Lizzy Lemieux joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read her poems "The Presumpscot Baptism of a Jewish Girl," and “Matryoshka,” featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Lizzy discuss how cultural beliefs play into writing, “sticking” the ending, writing honestly about familial heritage, coming of age, how a story's voice travels with you, explorations in punctuation, and why wait to write about current events. Lizzy is a Senior at the University of Pennsylvania and published her poetry collection “The Presumpscot Baptism of a Jewish Girl,” through The Telling Room’s Young Emerging Authors Fellowship.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Lizzy Lemieux: There's a character that I know well and can talk from her point of view.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Is it liberating?
Lizzy Lemieux: It is for the story, but if you finish the story and you still have the voice in your head, I'm not sure what to do with that. I guess I'd like to move on. I'd like to find a different voice and write a different story, but I've been working with ...
Stuart Kestenbaum: It almost sounds like a story in itself.
Lizzy Lemieux: Oh, it does. Doesn't it?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices of the Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine. All of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in the series are featured in A New Land, an anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill, and courage. Some of them were born in Maine, others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures. Lizzy Lemieux is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. She published her poetry collection, The Presumpscot Baptism of a Jewish Girl, through The Telling Room's Young Emerging Authors Fellowship. In this episode, Lizzy reads from her collection, and we also talk about what it's like to write from a character's point of view, rather than your own.
Lizzy Lemieux: “The Presumpscot Baptism of a Jewish Girl,” by Lizzy Lemieux.
We stood on the Mars-red railway pass
Toes curling over the edge, fifteen feet above
The river bottom stewing in August—
Rusting leather-seated wheelchairs,
Slatted red-handled, silver-wired shopping carts,
Old-fashioned, newly made, ten-speed racing bikes,
And children’s tennis shoes with tongues like dogs.
The Presumpscot boiled like tomato soup,
Frothing with all these things we swam with,
Friendly with them as the fat, female ducks,
And their puddles of sopping bread.
We no longer bragged that we could swim,
But they knew—saw us wet and skinny,
Tan lines buckled around our hips.
We still screamed like children—
We still were children, I think, at twelve.
We hit the water with the sound
Of flesh on flesh, hand to skin.
We fought with the placid river—
Sometimes we won and we drew
The Presumpscot into our mouths,
Above Razor scooters and squelching mud.
In September it cooled and we sat
On the sloping banks with twenty-five cent gum
In our mouths, heads tilted toward the Vs
Of hollering Canada geese,
To which we hollered back
Call and repeat campfire songs.
We liked being heard, liked everything
Until our big sisters came home,
Each of their ankles wrenched, skin puckered, one
Hanging off a boy like a playground tire swing.
Then we listened to the water
Hitting flesh on flesh, hand to skin,
Listened to who we would be
When we resurfaced.
“Matryoshka.”
I was born into a line of Russian nesting dolls,
each having cradled the next her womb,
curved from shabbat dinners,
a row of grandmothers in miniature.
Shoulders draped with shawls of a dying language,
mouths filled with chicken soup, paunchy stomachs
thrust forward after drinking two glasses of wine.
They never learned how to dance,
just swayed to cat gut violins and niguns,
studying genealogy like Talmud,
history’s dog-eared pages clinging together,
imitating popery.
My stomach is skinny still, but I wonder
what to say to a daughter who will
separate rib from hip and mourn
words she cannot say, they’ve been buried
so long in graves with month-old children,
a daughter who treats synagogue like a cemetery.
I’ll say to her, “Bubeleh,
Bubeleh, do not cry when you wonder
who sculpted that face of yours, your hips.
If you cannot believe in god, believe in grandmothers.
They all broke open for you.”
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you so much. Let's talk about the last poem “Matryoshka,” the last stanza.
Lizzy Lemieux: That “believe in grandmothers,” I think that's really like something that illustrates my beliefs because I consider myself culturally Jewish and having had a religious background, but kind of falling out of that.
Stuart Kestenbaum: That last stanza strikes me as the kind of part in a poem where, when you started out, maybe you didn't know that was the end, and then demanded to be the ending.
Lizzy Lemieux: Yes, I think often my endings demand to be the endings. I think the middles are where I get stuck, but the endings, when you hit the right line, it really...
Stuart Kestenbaum: You're like a gymnast when they stick the landing, right? So you've been writing for a long time and you've been involved with The Telling Room since you were in high school. And now you're a senior in college at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lizzy Lemieux: I guess I started, I think it was 2015, here, which is when I wrote these poems. They were for the Young Emerging Authors Fellowship for a book I wrote, which was primarily based in like my heritage. I think I was like really coming into being a teenager that time. I think these two poems pretty much epitomize that kind of transition from like familial heritage to kind of independence.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So when you read these now, do you think, “Wow, I was only 15 when I wrote that?”
Lizzy Lemieux: I was pleasantly surprised to look back at them. I was like, “Okay. Yeah.” I think they were like pretty honest. I think they did really capture a moment in time. They're pretty standard themes for me. I do a lot of coming of age. It's probably cause I'm coming of age. And I do a lot with my family. I think just you get ideas from whoever's around you, and I had a lot of Judaism in my life growing up, so I've done a fair bit with that. It's just kind of like my normal, so a lot of my poems and stories incorporate that without me even realizing that I'm necessarily doing like Jewish writing.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Talk to me a little more about your Jewish heritage kind of working its way into the work.
Lizzy Lemieux: I went to day school and I went to synagogue up until I was 16. And I think like just a lot of my early experiences happened in a religious context, like I think I was just always surrounded by like ritual objects. This is like very familiar and comforting. I think I've also felt a little bit disconnected from it, too ,because I'm only half Jewish, consider myself a cultural Jew. So in a sense it feels like I'm losing a lineage as well as continuing it. So I think it's a bit of a… There's a little bit of sadness in there as much as there is like pride and comfort.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It feels like you deal with coming of age or transitions, that moment where the 12 year old sees the 15 or 16 year old or what you're going to be, where things are going. What strikes me as I read that is, this seems like something somebody might write when they're 30.
Lizzy Lemieux: Also writing about something that I aspired to. I mean, like the emotion in it is very honest. Okay, I didn't jump off the bridge. I just saw all the older girls do it and really wanted to, but I didn't… It was more of like an aspiration for a kind of an adulthood, a teenagerhood that I found I think probably after writing the poem.
Stuart Kestenbaum: But you even have that self-awareness that you get to listen to who we would be when we resurfaced is a interesting emotional distance for somebody who's 15 to write.
Lizzy Lemieux: It’s kind of nice to look back on it now though, thinking maybe like, “Oh, maybe I've resurfaced a little bit.” Maybe, maybe it's been a couple of years and this is the person that I was looking towards becoming at the end of the poem that I was hoping to achieve and wasn’t there yet.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What kind of things are you writing now?
Lizzy Lemieux: Right now I'm working on a short story collection. I've moved to fiction a little bit. I just move between the two of them sometimes I'm in a poetry mood, sometimes I'm in a prose mood. There's a lot of overlap between the two genres for me anyways. So I'm doing a short story collection. Genre is not my strong suit. I think it really is quite cross-genre, but I'm dealing with like womanhood and women in male dominated spaces, maybe some magical realism. Yeah, that's where I'm at right now. I’m writing a lot of characters in their twenties, which is I guess where I'm at.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What's it like for you to write in a character?
Lizzy Lemieux: Voices is always the most important. I think one of the issues that I come across is sometimes the voice that I have for a story is so strong that I end up writing all my stories in that same voice. And it's not my voice, but it's a voice that I really like working with. My biggest struggle when working with fiction is making sure each of my characters have different voices. And I think I use a lot of kind of interesting punctuation as well. I think I changed the punctuation depending on the voice, which I think is maybe like kind of a poetry thing.
Stuart Kestenbaum: When you say the voice, you said it's not my voice, but the voice that's in the fiction.
Lizzy Lemieux: Right. I mean, I'm not writing nonfiction, I'm not writing from myself, but I feel like that there's a character that I know well and can talk from her point of view.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Is that liberating?
Lizzy Lemieux: It is for the story, but if you finish the story and you still have the voice in your head, I'm not sure what to do with that.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. But you said it's kind of the same voice that has been traveling with you?
Lizzy Lemieux: Right, yeah. I guess I'd like to move on. I'd like to find a different voice and write a different story, but I've been working with...
Stuart Kestenbaum: It almost sounds like a story in itself.
Lizzy Lemieux: Oh it does, doesn't it?
Stuart Kestenbaum: You're done with the voice, but the voices isn't done with you? Have any of the events since March had an impact on what you're working on in any way, do you think?
Lizzy Lemieux: I definitely like had some story ideas and I was like, “Oh, we're going to write about this current moment.” And then I was like, “We're going to wait, we're going to wait until this solidifies a little bit.” I think my thoughts about what's happening change so often that…
Stuart Kestenbaum: It has to simmer a little bit maybe.
Lizzy Lemieux: Yeah. I'm always like a couple years behind where I'm actually writing from. I'm always writing about who I was like a year or two ago, because that's like the self that I'm comfortable with instead of forging currently.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah. Well I think sometimes it can feel almost too fresh. It needs to distill a little bit.
Lizzy Lemieux: Yeah. I was studying abroad in London last semester. And so I came back and I was like, “Oh, I need to write about all of those things.” And it was really fresh. I'm glad that I jotted down some ideas cause I can go back to them and remember what it was, but I kind of needed the months to think about it and reflect, because I think a lot of the writing is more about how the character feels about it rather than the actual events.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And what were you doing in London?
Lizzy Lemieux: I was just studying abroad. I was studying English. I got to take some classes in Old English. I did James Joyce and Ulysses, I did Dickens.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Was that your first time abroad?
Lizzy Lemieux: I had done a study abroad experience, it was two weeks in Tokyo, and I'd done photography in the queer community in Tokyo. And then I’d traveled a little bit before.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And do you see any relationship between photography and your writing?
Lizzy Lemieux: I do. I am trying to merge them a little bit more. I'm trying to consider myself interdisciplinary.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Like make work that has both elements in it?
Lizzy Lemieux: Yes. Yes. With the project that I did in Tokyo, I considered it a little bit kind of like journalism in a way because I was meeting real people and then asking them to share their stories with me and then reflecting on it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Does the photography influence your writing?
Lizzy Lemieux: Yeah, I think a lot of my writing is really visual to me. I really like saturated colors. I think my stories often have like color schemes in my head.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode is by Jordan Kramer. The series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to learn more about the telling room and its programs visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. Thanks for listening.