Leigh Lucas: On Finding Humor in Grief, Riding the Residency Wave, How Mothering Informs Writing, and Her Debut Chapbook, 'Landsickness'

Leigh Lucas drinks whole milk. I know this because when we met up a few years ago at Literati Cafe in Santa Monica, she ordered her matcha latte with whole milk. I think I might have let out an actual gasp. As someone who is lactose intolerant and a self-proclaimed oat milk connoisseur, I was shook. She was also holding an absolutely adorable and perfect French Bulldog, who, if I remember correctly, was wearing a sweater. All these attributes solidified Leigh’s confidence.

But this is the kind of person Leigh is. She’s bold. She’s a poetic daredevil. And she brings this tenacious attitude to the page. In the wake of an ex-boyfriend’s suicide, Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) navigates what it means to start anew. The title itself gave me lots to think about. As someone who suffers from seasickness, I understand the unease and dizziness, the loss of color in the face, a whole body nausea that lingers long after returning to land. And so “landsickness” must mean that one can experience this debilitating state not only on a boat in the middle of the ocean. It’s the feeling we endure when we grieve.

The speaker guides us through her quotidian slog in the aftermath of the loss and grapples with what it means to be alive while the person you loved so dearly is no longer alive. She explores the scientific study of water and how this hydrology might help her reconstruct memories of the past and help process her mourning. Yet, there is a duality in the book of emotional responses to the loss. The speaker fluctuates between utter devastation and comedy. 

Landsickness is an elegy that speaks for all our ugly emotional passions—they are intense, unavoidable, laughable, and perhaps most of all, they are precious.

Brittany Ackerman: Hi friend! This is such an exciting moment in time. This chapbook is such a beautiful feat. It feels so good to hold it in my hands. I want to start with a blurb I found for your book by poet and author, Matthew Olzmann:

“Submerge in grief and risk being sunk by grief,” writes Leigh Lucas, and Landsickness is a book that emerges from that submersion, from that sinking. This is a haunting and crushing work of Art that tries to make sense of being alive and living with loss. It is its own kind of submersion, delivered by an author who can skillfully guide the reader back to the surface.”

He’s on the mark with the book’s throughline of submerging. There is huge conflict over if one must fully process a trauma before they attempt to turn it into art, or whether it can be cathartic and psychologically beneficial to write through trauma while it’s still raw. What was the writing process for Landsickness, since I know how heartbreaking and personal this tragedy is for you?

Leigh Lucas: I wrote badly for the duration of grad school right up until the very end, when we were supposed to be revising for our thesis. That’s when this book really started. My supervisor, my friend and hero Alan Shapiro, saw the early seeds of these poems and said, keep going. They were new for me—largely unlineated, conversational, spare pieces that weren’t trying to capture the entire experience of grief or the entirety of the person I had lost—both impossible tasks—but instead focused on little oddball moments, followed unexpected tangents, and recorded absurd snapshots from the everyday life of someone grieving. They had that levity that keeps a reader (and the writer) from being submerged in a tragic story. 

BA: I remember finding out that you’d won the Kurt Brown award in 2020 for 10 of her poems (four of which are in Landsickness) and thought, “Oh my God, someone I know actually won that award!” I never recognized the names of AWP award winners. To me, they seemed like fairies and dragons. It felt like realizing I was friends with a mystical creature! 

My shock and awe aside, what did winning this award mean for you? Did it elevate your writing career in any way, or push or motivate you? I think writers are often in the dark about literary awards and conferences and all that hoopla, so I wonder if you could share your experience with us?

LL: While it’s hard to say if that award did much directly in regards to my writing career, (though I hope it did!) it was definitely a confidence boost for me. It gave me a little something to add to my writers’ bio, and it was a nudge to send my work out more widely. What stands out the most though was how much fun it was to share the news with my family and friends—this was before I had published much or had much to show for all the time I’d been spending writing. My family was so cute and went over the top for it—my brother and sister-in-law sent champagne and my husband came home with some guy he was at a lunch meeting with and the three of us drank it. That day will always be special to me. 

BA: And parallel to the awards are the workshops and residencies. Funny story, you and I both attended the same residency in Northern California and both had exceptionally wild experiences despite our stays being years apart. LOL. But I know you’ve had lots of success with having time away to write.

What’s been your favorite residency? How do you make use of the time?

LL: Yes we did! Wow, that was an absolutely wild residency. I think we would’ve had a very different experience had we been together. Maybe one day we’ll go back and redeem ourselves.

I’m a bit of a residency rat, or at least I was before having a kid, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. I think it’s got to my friend and fellow poet Kimberly Kruge’s residency, Casa Comala, in Jalisco, Mexico. It’s the only one I’ve been back to multiple times (four in fact) and it’s such a thoughtfully run, boutique-y type residency. I sleep well and eat well (Kimberly is a vegan chef!) and my phone never really works, which might be the best part of it all. 

Regardless of the residency, I always fall into the trap of making outrageously ambitious goals before I arrive, then spending the first half fretting over the fact that I’m not getting enough done. But once I relax, I find them to be a great environment to take creative risks. When I have a lot of time to write, it’s easier to be playful—I can spend the morning experimenting with new ideas and in the afternoon editing existing work. No matter what comes of the new work, I’ve still had a great writing day.  

BA: And now you’re a mom! (Leigh and I both have daughters and they are about a year and a half apart!) I love to chat with other mom-writers because I think that after giving birth, even if you’re not a writer or an artist, you are finding, building, crafting, coming into a new identity. But especially as a writer, we are figuring out a new rhythm and relationship to our work.

How has becoming a mother informed your writing? And how has your writing colored your mothering?

LL: Pregnancy was a very creative and productive time for me, but postpartum was…not. I wish I wouldn’t have worried so much that I wasn’t writing during those first six months because eventually I found my rhythm, and becoming a parent has meant so much more to think and write about. 

Very literally, becoming a mother has inspired my latest writing project—a piece that explores pregnancy and anticipating motherhood (among other topics). This project is still in its earliest stages and will likely shapeshift many times, but regardless of what it becomes, it’s certainly not like anything I have written before.

And how has writing colored my mothering? I hope that it’s made me more patient, curious, and observant. It’s definitely given me some practice with that feeling of—oh my god, what if I don’t know what I’m doing? Becoming a mother is such a complex thing to describe, but above all it has been such a joy-filled experience for me. Kids live every day like artists should. Sometimes Penelope will point and shout, “TREE!” at a tree we’ve passed on our morning walk every day for a year and a half and we’ll have to stop and look at it for a while. Or she’ll make me get up close with her to say hi to a flower. She also loves to laugh, and what’s better than hanging out with someone who thinks even your stupidest jokes are funny.  

BA: “There are so many people to hate, so I keep things simple and hate everyone.”

“I take it [his body] for a spin around the block, feed it strawberries, test out a big blasting fart.”

While the book leans into darkness and despair, there is also a light touch of humor. I wonder how this felt as you wrote? Were you aware of the comedy and tragedy blending? Or was it a surprise to see certain emotions pop up during your writing?

LL: Whenever I’ve been asked to do one of those core values exercises, I always end up with Humor as one of mine, even when they ask you to wean it down to just a few. Really? Not Benevolence? Tenacity? Humility? (In case you’re wondering, this makes me particularly unattractive to an employer, but at least I’m being Honest. (Another enviable core value, but not one of mine.))

I understand this better now. Humor is a way of letting the light in. It’s also a way of insisting joy be a part of everyday life. When I was grieving, humor was much more than a coping mechanism, it was how I was able to process what had happened and eventually make peace with it. Humor is a great lens through which to see the world and still love the world in all its absurdity. 

Honestly, I felt mostly sad during the process of actually sitting down and writing this book, and I worried it was prolonging my “acute grief,” but I’ll never really know. Still, any moments of levity and humor I could capture on the page, I made sure to. So much of writing poems is choosing what to include, and as I tried to honor the life and loss of someone who was deeply funny, it seemed like a direction I could take.

BA: The mission statement of Tupelo Press reads : “What we look for is a blend of urgency of language, imagination, distinctiveness, and craft. What we produce and how we produce it—from design to printing to paper quality—honors the writing in books which boast the uniquely sensual look and feel of a Tupelo Press book.”

Landsickness feels like a perfect fit here, as the book is certainly all of those things—urgent, distinct, masterly crafted, etc. How has your experience been working with Tupelo Press? What’s been your biggest joy in the process?

LL: Thank you so much. And yes, what a beautiful mission statement. 

Working with Tupelo Press has been wonderful. I got to meet and hang with a few members of their team at AWP this year, and I’ve felt very grateful to join their small but very star-studded roster of writers. Looking behind the curtain I’ve been amazed to see how small these small presses really are—they might list twenty-plus people on the team page, but in my experience, it’s more like three or four dedicated people who help usher your book from slushpile to publication and beyond. 

BA: I once went to a very strange poetry reading back in Los Angeles where during the Q&A, someone in the crowd asked the poet, “What’s the difference between a poet and a poem?” This person was very serious about their question, which also sort of felt like a riddle. I wondered if the person was okay.

But, since you’re a poet, and a damn good one, let’s see if you might know the answer: What’s the difference between a poet and a poem?

LL: One makes its parent proud! (Jk my parents are the best. Shoutout Jill and Bill!)

Leigh Lucas is the author of LANDSICKNESS (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected by Chen Chen for the Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. She has been awarded residencies at Tin House, Community of Writers, and Sewanee, and has been recognized with the San Francisco Poetry Prize, AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, as well as with a Best New Poet nomination, Best of Net nomination, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Leigh’s poems can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poet Lore, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives in San Francisco with her family.