Lily Lady
Lily Lady is a New York based writer.
They run a reading series.
They’ve published 3 books.
Avery Nowicki:Where are you from?
Lily Lady:From New York, I grew up in Manhattan, and Brooklyn.
I’ve always written and been very moody, so that lent itself well to being a writer. But I went super left in my schooling, in terms of this trajectory. I never studied creative writing, poetry, or anything in that regard. I followed a difficult humanities background—history. I’ve really deviated from that. I’m so grateful that I have, because, I think a lot of what I was doing was sheltering in academia because I was too scared to be creative, even though I wanted to.
I started going to readings at KGB Bar (85 E 4th St) and hosting my own reading series.
Avery Nowicki: Where is that now, are you still running the reading series?
Lily Lady: Now, I run a monthly reading series at Honey’s in Bushwick (93 Scott Ave, Brooklyn). It floats on a Monday every month, I’ve been doing it for two years, they’re so incredible there. I’m starting another next month atBETTY on the Lower East Side (193 Henry St), so I’ll have a Brooklyn one, and a Manhattan one, that’s exciting.
Avery Nowicki: Do you find a similar crowd at each event or a fresh mix every night?
Lily Lady: It really depends on the lineup.
It often depends on who’s coming to see who. I try to have diversity in lineups. I don’t typically recycle people. I try to bring in people who don’t identify as writers or poets, as I find that often yields a really refreshing and unexpected performance. graffiti artists, magazine editors, those who haven't written their own work yet, I push them to take an anecdote from their lives or read a poem they wrote in high school.
Avery Nowicki: I’d like to close read some of your work.
For 'Odd Lots' the following line stuck with me: “playing the role / doing the bit. What do drugstore plastic nails say about human nature?” Could you expand on this line?
Lily Lady: I’m always interested in how our external environment shapes our desires.
There’s this concept called mimetic desire, it’s about how the things we consume and the things we see, reflexively develop our desire. I noticed that when I’m working or presenting in a certain way, and I have these little plastic objects glued to the top of my nails, I become more of an object of desire. I find that radically arbitrary, and fascinating. Like everything else, there’s an evolutionary component to that and a biological bla bla blah but mostly, these markers that we ascribe to be desirous become so morphed. Ultimately they are passing trends, we can see it with filler, or certain ways to present one’s face which involve body modification, it is culturally contingent. I try to be playful in my writing about the ways I become more desirous, or adopt falsities into my identity.
Avery Nowicki: Do you feel that writing about those topics has impacted your relationship with femininity, and relationship with artificial beauty standards?
Lily Lady: I think that, when I am my most honest —when I am writing, it feels a little raw. I’ve considered writing more about age, and age-play in sexual encounters. It is something I am avoidant on, therefore I know it’ll yield some cool poems. At a reading, the thing that makes it different is the corporeality of the performance. You can look at the author, what they say is mediated through their presence. I find that when I am at a reading, I’d rather read something that engages with myself as a physical object rather than something off the page that may work better there.
Avery Nowicki: I’d like to look at December, New York1. First of all, I’ve been tempted to ask if there really is a Lisa Frank© pocket knife? That..that’s not real, is it?
Lily Lady: Oh my god, somewhere in the deep recesses of Ebay I found her.
Avery Nowicki: That’s real! Was it-
Lily Lady: Yeah, you can find anything on the internet.
Avery Nowicki: For December, New York, you quote Walt Whitman directly after the lines: “In the Dekalb Airbnb, Dejan says you're so good [...] Adultery, the keeper”. That switch felt particularly interesting. Do you find that you tend to do this often in your writing— where you create a contemporary piece, cut with concrete classic poets?
Lily Lady: I like that, and I tend to enjoy using what I am consuming in terms of literature. I often toggle between fiction and non-fiction. When I write poems for readings, those that come the most naturally are from picking up things that are happening, combined with things I am reading. That kind of intertextuality is nice, to bring an incredible writer like Whitman and to have it be contextualized through hypermodernity. So much of art is creative stealing. Finding a way to incorporate other people’s words in your words is something that’s been done since the dawn of time.
Avery Nowicki: It reminds me of these universal truths we may feel as female writers. The act of stepping into the role of the modern internet woman day-to-day, and then when working in classical writing, you are pushing that form of yourself away.
As you didn’t study contemporary poetry, did you feel a pull against the internet feminine when beginning as a poet and instead strive for classical—often described as “serious” poetry with modern references?
Lily Lady: That’s interesting, when I started writing poetry I was always very skeptical of the thinly veiled memoir and abundant referencing of the ‘I’. I was cynical of naval gazing and autofiction. Though, what we are resentful of is often really what we want to do ourselves. Eventually, I just leaned into that.
That being said - I do find a lot of autofiction to be self-indulgent. For a poem to be successful, it doesn’t have to do with whether it uses ‘I’ or not, it has to transcend transcription and become craft. The act of transcribing a life - unless it is an intentional genre, that’s not..I don’t think that’s art. You can make memoir in poetry elevated, but you have to move slow enough to think about the words, and to bring gravity to the subject in a way that’s using language and that is ultimately about language.
Originally, I really was skeptical of a lot of what I do now.
Avery Nowicki: Do you feel that the ‘I’ in your work is a direct representation of yourself?
Lily Lady: I feel I am writing a character around the ‘I’ in my life. Every version that I am in relation to another is fiction.
I’m not an authentic person in relation to other people. I don’t believe in that. Everyone is presenting a version of themselves. It can be done in an authentic mode, but it is still not a direct reflection of our ultimate self. That’s more ontological but I do think that when I write in the ‘I’, often I am trying to tease out the really unlikeable, you know, unpalatable of the ‘I’ in my own life. I think it’s interesting to test an audience, people’s appetite for unlikeability is concerningly low. Generally, people are not necessarily able to separate the art from the artist. This is why in school, I found the very few creative writing classes I took to be infuriating. Creating an unlikeable narrator is valuable, it is an act of self-investigation. Creating an interesting, superego narrator cannot do this.
Avery Nowicki: I’d also been curious about the Office Magazine article. How much truth exists behind the picture painted of the New York literary scene, does it feel accurate to your experience?
Lily Lady:Mm, yeah I think that’s a good question. It felt very true to Sammy [Loren]’s experience.
I think he did a really fun job in taking us through a scene. These micro-scenes are really funny. They become a world into themselves, what can feel really niche, takes on these gargantuan proportions in one’s life when they’re steeped in it. It’s funny. I think that speaks to existing in New York. The social milieu that one finds oneself in feels like the only thing, and then you go ten blocks away, enter a club and you don’t know anyone around. It’s so humbling. There’s just 100,000,000 scenes for every 1 block radius.
Avery Nowicki: What’s next for you?
Lily Lady: I’m starting a new reading series, and I really want to differentiate it from the Brooklyn one. It’s been about a year since I've been bi-coastal, living between New York and LA so I’m going to keep that up and sleep as much as I can. I’ve got a book coming out through Far West Press which will be out sometime in the early spring. They’re a press doing a lot of really amazing things, they’ve published a bunch of cool heads so I feel really grateful to be part of their upcoming new authors.
*Publications Mentioned
