Writing Your Own Process: Lisa Marie Basile
Alumni share their experiences and insights on polishing the craft and finding their own voice
How has your writing changed throughout the years? What has surprised you the most?
LMB: For a long time, I resisted the impulse to write about the ugly realities. I always hit this quiet, interior wall, feeling that certain topics or emotions were ‘undeserving’ of the poetic, at least when it came to my own work.
I felt more comfortable creating beauty for the sake of beauty—poems that sometimes felt “about nothing,” indulging in some fanciful pursuit of the so-called Poetic. By the way, I also think this is fine, but it wasn’t sustainable for me.
My MFA advisor, the brilliant and wise Jennifer Michael Hecht, gave me a great piece of advice toward the end of my time at MFA—and that was to always give the reader an anchor point in reality. I can see why she gave me this recommendation: I so wanted to create a beautiful world and felt that my own (my upbringing, my childhood, the lens through which I saw the world) was not ‘beautiful’ enough. So, my poems often struggled to give the reader a place to land, to connect. There wasn’t enough truth fiber, not enough substance to hold onto.
Yet I continuously was drawn to biographical or confessional poetry—and if I wanted to tell the truth, I had to get dirty with it. In my new collection, SAINT OF (White Stag Press, 2025), I explore a lot of these ugly things: a girlhood in foster care, generational trauma, the consequences of lack, unbelonging, ancestral deprivation, erotic havoc and ruin, obsession and panic disorder. I try to bathe it all in the lush and the lyrical.
I think poets have an incredible tool with the poem: We can write our worlds down any way we want. Confession can be both delicious and ruinous, and I love that poetry, more than any other genre, can hold space for both aspects. People critique the naval gaze in poetry, but over the years I’ve deepened into it. I am not sorry about this. The personal is political and also, somehow, universal.
What do you enjoy about writing the most? The least?
LMB: I seem to be a vulture circling the same old things: then/now, want, hunger, abandonment, obsession, the body and disease, beauty and aesthetic, girlhood, the past self colluding/colliding with the current self, getting down the truth beneath the truth. I like asking the unreliable narrator of the self, Can we name the wound?
I tend to write in a non-linear way, always playing with fragmented memory. I feel poetry and lyric essays (and prose-poetry, my favorite) can really contain that nuance.
I so WISH I could invent worlds and tell solid, long-form stories. I admire fiction writers so much. What a skill!
Who have you been reading lately? How have they influenced your writing or inspired you in any way?
LMB: I am always looking for work that stretches the boundaries of what poetry can be and do—whether through form or musicality or content.
I am devouring Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira—it’s this book of hybrid poetry. It’s biblical, queer, erotic, sacred, delicious. I’ve been re-reading Richard Siken’s CRUSH, as it’s the book’s 20th anniversary. I think this is my favorite book, ever.
I am always turning to Marosa di Giorgio’s work for its ability to collapse the spiritual otherworld and the real world into one. I’m reading the strange and unexpected Summer by Johannes Göransson. I am loving The Wonder Paradox by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Lastly, I’ve also been reading a lot of the work of Maria Messina, a 19th-century Sicilian writer who wrote openly and intensely about how women were treated. I’ll be co-guiding a writing immersion in Palermo, Sicily this summer, so I like to read in context.
How did completing an MFA help you find your style or purpose in your writing?
LMB: When you’re in MFA, you’re exposed to such a tidal wave of voices, from all the books you read to your classmates’ work, in which you are deeply entrenched for years. So, you naturally contend with many sources of influence or inspiration, and sometimes there can be a push and pull away from yourself. If you see your peers’ work being received well, you wonder if your work is missing the mark. Or if you find that a certain style of work is trending in the lit journals, you may feel pushed to replicate that.
So, MFA, for me, was the opportunity to think critically about my work and others’ work and to find the line between everything else and myself. What do they do? What do I do? It also teaches you how to identify what you like about poetry. Sometimes, this can be pedantic. Sometimes, it can be about feeling and intuition. We were able to explore both ends of the spectrum, especially with different professors taking different approaches to the unwrapping of a poem.
What piece of advice would you give to current students who are in the process of crafting their first novels/collections?
LMB: You have to honor your impulses. I know so many poets who feel the need to tie their poems up with a bow, or over-edit them until they’re some corporate, diluted husk appealing to the lowest common denominator. Please don’t put mass marketability before voice. It might be cute and shareable on Instagram, but is it true to you?
I also recently took a class with Elle Nash through the Heretics Club about writing the book you want to write, because I’ve been working on a memoir-in-vignettes. For me, this has proven a challenge because of time limitations and health concerns. Knowing your why and showing up to it—however that looks to you, in whatever small space you can muster—is a sort of holy thing. She said something like, “Attention, belief, and devotion are a self-fulfilling reality.” I loved that. There’s no magic hack. No shortcut. Just devotion.
Lisa Marie Basile is the author of a few books of poetry, including the newly-released SAINT OF (White Stag Publishing, 2025), Nympholespy (Inside the Castle, 2019, finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014), and Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York, 2012). Her work can be found in The New York Times, Catapult, Narratively, Tinderbox Poetry, Lover’s Eye Press, Sporklet, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020, among others. She earned an MFA from The New School and is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.