit it so that it sounds better to read out loud.
Me: Is that because you’ve come up with a better way of what you want to say or because there’s a difference between written and aural…
Alisha: A little bit of both. It starts off because there’s a difference between written and spoken word, but as I’m doing it I’m like, “Wait, I know a better way to describe this.”
Me: Are you inspired by your peers?
Alisha: Yeah, absolutely.
Me: What do you think is the art form that most inspires you? Is it other writing?
Alisha: Probably music in an elusive way. Not one that I could point to specific aspects of it like, “Oh this lyric inspired this theme in this story.” It’s more like music as an art form feels like a transfer of energy than it is something you consciously think about and digest. Whereas writing, you have to think about it first while music just hits you. Good art feels like a vibration that for whatever reason resonates at the same frequency as something in yourself and when that happens, in these moments of being moved, you’re more vulnerable to your own senses and your own thoughts. It makes you introspective. And in that sense, you start making connections and you find the thing you didn’t know you were looking for. The idea you didn’t know you were looking for in yourself.
Me: And you’re saying that happens in music or in all art forms?
Alisha: It happens in all art forms. It’s just more immediate in music. When I say other work inspires mine, it happens in an abstract way. It hits the right note for me—not to use that fuckin’ music metaphor again—it hits some weird note where it unlocks a different part of myself. It’s not the answer but it’s like the key to door the answer is behind.
Me: I get where you’re saying. When I’m writing poetry it’s almost like there’s this ancient saint who’s whispering in my ear one word so I can get started. But, I have to pick up the pen and be present in order to hear what the saint has to say. Otherwise, I would just have the saint write it all.
Alisha: Ooh, I just thought of a really good comparison. It’s like when you’re in conversation with someone—good conversation—and someone says something that’s really inspiring or that really interests you, but it reminds you of something you think is a good story so instead of asking them a question, you tell your story. Kind of like in this interview. Like when you interrupt, it’s because they triggered an idea in your mind and that makes you wanna tell it. That’s how it is when I read other books. I’m like, “Oh yeah, right! So anyway, this happened to me…”
Me: Do you ever put down the book and go immediately to your notepad or computer? Are you ever in the middle of a sentence?
Alisha: Not recently. It is nice when that happens: When you’re reading something so good that it makes you want to write.
Me: Can you think of any author who has taught you a fundamental lesson just from reading them?
Alisha: Style-wise, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays really informed how I write on a sentence level. This is embarrassing but I heard Bret Easton Ellis say he used to do these exercises where he developed his style by trying to copy her. I was like “whoa same.” I’ve totally done that too, before I even knew that about him doing that. But yeah, Play It as It Lays was one of the first books I read where the voice sounded really similar to my own thought process.
Me: Do you prefer economy to poetic writing?
Alisha: Yeah. I think so. I’m not particularly into flowery or bombastic language. I’m trying to get more into poetry in general, but I haven’t had my phase with it, I guess. This is probably a very basic take, but if I hear good lines, I’d rather just hear them as lyrics to a song.
Me: Yeah?
Alisha: Something with poetry doesn’t hit the right note for me. Maybe I haven’t had my poetry phase yet. I haven’t found the poets who resonate with me most. I write poetry. I write prose poems. And I love my friend’s poetry [Ed: Good save here, Leesh.]
Me: What type of reader were you as a child? Were you one of those kids who read the book in class or did you Sparknotes that shit?
Alisha: Both. The books I wasn’t into, I Sparknoted the hell out of. Man, as a writer, I want so badly to say, “I loved reading. I was always getting lost in books.” But the truth was, I wasn’t. English and literature were my best subjects, and I did read most things in school with a lot of interest. We had to read this book called The Poisonwood Bible, I Sparknoted that. I Sparknoted a lot as additional research. I would read it, then Sparknotes.
Me: That just means you’re an intelligent reader. An intelligent reader would want more from the text.
Alisha: Yeah, especially if it’s a book like 100 Years of Solitude where there’s 26 characters and they all have the same name.
Me: Did you read that for school?
Alisha: I did. In high school.
Me: That’s fun. I read it on a cruise ship.
Alisha: You did? Did you like it? I loved it
Me: I did until the last fourth of the book. I just started getting frustrated with how circular its plot is. I think I was really keeping up with who was whom at the beginning. By the end I was like, “Another one of these fuckers with the exact same name? I can’t do it.”
Alisha: I know. I know. I was a pretty dark kid so I really liked Russian literature. Crime & Punishment was extremely my shit. And I think I was the only one in class who actually read the book.
Me: This makes so much sense. That you would read that book and like it. I’m just picturing you reading the scene where he dreams about the horse being whipped to death and being like, “I could write, too.”
Alisha: The horse kind of made me sad. Definitely when he bludgeons the lady, I was like [shudders]. Violence titillates me in books
Me: There’s something slightly violent about your writing. It’s dark for sure. I don’t think anyone ever said Crime & Punishment was an uplifting book.
Alisha: Though there isn’t outright violence, I think “Lizard Blood” is an extremely violent piece of fiction.
Me: In what way?
Alisha: It really leans into the setting of the desert and desert imagery. The desert is a violent place. The weather’s really harsh, the climate is harsh, the wildlife is harsh. Now, on a purely socioeconomic level, living there is harsh. If you are lower middle class and live in the suburbs and were affected by the housing bubble and the Stockmarket crash, it feels very much—I hate to make this obvious cliche comparison—but you know that Baudelaire line that’s like, “an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui.” [Ed: It’s desert of boredom.] That’s what a Southwest suburban town feels like. Especially Las Vegas. There’s such horror to living in those places where everything is closed and overrun by animals and all the houses are abandoned. You see roadkill everywhere and coyotes just eating it when you walk out your door. It’s just a brutal place. If you’re affected by drug addiction on top of it, too, that’s more violence.