Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Main Street Rag, Bluestem Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Kentucky Review, The Delmarva Review, Litro Magazine, Superstition Review and Pithead Chapel. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-owns and operates a cut flower farm on the eastern shore of Maryland with her husband and two hard working cats. You can learn more about Lisa by visiting her website.
I sat down with Lisa recently to discuss her new novella-in-flash titled Unpasteurized. Her book is inspired by stories her grandmother told of growing up on a dairy farm, the same farm Lisa visited as a young girl. Our conversation follows.
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LPR: Tell me about when you sat down with your grandmother to tell her story. You say it took place over thirty years ago. I’m picturing the early nineties. What was going on in her life and yours? Was it you that wanted to record her story or her, or a little of both?
LB: I just knew I had to record the stories she had been telling me for so long. I needed a permanent documentation of them, and I also knew I had to capture her voice, which was the voice of a true storyteller filled with joy and sadness and all those places of contemplation in between. She took the recordings so seriously. She knew that I would be writing her story one day. She always believed in me as a writer.
LPR: I think it’s lovely how you began the writing of your own memories with her but felt compelled to revisit those tapes, as hard as it may have been to open that bit of the past back up. What was it like to hear her voice again? How did her voice influence your own voice in the story?
LB: It was one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had. It was as if we were sitting right there at her kitchen table again with the tape recorder running. I felt her presence so strongly. I had remembered all the stories, but I had forgotten so many of the rich details. And hearing her voice brought back so many more of my own farm memories. It made me realize how intimately voice is tied with memory.
LPR: What draws you, personally, to short fiction? Or, I suppose I should say, did you ever consider writing this story as a traditional novel?
LB: I did write a novel years ago when I was working on my MFA degree in fiction at Vermont College, but it wasn’t a natural form for me. I started out writing song lyrics and poetry, and it is the language and setting and characters that interest me much more than an overarching plot. I had been reading a lot of novellas-in-flash when I started writing Unpasteurized, and this format seemed a natural way for me to write about my farm memories with my grandmother’s stories as the connecting thread. What I love about flash fiction is that it relies on little epiphanies and revelations, and so with a novella-in-flash those little epiphanies build upon each other to the conclusion. I didn’t have to think so much about an overriding plot, just the little moments that mattered and shaped my main character along the way.
What I love about flash fiction is that it relies on little epiphanies and revelations, and so with a novella-in-flash those little epiphanies build upon each other to the conclusion.”
LPR: What writers have influenced your work?
LB: In the realm of contemporary novella-in-flash, Dan Crawley, Karen Jones, Sudha Balagopal, Nod Ghosh, and Johanna Robinson have all written brilliant works. And I don’t know how much these writers have influenced my work, but I am very much drawn to the work of Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, Marguerite Duras, Kate Chopin, Charles Baxter and William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying, by Faulkner, is one of my favorite novellas, and it strikes me as more of a novella-in-flash than novella proper. To the Lighthouse, by Woolf, is my favorite novel; I am particularly awed by how she brings to life the setting and personifies the house as a character of its own. I think of the farmhouse on my grandparents’ farm like this—it held such vast memories, every board creaking with energy, pulsing with a life of its own.
LPR: Your grandmother and your father, and you to a certain extent grew up on this dairy farm described in Unpasteurized. You are also a flower farmer. How has the natural world influenced your own writing? To that end, are there any nature writers you’re particularly drawn to?
LB: The natural world is everything to me; it is my mirror, my teacher, my shrine. . . I spent all my summers growing up on my grandparents’ dairy farm in Pennsylvania. I was only inside on rainy days—days where it rained the entire day, which is such a rarity these days. Otherwise, I was bailing hay or swimming in the creek or picking berries or hiking or reading in the woods on a stone wall. . . There are so many mysteries in the natural world, so many miracles; as a writer I try to understand my characters through their interactions and relation to this realm. I love the intensely detailed nature writing of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and Henry David Thoreau—how they examine the natural world and our place within it.
LPR: You teach writing at the college level. What advice do you give to the emerging writer, the stuck writer, or the writer who is weary of rejection?
LB: Writing is incredibly hard. It takes so much patience, perseverance, and an understanding that rejection is part of the process. I tell students that they have to love writing, and that they must do it for themselves first and foremost without anyone real or imaginary looking over their shoulder. I also tell them that writing is a practice. Like anything, they will get better at it over time and, eventually, those rejections will start turning into acceptances. There will always be more rejections along the way, but it is the knowing that writing is helping you understand yourself and the world around you that truly matters. Writing is a way of knowing and being in the world. Sharing it with others is a wonderful thing. Getting acceptance from the outside world is a bonus. But that, or money, should never be the goal. If it is, you’re not a true writer.
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