Maryann Lesert
Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press, 2009), featured an astrophysicist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Before novels, Maryann wrote plays, including three full-lengths, five one-acts, and collaborations with a memoirist and a local symphony. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she teaches writing, enjoys time in the natural world (shared with family and friends), and writes by the big lake.
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
The folk genre, with its tendency toward environmentally and socially conscious lyrics, has always been a part of the environmental movement, and because I had a family member who started a career in music in the late 1960s and 70s, I grew up hearing activist singers and rock bands. From Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Me, the Ecology” to Neil Young and The Clash and later REM and Liz Phair and Pearl Jam (so many artists I could name), I’ve always appreciated the way music is able to shift the story of culture while we dance and sing and sometimes shout along.
I don’t listen to music while I write, but I often play classical or instrumental music when I read and grade student work. (I’m an English professor.) The music keeps my body relaxed and helps me forget about time.
Favorite non-reading activity?
Hiking, especially hiking in the winter. I love the hush that falls over the forest with a good snow, how the shapes and sounds and movements of the trees become prominent in the stillness, how the snow brightens up our Michigan winters. When the moon is bright, I love hiking at night with the snow topped in moonlight’s silver-blues.
Growing up in Michigan, I also have an affinity for shorelines – for any place where water and land meet. I love to swim in the big lakes, even when the cold deep waters of the Great Lakes take half the summer to warm above 65 degrees. Sixty and above, and I’m in.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
The more time I spend in the natural world, the more interested I have become in geology. The creative forces of Earth are quite amazing, even in the patterns and formations of rock they leave behind. Like my Land Marks narrator, Rebecca, I pick up stones.
During my “boots on well sites” research phase, when I visited active frack well sites deep in the state forests, it was impossible to escape the brutality of drilling and fracking. It is not an exaggeration when I describe the screech of the drill rig as “biting into brain and bone.”
When you study geology and hydrology, when you marvel at the relationships between rock and water, it is difficult to handle the dissonance that occurs when you understand that fracking violates the geological record of life below us.
On a brighter note, I have a friend and coworker (a professor) who is a volcanologist, a geologist who specializes in studying volcanoes. I admit to feeling quite jealous when she visits my classes and shows images of her studying an active volcano. If given the opportunity, I just might trade in my keyboard for a pair of those non-melting boots and go walking on lava with her.
What’s the difference (at least for you) between being a writer and being an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
For me, writing is the quiet, internal, imaginative part of creating. When I write, I often begin with a cup of coffee and an open journal and I listen: to thoughts, to characters, to the birds moving about the trees. I don’t put any productivity demands on my writing mornings. Instead, I enjoy being present. There’s something incredibly special, to me, about free time.
At some point, when I feel ready to work on a particular passage or a scene, I move to the computer. Writing time, for me, is just as much about space as it is about the clock. If I feel free to sink into this imaginative state and listen, if I am free from interruptions, the writing flows.
Being an author, for me, is about outward time: about teaching, about querying agents and editors, about making potential readers aware of a new novel and upcoming events.
The best, in-between spot is doing a reading. I love sharing work with readers!
Except for a public reading, the roles of writer and author don’t usually mesh well for me, so I try to commit large blocks of time to each role.
One thing I don’t do well is turn “inward” after I’ve spent time in the “outward” author role. So, if I’m splitting time between worlds, writing time comes first.
I guess you could say I’m not a good multi-tasker!
What do you worry about?
As someone who has a deep connection to the natural world, it is difficult not to worry about what climate change could mean to our future. So, what brings me great joy and what causes me great worry are often one in the same: how the more-than-human world will respond to climate change and how we humans will respond to a changing Earth and each other.
