INTERVIEW: Leigh Lucas (Landsickness)
Landsickness
Leigh Lucas
Tupelo Press
Interview by Laurel McCaull
Anyone who has experienced a sudden, tragic loss knows that you can spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of it. Nothing feels quite as real or as solid as it once did. There’s a reason that, when faced with such sorrow, humans turn to poetry. Nothing else can speak quite as well to the vastness, the impossibility of losing someone you love. It is a form that relies on absence, on space, and, much like life, is only made more profound by its brevity.
While reading Leigh Lucas’s chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024), I was again astounded by the power of poetry, and of this poet in particular, to traverse the full spectrum of grief in just a few lines. Written in the wake of her former lover’s suicide, this collection is a study in contrasts–from the heartbreaking to the humorous, from fact to fiction, and back again. Each poem acts as a different angle of a prism–refracting a particular emotion or aspect of Lucas’s experience that, once seen, might also be healed. The effect is mesmerizing, a triumph of both skill and heart.
Earlier this month, I hopped on a Zoom call with Lucas to discuss Landsickness and its warm reception. Our conversation touched on the performative aspects of grief, the pressure to make “good” art, and the shame that surfaces in the process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Laurel McCaull: I really appreciate the irreverent tone you weave throughout and how it balances moments of intense emotion and almost devotional adoration that often accompanies grief. How did you approach finding that balance, and did that affect how you structured the collection?
Leigh Lucas: I like the word irreverent; I haven't thought of it that way. I wrote about this topic for a few years before landing on this form and this mode of telling. Something I learned in the process of writing bad poems and essays was that while I was still deeply processing the grief, it was hard for me to bring any levity, lightness, and humor into the work, so it was too one-note. It was also too sad, and as soon as I got a little bit more space from the event and I was healing more and more, I was able to see that throughout that entire time, humor had been my best friend and an enormously effective survival technique. So was irreverence, like you said. By allowing myself to be petty and—this word means something totally different now—a brat, I was able to travel between deep feelings of grief and then some lighter ones. I could see that even though this horrible event happened, I was still the same person. I wasn't like this heroic widow or something.
Such a big part of telling a story is deciding what to leave out and what to focus on. I was like, “I'm going to make this funny. I'm going to make this real. I'm going to make this light.” I'm also not going to let myself off the hook. In fact, why don’t I start with all the parts that I'm most ashamed of? I found grieving an experience that was tied very closely to shame, and I still am trying to understand that. I would feel really embarrassed a lot. I would wish I had behaved differently and thought different thoughts–all sorts of stuff like that. But I decided that was where I was going to write the story from. Plus, there’s only so much sadness a reader can take, and allowing those lighter moments into the story made the piece more readable.
LM: The funeral poem on page 22 feels like a place where shame is very present. It’s interesting to me that it's the only poem in the collection where we get more explicit information about the speaker’s relationship to the deceased. To learn that she’s a former girlfriend among several was a little unexpected, considering the depth of feeling she expresses. Why did you feel it was important to include a poem that, in some readers’ eyes, might compromise the speaker’s “reliability” or at least change their perspective of her?
LL: Recently, I went to a book launch for a poet who had just written a fiction book, and she said she was excited to have her main character be unlikeable. She said that in poetry, the speaker is often assumed to be the self, and if it’s a sad poem, about the suffering of that heroic self. I think it’s interesting to not let the speaker of my poems off the hook and to not be the perfect sufferer, or even someone the reader sees themself in.
I'm okay with coming off a little ugly or mean or unattractive. I like reading work like that. It's a part of me that I like to explore—and obviously improve. I'm not interested in being a petty person, but I do think that for this project in particular, I was very comfortable with the reader being a little turned off by the speaker sometimes. Because that was my experience–I don't know if I was the best friend; I was certainly not the best version of myself during that time. That was just the honest truth. I was very willing to expose myself. I felt like a fraud a lot of the time, like I was way too sad for what had happened. It felt like something I couldn't get over–it didn't matter how much therapy I did, it didn't matter how much time passed, I just couldn't get over it. So, in some of these poems, I put myself on blast for that and other petty crimes.
LM: I think it’s so important to embrace messiness and approach this topic from an angle that is not often explored—the ex-girlfriend as opposed to a family member or spouse. It shows the universality of loss, but also how personal it is. And how grief becomes this self-referential experience.
LL: I don't remember if someone gave me this metaphor or if I came up with it on my own, but I remember loss being described as an amputation. After you lose the person, the only dynamic, changing relationship you have with them is your grief. So letting your grief go feels like an amputation—you actually hold onto it with two hands because that's what you have left of them, that isn't just these memories that are disintegrating in real-time. Of course, you don't have conscious control over a lot of it, but at some point, you also have a decision to make: am I going to let this go gracefully? Am I going to release myself from this, even if it means losing them a second time? That was scary for me; I didn't want to do that. I went kicking and screaming into the next stage of healing. I don't think anyone who knew him and lost him was ever the same, but at some point, we all started to feel better and think about him less and rebuild our lives. But deciding to do that is a big choice.
LM: In the poem on page 8, you write, “Art requires careful theatrices / be more cold.” I interpreted this as the pressure to appear detached when writing about loss–that it’s such a universal experience that your own loss becomes too common to be a worthy subject. Being called “sentimental” has become the death knell for writers, but I wonder what your relationship is to sentimentality? In many of these poems, the speaker searches for objects, mementos, little scraps of paper, and ephemera because she doesn’t want to lose anything else. Is this not sentimentality? If so, how is it functioning in the work?
LL: One of the central things I struggled with when writing this was pretty much all of my early work on the subject was—you could only describe it as sentimental. They were more like diary entries, even though I was attempting to write poems. And that was just another shameful, embarrassing thing–I used to know how to write poems, but now all I can write about is how sad I am.
So I thought a lot about how I will once again perform this grief in a way where I can create art from it, which in itself is a little unsettling–art is performance, and you are imagining the audience on the other side of it one day. I knew the poems I was going to write needed to look different than the diary entries that would never see the light of day.
The poem starts:
I know I am embarrassing myself.
I try to calibrate the distances. Art requires careful theatrics.
Yes, be more cold.
I thought a lot about coldness and a cool tone and how I might employ that to make my writing “art.” Could I remove myself from the grief, hold it at arm's length, and write about it from there? And then, in the same poem, could I switch between a cool tone and a very emotive, hot tone? Could I create some kind of theater by doing that, but also get closer to the experience of grief and the variety of emotions involved in it? On a craft level, that was the project of the book. I actually had a lot of poems that referred to the process of writing the book, and I ended up taking them all out except for this one. I thought it was belaboring the point a bit or trying to seem too smart. I think I needed to write them while I was writing the book because they were my little guideposts, but I ended up just keeping the one. I think that was the right choice.
LM: It's one of my favorites. I feel like the coldness or remove can also express the numb state of grief. And the obsession with the facts of it, the facts of the death, because it all feels too huge and inconceivable. You have to focus on the little details because you have to convince yourself that it happened.
There is this romantic quality to some of the poems, as the speaker succumbs to memory and fantasies. Then there are short, brutal poems that describe her lover’s death in the plainest terms, as if from a distance. For example, on page 10, the whole poem is simply: “The man I love / jumped off a bridge on September 30th at 4 in the afternoon.” Is this part of the pressure to “be cold” in art? Or do you see a kind of poetry in stating such facts?
LL: I like when there is tension between diction and storytelling mode, where it goes from more lyrical, flowery language to a really plain, almost academic, or scientific kind of speech or writing. The form that inspired me for this book was the lyric essay. I was reading a bunch of lyric essays at the time, and I loved how well the form suited academic or scientific subjects because the writer had the freedom to write a lineated poem or just write in flowery language, and then they could boom, switch to a paragraph of really thick informational text. I found it really pleasing.
I wasn't totally sure a grief story could fit into the lyric essay as well, but I wanted to try. I was very conscious of using the tools of the lyric essay when I could. By combining all of the wonderful things that poetry allows, like line breaks and crazy jumps of logic, with the cold, hard facts that you would expect from an essay or a nonfiction piece, I was able to create a little tension and starkness, and even a little bit of drama.
LM: It reminds me of the poem on page 15:
A simpleton-philosopher, I seasick between: I knew this would
happen (rock). And, how could it have (rock). Between: I knew
him as well as I could know someone. And, I didn’t know him
at all. (Rock, rock).
It’s a lovely illustration of that flopping between the lyrical and the practical. The fact that you knew this person and also didn't know them at all—the paradox of grief is so stark there. How did you get to the title Landsickness from there?
LL: Seasickness was something that I was thinking a lot about at the time. It’s how I felt, and I thought, “okay, maybe I'm not ready to write a book about what happened, but maybe I could write a book about seasickness.” I read a lot of Reddit, but before I could even go down the seasickness rabbit hole, I learned about this thing called landsickness.
It comes from being on a boat for a while, and all these people on Reddit were saying, “Ohmygosh, I’ve had it for two years now,” or “What works best for me is if I do a mosh pit, it’ll go away for like a week.” They were swapping advice, and it was also this very vibrant community that was there to understand each other and complain together and not feel like they were burdening the people in their lives who are sick of hearing about it. I thought landsickness was way more interesting than seasickness and wondered if I could write about it. Much less of that ended up in my published poems, but that was how I came upon the concept.
LM: It’s so powerful, and it speaks to the sense of complete disorientation from a loss like that. And the sense that something is missing–missing the waves when you’re on land and vice versa. It’s a really beautiful metaphor.
LL: Another thing that occurs to me is that grief is an invisible ailment. You’re walking around posing as a regular person, but in reality, you're anything but. You’re suffering, and you sort of want everyone to know where you're at, and you also don't want anyone to look at you ever again. But I really related to these people on the landsickness subreddit because I felt like they were feeling the same way I was. They had no hope for when it would end, and they had no idea when they would feel better. No one could see that they were suffering, but they were from something broken inside that there was no official fix for. It felt so, so similar to the experience of grief.
LM: Is there anything else that you’re working on right now?
LL: This chapbook is actually the first two sections of a longer manuscript. The full work includes five other sections that go further along in time. It’s out on submission right now, but there’s definitely value in the reader seeing Landsickness as a complete work of art and enjoying it as it is.
