Lindsay Lerman Is a Damn Bandit

Lindsay Lerman (@lindsaylerman) is a writer and translator. Her first novel, I’M FROM NOWHERE, is now in its second printing with CLASH Books. Her second book will be published in 2021. She has a PhD in Philosophy and is an editor at Black Telephone Magazine.

1. What is the best thing that has been said/written about your writing?

Someone once said to me, “I can feel your presence when I read your writing.” This person knows me (or knew me) in real life, so I don’t know exactly how this would translate to my work being read by someone I’ve never met. But I do hope that some kind of presence is felt. To me, that’s the undercurrent of the thing we call “voice”—something palpable, something that lingers after the interaction has come to a close, even if the interaction is fraught or challenging.

2. What is the worst thing that has been said/written about your writing?

This one is hard to answer. So much praise and criticism is highly coded. Criticism has always stung like hell for me because I take it very seriously. But shortly after I’M FROM NOWHERE came out and someone called it “too feminine,” I realized I had to re-evaluate my relationship to criticism. Up until then, my work had never seen an audience large enough for me to be on the receiving end of context-free criticism (and my audience is not very large). I find it’s the context-free criticism that really gets inside my head and does damage, because it’s often someone’s set of unexamined ideological commitments playing out in relation to me and my work and what it (and I) seem to represent. It often takes the form of “So you think you’re special, do you?” and although I welcome reminders to let go of ego, I don’t need any more strangers telling me I’m a dummy or a bitch or a bore. That said, with any luck, the worst or cruelest thing to be said about my writing is yet to come!

3. What is the best writing advice you’ve been given?

“You’re a good steady driver, hun, you just need to keep your hand on the wheel.” It was the reminder I needed at a crucial point in my writing/thinking/reading life to not throw my hands up in exasperation, to not take the easy way out—to keep it strange, difficult, fresh, bewildering. I still think of this advice a lot. Maybe the things I’m writing are a bit out of my control (and this is how I want it to be), but I can still ask myself: Is there some way in which you can still keep your hand on the wheel?

4. What is the worst writing advice you’ve been given?

Any advice that says you must first identify your target market and then create is the worst. I don’t mean to suggest that we should never be attentive to the concerns of the market and how the market operates. I mean that advice that says you need 50k Instagram followers to be taken seriously as an artist is the worst, and it does a lot of harm. I’m happy to say that people have stopped giving me this kind of advice.

5. Who writes like a Damn Bandit?

More writers than I could ever list here, but in general it’s the ones who inspire me and motivate me while simultaneously (unintentionally) shaming me. The first time I read The Laugh of The Medusa by Hélène Cixous, I wanted to throw myself in a river but I also wanted to write in a way that expanded into the possibilities the essay seemed to open up. At the moment I’m teaching a class for LitReactor, and the writing produced by students in the class is giving me that feeling.