This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lisa Fishman, whose poetry collection One Big Time is out today from Wave Books. The collection is a one-woman quest narrative in a kayak, written during Fishman’s “journey-in-place” in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine. The poems are lyrically precise and respond to the poet’s immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, the poems are dynamic—language takes on its own life in an active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. Rob McLennan says, “There’s a calm to this collection, even with the framing, the background, of uncertainty across that first Covid-era summer. There’s also something quite graceful to the subtleties of a smaller collection,” adding that Fishman is “fully aware of the lyric geographies she moves through.” Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, a short story collection, and several chapbooks. A nominee for a Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Fishman continues to live primarily on the farm she and her husband started in 1999 in Orfordville, Wisconsin, dividing her time between Wisconsin and Canada.
Lisa Fishman, author of One Big Time. (Credit: Lisa Fishman)
1. How long did it take you to write One Big Time?
Fourteen days. That’s why I thought the title would be 14 Days, as the audio book (recorded in 2023) is called. I was alone the whole time in a 400-square-foot cabin in a Northern Ontario forest, in quarantine that summer of 2020. The border between the U.S. and Canada had closed for the first time ever, but I was able to drive across as a dual citizen. Then, it was so strictly enforced that I had to stay put, not going for supplies or food or stand within eight feet of anyone—not that anyone else was around, except the cabin owners a half-mile away in the woods. The five or six interconnecting lakes were surrounded by cliffs and “Crown land;” there was no cell service or internet. For much of every day I was in the water, with or without the battered blue kayak that went with the bare-bones cabin. Inexplicably, I woke up at dawn every morning and found myself writing every day, having had no intention of doing so. I had thought I’d be working on a manuscript that already existed and needed organizing. I wonder if, in that context, the intensity of sensory perceptions simply necessitated, for me, their own translation into language—but also, I was looking for something specific every day (a passage from one body of water into another), and I found myself laying out in words the story of that daily attempt. It turned out that the quest—as it came to feel—revealed something else by the twelfth day, and that recognition was just as unanticipated as the experience of writing every day.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I wasn’t thinking of it as writing a book, nor was I thinking of it as “writing poems”—I was simply writing the days, but in a very intense state of sensory awareness and, I have to say, in a protracted condition of sheer physical pleasure. Being outside all day every day, swimming for hours, hiking, climbing, paddling, being strictly forbidden from driving anywhere and so making do with my one cooler of food and one giant loaf of bread—for me that seemed to enable both a focusing and a loosening. The magnitude of space around me must have opened a kind of interior spaciousness where the writing came from. The challenging part came afterward, when it wasn’t clear to me for a while that it was enough in and of itself, i.e., that it was a book: a single, sustained, and relatively compressed narrative, essentially a book-length poem that tells one crystal-clear story, or perhaps two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
It seems to me that I don’t write very often, but when I do, it can be anywhere. For poetry, being in transit in a confined space has often been helpful, such as on a train, bus, or plane. I tend to write poetry on scraps of paper and in unorganized notebooks or big sketchbooks, and on loose-leaf. However, for One Big Time, I was usually sitting at the table in the cabin, or out on the rickety dock with my notebook, or in the kayak with my small note pad. The two books I’ve written since writing One Big Time in 2020 are fiction, and they were both mostly written in Canada as well. The first, a collection of stories, World Naked Bike Ride (Gaspereau Press, 2022), began in quarantine in a Halifax hotel room with a guard outside the door.
4. What are you reading right now?
I used to never read more than one book at a time. Now it’s three: one for riding the train to Chicago where I teach, and two for reading in bed at night. Right now, the three happen to be Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (Anchor, 2006); Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink (Yale University Press, 2020), translated by Mark Polizzotti; and Sarah Moses’s Strange Water, which was recently published by 1366 Books, a new Canadian imprint for experimental fiction.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Shimpei Kusano, Tarjei Vesaas, and Lewis Freedman. Lewis has two remarkable poetry collections with Ugly Duckling Presse, and I love his new manuscript, “Trillium Bsalm.”
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
This book was largely self-organizing, since it was written day by day and the lens was focused on what was unfolding in real time. I don’t always date what I write, but because I was tracking the dates so closely, being in quarantine, the dates were intrinsically part of the work. In fact, instead of a “Table of Contents,” the book has a “Table of Days.” Ultimately, I left some parts out—that was the primary method of editing. In the audio book, those parts are still there.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
He told me to stop interfering with the form of the lines on the page, though he said it more eloquently and gently than that. When I first typed the pages, I’d kept the slight fluidity of the handwritten material: it was not perfectly left-justified. Later, I offered a more “polished” version, in which everything lined up consistently. But: The original version’s subtle shiftings of the margin surely reflected my movement in water every day; swimming was—and I mean this as literally as possible—part of the compositional process. I feel lucky that Joshua (Beckman) recognized that.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started One Big Time, what would you say?
Bring another loaf of bread?
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of One Big Time?
The work of trying to decipher a hand-drawn map and navigating an unfamiliar landscape by kayak day after day was essential to the emergence of One Big Time. The circumstances were so unusual for me that this was the only work going on—but truthfully it was a pleasure.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Since I can’t lay hands right now on specific sentences from conversations with Michael Palmer, which began around the time I was writing my second book, I’ll allude to them by way of his book Active Boundaries (New Directions, 2008). He is aware of how, in the poetry of Creeley, Oppen, and Celan, “listening and attending take primacy over systematized artistic construction.” And: “However resistant it may appear, and may be, poetry becomes a form of encounter, or conversation, a way of being with others. A goal then: to project lyric interiority itself into a shared world, a world of exchange between the singular, the singularity of the poem, and the plural.”
