The Writer’s Desk features the desks and writing practices of Gemini Ink faculty, visiting authors, teaching artists, volunteers, students, interns, staff, partners and more. Receive new posts in your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter at bit.ly/geminiinknewsletter.
Join Lyzette Wanzer on Tuesdays, June 4, 11, 18, 25 & July 2, 9, 2024 from 6:30-8:30pm CST, via Zoom, for her workshop: No More Excuses: Submission Bootcamp. This course is for writers of all levels—from those who are ready to learn about the submission process to those who are in the submission trenches.
Hi Lyzette! It’s great to have you here with us! Let’s dive right into your writing habits.
Do you like things to be carefully planned out or do you prefer to just go with the flow? Does this also apply to how you lay out a story?
I’m an INTJ, so the more planned out, the better. Spontaneity is not my bailiwick. In contrast, my writing is all over the place. I still compose longhand, and if you saw my journals you’d find them indecipherable. I’ve got scribbles, arrows, Roman numerals, circled items, and shorthand all over the pages, along with my own coding system for where paragraphs and passages should go. I keep trying to write in a linear fashion, but that never works out. Whatever I envision to be the opening winds up as the ending, or somewhere in the middle. The ending I’d prescribed ends up as the opening, etc. The contortionist morass you see in my handwritten journals mirrors my composition process.
Is there one piece of writing advice that you value most?
If you’re going to be an author—or any other kind of artist—you must have a thick skin, tolerance for ambiguity, and perseverance. If you lack the first attribute, you should funnel your energies into a more predictable, safer career choice. I repeat this advice to my students, often.
Who are your heroes in real life? What do you admire most about them?
No true heroes, but I do have what I consider to be literary mentors, both visual artists: Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher. Their art informs my work in muted ways. One lithograph that I often have in mind when composing new work is Escher’s Relativity, in which a trio of gravitational forces function in perpendicular relation to one another. Dali’s Animated Still Life, an oil-on-canvas where the typical objects of a still life—fruit bowl, flask, wine glass—course through the air, serves as another muse. Dali has said of this painting, “The entropy of a still life is a way of amending nature.” And I feel that my work give substance to space, validating my own attempts to gain triumph over tumult.
What about movies? What can you can watch over and over again and not get tired of?
I have several:
Gentleman’s Agreement
Rear Window (the original)
The Shining
The Omen (the original)
A Few Good Men
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve heard or read recently?
Percival Everett’s Erasure, and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.
What is your next project?
I’ve just wrapped the book proposal for Building a Career as a Literary Artist of Color. This is a book that stems from the series of workshops I began teaching under the same name during the racially fraught summer of 2020. Chicago Review Press gets the Right of First Read, so it’s with them now. I’m waiting to hear whether they’ll take it on or pass on it. What’s interesting is that I began working on this manuscript before Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair through Personal Narratives, was ever born. Summer 2020—what I refer to as the Summer of Racial Reckoning—brought the TT&T project to the fore. The zeitgeist was ripe for that project, so I back-burnered Building a Career for over two years. Now that TT&T has been out in the world for some time and the touring is done, I’m thrilled to turn my attention back to Building a Career. I never stopped teaching the workshops, though.
If people want to learn more about your work, where should they go?
If you want to know about Trauma, Tresses, & Truth the book: https://shuffle.do/projects/trauma-tresses-truth-untangling-our-hair-through-personal-narrative
For Trauma, Tresses, & Truth, the conference: https://trauma-tresses-truth-conference-interrogating.heysummit.com
For my new Muses & Melanin Fellowship for California BIPOC Creative Writers: https://forms.gle/eP5KHEVD3S4AQY7h9
And for info about me in general, either https://www.lyzettewanzermfa.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyzettewanzer
Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. She received her MFA in Fiction from Mills College. A flash fiction connoisseur and essay aficionado, her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, The Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, Tampa Review, The MacGuffin, Ampersand Review, Journal of Advanced Development, Fourteen Hills, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Pleiades, Flashquake, Glossalia Flash Fiction, Potomac Review, International Journal on Literature and Theory, Fringe Magazine, and many others. She is a contributor to Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth From the Margins (Wayne State University Press 2022), The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie 2012), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press 2019), and 642 Tiny Things to Write About (Chronicle Books 2015). Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Lyzette is the current judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and of the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s nonfiction category.
Lyzette has been invited to present her work and/or panels at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association (CEA), Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Litquake Festival, San Francisco Writers Conference, and others.
