Interviewed by Christine Maul Rice
It’s clear: Lisa Lenzo has lived Detroit.
Born and raised in the Motor City, a good deal of Lenzo’s work gives context and texture to one of America’s most misunderstood cities. In her latest short story collection, Unblinking (Wayne State University Press), Lenzo populates her stories with complicated and wonderfully-realized characters whose dilemmas reflect the complexity of modern existence inside (as well as outside) Detroit’s city limits.
It’s an uphill battle, using Detroit as setting, because nuance and beauty and perseverance can get steamrolled by glossier headlines: economic downturn, urban blight, civil unrest. But Lenzo’s deep understanding of the place and its people offers the reader a generous lens through which to view Detroit and its people.
Racial tension fuels a number of stories in this collection. Right off the bat, Lenzo opens with:
Back in the day, the two of us were tight; people rattled off our names, “Tremaine-and-Jay,” as if we couldn’t be split apart. That began to change in tenth grade, when Jay started calling his parents—not to their faces, but to me—”the light, right Negroes” and “Dr. and Mrs. Tom.
No matter the character, Lenzo offers just-right details that allow her characters to get up and walk into the reader’s imagination: A character takes a baby, feels its weight, thinks, “I looked at the fat, light-skinned baby and smiled. He would grow darker—”ripe up,” my grandma called it…”; a white character looks into the face of a woman of color, “As I stared at her, she said, “See these bruises?” She traced her skin right below both eyes. It was slightly darker there, but whether from bruises or from lack of sleep or other hard luck, it wasn’t clear.”
Lenzo’s characters may live within Detroit’s city limits, be beholden to and influenced by economic boom and bust, but they elbow their way out of Detroit City limits to populate every inch of the American experience.
Christine Rice: Two of your three publications—Within the Lighted City (University of Iowa Press, 1997) and your most recent collection Unblinking (Wayne State University Press, 2019)—examine the lives of characters living in Detroit.
Your second collection, the novel-in-stories Strange Love, includes stories that take place in southwestern Michigan—Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and the Saugatuck area near Lake Michigan.
How does place—especially a place as mischaracterized and complex as Detroit—influence your imagination? Shape your characters?
Lisa Lenzo: Whether I’m writing about southwestern Michigan, where I live now, or Detroit, where I grew up, place is always important in my fiction. Although I left Detroit as a young adult, I’ve returned often, to visit my family and also the city itself. People, and characters, can’t help but be shaped by their surroundings, although I realize that for some authors place isn’t as important and they draw less on their own experiences than I do. But I would be a different person if I’d grown up somewhere else, and I’d be writing different stories. Not having lived any life except the one that I have, I don’t know what I’d be writing instead.
CR: Why—or how—does place continue to inspire your stories and the characters that inhabit them?
LL: A place’s influence doesn’t stop just because you no longer live there; to quote Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Also, as you say, Detroit is complex and often misunderstood—I’m still working at trying to understand it and describe it. I want to convey not only the city’s ugliness but its beauty.
CR: You deal with race with a certain fearlessness. I’m thinking specifically about “In the White Man’s House” and the story “Unblinking.” A lot of writers don’t touch racism or racial issues in their writing. How has your approach to writing about race changed over the years?
LL: It has changed in that I’m more conscious of cultural appropriation and I’m more careful to not offend. In the first story of my first collection, “Within the Lighted City,” I have black characters who are calling each other the N-word in dialogue, and in the past I’ve read that story using that word. (I’ve seen white people look around them nervously, and then when they notice a black person or two in the audience laughing and enjoying the story, the white people relax and laugh, too.) But when a host of a reading series recently asked me to read that story to an audience, I worried that it would be found offensive, so I replaced the N-word with “bro” and “homie.” However, my writing has not changed in that I still include black characters in my fiction. I grew up in a majority black neighborhood, and I feel confident that my portrayals are both accurate and compassionate. Besides, if we—white writers and black writers—are going to write about race, we can’t each just write half of the story, we have to also write about where our stories intersect.
CR: Agreed. That’s a great way to think about it.
Maybe it’s because my father had dementia and I now care for my elderly mother…but I found the story “Unblinking” devastating on so many levels.
The characters, Rosie and her husband Ralph are struggling. Ralph has dementia caused by Parkinson’s. The story deals so tenderly with aging, race, love, relationships, fear, crime, elderly parents trying to get along without worrying their kids.
You write:
Today Rosie’s fingers and brain are also clumsier and slower. She is more tired than usual because the day before yesterday, she fired Angels in the Home. The owners of Angels told her she had to start paying a higher rate because Ralph had become harder to care for, and that rubbed Rosie the wrong way. Did they expect things would get better?
I’m wondering about how this story evolved? Did you know, for example, when you started writing, that they would end up on the street, returning from buying adult diapers, at night, helpless?
LL: The story began with knowing that final scene. It’s based on my parents and their actual experience, but I added a lot and switched things up—for instance, while my dad did often hallucinate, he wasn’t hallucinating on that night that my parents set out to buy diapers. And although a neighbor of my parents was shot when his car was hijacked, this happened later, after my dad had died. There were five teenagers who met up with my parents in real life, but that was more than the story needed and harder to keep track of as individuals, so I reduced the number to four. As I watched the young men approach my parents in my mind, a dog—at the end of a leash held by one of the teenagers—materialized out of thin air. And so on.
CR: Even though your work is set in Detroit, I understand that you no longer live in Detroit. How has the distance influenced writing about the city you love?
LL: Well, when I want to do research, I have to drive across the state! And living in a very different sort of place—majority white and rural—gives me perspective, as does the distance of time.
CR: Alice Munro, when asked by her editor in the New Yorker, “How did you settle on the short-story form—or did it settle on you?” answered,
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.
You have written two short story collections and a novel-in-stories. What continues to draw you to the short story form? And did you set out to write a novel-in-stories? Or did the stories and characters pull you in that direction?
LL: I’m not sure whether I was originally drawn to the short story because that’s what college writing programs tend to teach or because I have a natural inclination toward it, but I have learned to love the form. (In high school, I hated reading short stories—in fact, at first, I thought that they didn’t exist in their own right: I assumed they were exercises written for students because there wasn’t enough time in class to read entire novels.) With Strange Love, I didn’t set out to write a novel-in-stories, but after I’d written four or five, I saw the pattern emerging and so I wrote other stories to complete it. I have attempted writing novels a few times—and I’ve finally finished several drafts of one that I’m really excited about, called Before the Revolution. I think it portrays Detroit and the conflicts of race and class better than anything I’ve written so far.
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