Member Spotlight: Leslie Denise Li

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Carol Joyce Oates said it first and said it better than I ever could. She said, “Writing is not living, but living AGAIN; and through the willed creation of a private myth, the artist constructs his/her own salvation.” It’s the best way I know of living a life other than the one I’ve been given, and perhaps in sharing that life, I might be helping another person deepen or expand her life, as other writers have helped me to do.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Writer’s block, if that actually exists, merely tells me that I’m meant to be living, seeing, experiencing, absorbing, incubating. I’m meant to be doing something else. Something that my writing needs and can’t do without.

What is your favorite time to write? It varies. I don’t set aside a time to write. When I find myself in a sort of liminal space (like between sleep and wakefulness), and I don’t have something else that I absolutely must do, then I will write. In fact it is then that I AM writing, invisibly, in my head. Hopefully, I get it down on paper before it vanishes—or better yet, I vanish into the paper.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Don’t write what you know. Write what you hate you know, what you don’t want to know, what you’re afraid to know. However, something stronger than that hate or fear makes you sit down and write, and very likely that something will be important.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? As opposed to any other age? I will tell you that writing at my advanced personal age is a blessing: I am old enough to have had and assimilated many life experiences, but not so old that I’ve forgotten the memories they’ve left behind. Rather my imagination has transformed many of those memories into the words that are found in my written works. So, like Joyce Carol Oates said, a writer can live AGAIN.

Leslie Denise Li’s The Forest for the Trees is out now with Black Lawrence Press.