Lisa Knopp

Lisa Knopp is the author of seven books of creative nonfiction including Bread: A Memoir of Hunger and What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte. Her essays have appeared in the best journals including Georgia Review, Seneca Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Brevity. Knopp is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She lives in Lincoln.

Twitter: @Lisa_Knopp

Is there a work of art that you love? Why? Have you ever visited it in person? 

When I turned a corner in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in PS 1 several years ago, I found myself facing the life-sized image of a naked, elderly woman with a horrified expression on her face. I gasped! More shocking than her loose, salmon pink and yellow flesh is that she holds a black pistol in each hand. She aims one at me and the other at her left temple. Du, Oder Ich? (You or Me?) is the title of this 2005 self-portrait by the Austrian artist, Maria Lassnig (1919-2014). Then, I wondered if something happened to this woman that she found so unbearable that she was willing to commit homicide or suicide in response. Or perhaps she was an exhibitionist. Or perhaps she was bluffing.  

Since then, I’ve read everything I could find on Lassnig and have familiarized myself with many of her paintings and films. While I can’t say that I love her work, I can say that I’ve always found it provocative. And, too, I admire Lassnig’s values -- her artistic freedom, her audacity, her persistence even though she didn’t receive the interest or support she deserved until very late in her life. Maria Lassnig inspires and strengthens me.  

Is there another profession you would like to try? 

I’ve long dreamed about becoming an energy healer so that I can help people to heal. Recently, I completed training to be a Reiki practitioner. Now, I’m readying myself to make the leap into my own practice. 

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long? 

I suppose that I collect “lost words” – old words that people don’t use anymore. One of my favorites, one that I use with frequency, is “velleity.” “Velle” is Latin for “to will, to wish, to be willing.” “Velleity” means a wish or an inclination that isn’t strong enough to nudge or push one into action. Velleity is the weakest form of volition, an indolent, lazy, decaffeinated form of desire. It’s an impulse or inclination that hasn’t ripened into intent, let alone action. An “incomplete willing” is how the theologian Thomas Aquinas described it. The paralysis of velleity might be caused by self-doubt, laziness, ennui, angst, or fear of commitment, consequences, or regret.  

I found this wonderfully useful word last November when I was flipping through a copy of Simon Hertnon’s Endangered Words: A Collection of Rare Gems for Book Lovers at the public library. The entry for “velleity” jumped off the page. “I cannot imagine there are too many other English words,” Hertnon wrote, “that so accurately describe such a pervasive condition.” Indeed, it was just the word I needed to describe a state that, for better or worse, I so often find myself in.  

Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?

Oh, glorious potatoes! Baked or boiled or fried or mashed or chunked into soup or a curry. With their white, yellow, or purple-blue “meat,” their thick or thin skins, their eyes or eyelessness, their varying levels of starch content and moisture levels, and their different sizes – petite, fingerling, russets as big as your head -- they’re as diverse as humankind. Oh, glorious potatoes! 

I’m sure that there’s a neuropsychopharmacological explanation for why I turn to potatoes for comfort. But the weightier reason is clear to me when I flip through the crusty pages of my mother’s Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. There I’m reminded of the various ways in which she prepared my favorite food: Scalloped Potato Bake, Creamed Peas and New Potatoes, Parsleyed New Potatoes, Baked, Twice-baked, Potato Salads (German, Potluck, and Sour-cream), Potato Patties, Potato Soup.  

But I’m a simple woman, and I’m not a very good cook. So, number one in my hierarchy of potato dishes is the humble baked potato. Just the thought of the earthy flavor, the chewy, dark brown, netted skin, the dry, fluffy texture of a high-starch Russet potato eases my worries and takes me home.  

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

Unfortunately, I don’t speak or understand a language other than English. But I have the privilege of tutoring adult English Language Learners through a local literacy program. While working with people for whom their first language is Bosnian or Kurdish or Spanish or Japanese or Khmer, I’ve come to more deeply understand and appreciate my own language. I especially love explaining American English idioms and metaphors to my students and listening to them explain what they see or are puzzled or delighted by in those set phrases and figures of speech and what they have in their own language that is comparable.