Lisa Teasley is the author of the award-winning story collection Glow in the Dark and the critically acclaimed novels, Dive and Heat Signature (Bloomsbury). Her writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Arabic. Lisa Teasley’s stories and essays have been much anthologized including in the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, 2023, and Europa Editions The Passenger: California, 2022. She is the writer and presenter of the BBC television documentary “High School Prom” and is currently writing a commissioned opera libretto.
Lisa Teasley will be in conversation with Steven Reigns as part of City Lights’s virtual event series on Monday, October 2, 2023 at 6:00pm PST to celebrate the publication of her new book FLUID: Stories, published by Cune Press. Register here!
Where are you writing to us from?
Los Angeles.
What is bringing you joy right now, personally/artistically/habitually?
Hiking in the mountains, dancing anywhere, and watching every sunset from wherever I am.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
For this book specifically there isn’t a way to pin down influences since the stories in Fluid are about very diverse characters in varying situations, some of them extreme, and many of the stories were written during the past two years, while others during the past ten. Some of my all-time favorite writers and books are 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima, The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, Yes by Thomas Bernhard, Struggle #2 by Karl Ove Knausgård, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, Sula by Toni Morrison, and 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
What books are you reading right now and would you recommend any to others?
Right now, I’m reading Sirius by Olaf Stapledon and Philomath by Robert Edward Grant and Talal Ghannam (I tend to read two books at a time only if they are entirely different genres). I was late to the On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous party but that was the last book I finished where I just laid there and could only utter, “Wow.”
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
My bookstore would be in Big Sur—not intended to be in competition with the Henry Miller Library—it would be called “The Art of Fiction” and its bestseller would be The Junk Gate.
