The Questionnaire: Lisa C. Hickman

By The QuestionnaireMarch 26, 2012

How do you get up in the morning? 


Reluctantly.


 


Do you succumb to nostalgia? 


Always.


 


Do you write long and cut, or short and backfill?  


More circuitous.


 


Lunch with any three people who ever lived; who do you invite?  


Mary Todd Lincoln, St. Therese The Little Flower, Bob Dylan.


 


Best piece of advice you ever received?  


I actually read it in a Richard Ford novel: "Things can always get worse."


 


Are you okay with blood?  


Not really but there is a lot of it in my current project.


 


Who is your imagined audience? 


Does it at all coincide with the real one?  I find imagining an audience stifling so I avoid it.


 


What is your go-to shoe?  


Donald Pliner peep-toe pump.  


 


What's your poison?  


Fried-green-tomato southern fiction. 


 


What's your problem?  


Discipline.


 


What are you so afraid of?  


The interstate.


 


Do you require a high thread count?  


Yes!


 


What character or story haunts you?  


Many do. An American Tragedy, Native Son, and Thomas Sutpen, a ruthless, striving but weirdly sympathetic character in Absalom, Absalom!


 


Does plot matter? 


No.  For example, Per Petterson and Stewart O'Nan are wonderful and often nothing really 'happens.'  Some authors can pull that off.  


 


Does age matter?  


No.


 


Who is the author you'd most like to impersonate online?  


It would have been J.D. Salinger.  


 


Is there a literary community?  


I like to think so. 


 


What's the question or questions we should have asked, had we known? What is the answer?  


Question: What change would you like to see in the reading public?  Answer:  People interested in smart books.  Not gimmicks, overwrought memoirs, and the usual best-seller fare. This is a fantasy of course but a return to the days when quality fiction and nonfiction were widely read.  


 


 

LARB Contributor

The Questionnaire is, as her name suggests, a multifarious and mysterious interlocutor. Chameleon-like, her questions change their color as they approach each new interviewee.

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