Ask the Author: Lisa Knopp
Answered Questions (4)
Lisa Knopp
I have little interest in fictional worlds. My choice would be to follow John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley on their journey around the United States in the late summer and fall of 1960. This was a time when our nation was on the cusp of so much, such as the Civil Rights movement, a time when the interstate system was still new and hadn't yet completed it's transformation of road travel, a time before 24-hour cable news, a time before . . . (Travels with Charley)
Lisa Knopp
I'm working on two books. One is a collection of autobiographical essays focused on midlife. It's called Like Salt or Love: Essays on Leaving Home. Many of these essays have been published or are forthcoming in Georgia Review, Seneca Review, Crab Orchard Review, Brevity, Shadowbox, Gettysburg Review, Rock and Sling, and others. The other book is about a local murder that raises many questions about the lack of mental health treatment for incarcerated people. It's hard subject matter to be immersed in, but it's also a subject that could help bring about change.
Lisa Knopp
Develop a writing schedule and stick to it. The muse will visit if she knows when and where to find you.
Read voraciously and promiscuously. Read like a writer, always trying to figure out why an author made the choices that s/he did and which ones you want to try in your own writing.
Read voraciously and promiscuously. Read like a writer, always trying to figure out why an author made the choices that s/he did and which ones you want to try in your own writing.
Lisa Knopp
I never thought that I would write about my disordered eating. In fact, I’d all but forgotten about the first two episodes (at fifteen I probably had anorexia nervosa; in my mid-twenties I feared that my food might be poisoned and ate only under tightly controlled circumstances). Certainly, all of that was far behind me and had no effect on my present life – or so I believed. Yet in 2011, I again found myself sad and anxious. Once again, I was severely restricting what I ate and quickly losing weight. I was thrilled, embarrassed, and confounded by this.
In 2014 while I was working on Like Salt or Love, a collection of personal essays, I decided to write about my three episodes of restrictive eating and include that essay in my collection. My plan was to tell just a little bit about what had happened to me and a lot about the historical, cultural, economic, and spiritual context in which it had occurred. But as I went deeper and deeper into the three bouts of my malady and learned about eating disorders among older women, “Bread,” the essay, kept growing and growing -- 15, 20, 30, 35 pages. What I hadn’t expected was how satisfying it would be to excavate those experiences and to construct a story of my life as seen through the lens or filter of my relationship with food.
One of the first readers of “Bread” suggested that I unpack the essay and make it into a book. I gasped at the very thought, because I knew that a book, a memoir, of sorts, would call for even more personal revelation. Also, many of the illness narratives with which I was familiar seemed self-indulgent and unimaginative. I didn’t want to write something that would be classified as “sick lit.”
But I was so energized by this project that I dove in. I broke the essay version of “Bread” into chapters, which meant that I already had a good start on each of them in terms of research and personal story. I researched and drafted the booklength version of Bread, in about six months, though for the next year and a half, I kept revising.
In 2014 while I was working on Like Salt or Love, a collection of personal essays, I decided to write about my three episodes of restrictive eating and include that essay in my collection. My plan was to tell just a little bit about what had happened to me and a lot about the historical, cultural, economic, and spiritual context in which it had occurred. But as I went deeper and deeper into the three bouts of my malady and learned about eating disorders among older women, “Bread,” the essay, kept growing and growing -- 15, 20, 30, 35 pages. What I hadn’t expected was how satisfying it would be to excavate those experiences and to construct a story of my life as seen through the lens or filter of my relationship with food.
One of the first readers of “Bread” suggested that I unpack the essay and make it into a book. I gasped at the very thought, because I knew that a book, a memoir, of sorts, would call for even more personal revelation. Also, many of the illness narratives with which I was familiar seemed self-indulgent and unimaginative. I didn’t want to write something that would be classified as “sick lit.”
But I was so energized by this project that I dove in. I broke the essay version of “Bread” into chapters, which meant that I already had a good start on each of them in terms of research and personal story. I researched and drafted the booklength version of Bread, in about six months, though for the next year and a half, I kept revising.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more