Writing Your Own Process: Lisette Boer
Alumni share their experiences and insights on polishing their craft and finding their own voice
How has your writing changed throughout the years? What has surprised you the most?
I started in fiction and found my way to poetry toward the end of college. My early instinct was just to follow a feeling and see where it went, and get it down before it disappeared. That impulse is still there, but I think something has slowed down in me over time. Now I think more about rhythm, about how a poem lives on the page, about resisting the urge to rush toward resolution. I’ve also started thinking across poems, about what they’re building together, what threads are running underneath. I think the biggest surprise has been accepting that the work has its own pace. Sometimes you just have to wait and see what it becomes. There’s something to the work now that I don’t think I could have forced.
What do you enjoy about writing the most? The least?
What I love most is the feeling that calls me back to the page over and over again. It’s hard to name exactly. I’ve written through grief, through family, through trying to figure out who I am and who I’m still becoming. The work holds a lot for me, which is also what makes it hard. Writing that close to you requires a kind of vulnerability that doesn’t always get easier.
What I enjoy least is probably less about the writing itself and more about the world around it. There’s a scarcity mindset that runs through it that produces gatekeeping and prestige hierarchies that I find to be exhausting. That said there are a lot of things to love about the literary world as well.
Who have you been reading lately? How have they influenced your writing or inspired you in any way?
Lately I’ve been reading Wendy Bishop and Sandra Faulkner, for their work on writing pedagogy and research, which feeds into my own scholarship. For poetry, I’ve been rereading Taneum Bambrick’s Intimacies, Received. I became a fan of her after reading Vantage and apparently I’m willing to avoid my TBR to spend more time with her work. Her poetry is honest in a way that I both admire and envy.
How did completing an MFA help you find your style or purpose in your writing?
The MFA made me take myself more seriously as a writer, which sounds simple but wasn’t. In undergrad I think I wasted too much time writing for other people, trying to emulate what I thought good poetry was supposed to look like. The program pushed me to figure out what I actually wanted from the work. I still read widely because I think you have to, but somewhere, the focus shifted. Now I write for what poetry gives me, not for what I think it should be.
What piece of advice would you give to current students who are in the process of crafting their first novels/collections?
There’s a pressure in the MFA to come out with a finished manuscript or novel, something tangible to show for the time and money you’ve put in. I understand that impulse. But I think writing is something always in process; it’s always becoming something else. A manuscript doesn’t finish so much as it finds a moment to rest.
Lisette Boer is a PhD student at Teachers College, Columbia University researching creative writing pedagogy. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School (‘23), and currently works as a Part-Time Lecturer at Parsons School of Design.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.