Show Me Your Shelves | Lilly Dancyger
Interviews
Show Me Your Shelves is a regular book column by Gabino Iglesias. In this edition he talks with Lilly Dancyger, editor of the essay collection Burn It Down and the forthcoming memoir Negative Space.
Social media is often a self-imposed headache. That said, we keep at it because some of the people we meet there make it worth the bad. Lilly Dancyger is one of those people. Besides having a superb online presence and being a supportive member of the writing community, Dancyger is a great writer, an editor at Catapult, and an assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She edited Burn it Down, a fantastic collection of essays about anger written by women. Her next book, a memoir titled Negative Space, is coming from the Santa Fe Writers Project on May 1, 2021. I’ve read all of Dancyger’s nonfiction work so far, and her voice is powerful. She also has incredible taste, and Burn it Down is proof of that. With that in mind, I asked her if we could take a look at her shelves and pick her brain about books. She said yes . . . and much more.
Gabino Iglesias: Who are you and what role do books play in your life?
Lilly Dancyger: My name is Lilly Dancyger, I’m a writer and editor, and books have always been very central to my life. I dropped out of high school when I was fourteen, after I decided that I could educate myself better than the New York City public school system. What that ended up looking like was just a ton of reading—poetry and philosophy and classic novels and history and whatever piqued my interest and felt like something I should read if I wanted to consider myself self-educated.
I ended up studying nonfiction and journalism in college (I wrote my application essay all about my self-directed studying), and have been a freelance writer and editor ever since. My memoir, Negative Space, is coming out next spring from the Santa Fe Writers Project.
GI: When did you start writing and why?
LD: The first thing I ever “wrote” was an origin-of-the-universe story that I dictated to my father when I was four years old—he wrote it down and I illustrated it, and then he bound it into a book. I’ve been writing since then, really. I wrote lots of really bad poetry when I was a kid and young teenager, and I started keeping a diary after I read the Diary of Anne Frank when I was about nine.
I have a hard time with the why part of this question! I don’t know why. I guess it seemed fun at first, and then it got harder and harder in a way that made me want to keep getting better. Now I write because it’s how I process things that are too complicated to keep in my head.
GI: Your work is all over the place. I mean that in the best way possible! How do you decide what is worth pursuing and what ideas are just two-minute obsessions?
LD: I’m writing less these days—but in a good way. I’m trying to employ a “quality over quantity” approach. When I was first freelancing, there was this constant pressure to churn out tons of ideas and I was able to do it, to work at breakneck speed and write several pieces per day, but I wasn’t producing anything of any real quality. I’d rather write a handful of pieces a year that I’m really proud of—and in the meantime, I also edit and teach, and have plenty of writing-adjacent work that keeps me busy and plugged into the community, and pays the bills.
GI: I heard you have a cool organization system for your books and shelves. Can you please tell us about it?
LD: Yes! I arrange my books by genre/subject, and as much as possible, I have one section flow into the next in a way that makes sense (at least to me).
Starting at the top left, the sections are:
First shelf: occult/witchcraft, folktales/fairytales/myths, Judaica, philosophy, ancient classics, poetry, Shakespeare (plays), Shakespeare (criticism of), literary criticism, books about writing/grammar/language, fiction*.
Second shelf: my publications (every print byline I’ve ever had—from copies of my college student newspaper to several copies of my anthology, Burn It Down, which was published by Seal Press last year), my notebooks, memoir*, essay collections, anthologies, diaries/letters, cultural criticism, politics, feminism, art.
*Fiction and memoir are alphabetized by author’s last name (they’re the largest sections).
I don’t know why, but I find scanning the shelves and seeing one section flow into the next one so supremely satisfying. Plus it makes it easy to find what I’m looking for quickly.
(Of course, in addition to the perfectly organized shelves, there’s also a pile of books I’m currently reading on my nightstand—at the moment, The Body Keeps the Score, Bluets (I am kind of always reading Bluets), and East of Eden—a pile of books I should be reading on my desk, and a pile of books I want to read soon on a different shelf in my office. But we can ignore those . . .)
GI: The house is on fire (don’t be surprised—this is 2020). What books are you grabbing as you run out of the house?
LD: Oh man, this is a mean one. I would definitely grab books where the specific copy has sentimental value, as opposed to favorite titles that I could theoretically replace. Like I would grab the Sargent book that my father gave me for my tenth birthday, and the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that we read together when I was little until the spine fell apart. And the copy of Volume I of Anaïs Nin’s diaries that I filled with marginalia when I read it for the first time when I was fifteen and it totally blew my mind.
GI: I love your Twitter presence. How do you stay sane on social media?
LD: Thank you! It’s really a release valve for me. Having a place to dump random thoughts helps me keep my head clear so I can focus on work—which I know is the opposite of how a lot of people experience social media, with its constant noise invading their mental space. It also helps me feel like I’m getting some social interaction when I’m home working all the time (which was the case long before COVID-19). When I get annoyed with it, I just close it for a little while. But overall Twitter is a net positive for me.
GI: Could you tell us about books that have left a mark on you? It could be two or twenty. Seriously.
LD: Well, I mentioned earlier that Anaïs Nin’s diaries were big for me—it was the first time I saw writing about your own life and your own thoughts and emotions as a viable creative outlet. And now my entire life revolves around personal essays and memoir! And then I guess following that thread, the next two books that had that kind of profound impact on how I think about my own writing and what I’m trying to do with it are The Night of the Gun by David Carr and The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavich.
I read The Night of the Gun in the earlier stages of writing my memoir, and it blew up my ideas about what it means to rigorously interrogate one’s own life. And I read The Chronology of Water years later, when I was revising and trying to take this collection of facts and memories and observations and turn it into art. That book is such a great artifact of life turned to art and the fact that you can do that in whatever fucking way you want.
GI: COVID-19 has hurt us all. How has it affected you, especially with a book coming out next spring?
LD: The honest answer is that I’ve mostly been fine—which feels strange to say when so much has been upended. But my day-to-day has not been impacted that much—I worked from home full-time already, and I haven’t lost work (yet, knock on wood).
There is of course the looming existential dread, wondering how long this will last and what society will look like when we eventually make it to the other side, but it turns out I’m very good at compartmentalizing! Or I’m just good at functioning while mired in existential dread. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s the truth.
It is definitely a strange time to have a book coming out though. Bookstores are taking a big hit, the rules for how pretty much every aspect of society functions seem to be changing, so honestly who the hell knows what May 2021 will look like! But I’m just pushing ahead as if there will still be a publishing industry next year, and people will still be buying books, because what else can I do? It took me ten years to write my memoir—I’m not going to give up now when the finish line is so close. (I wrote an essay about this actually—I think as much to convince myself as to articulate it to anyone else.)
GI: Can you tell us more about the research that went into your memoir? Maybe tell us a few memoirs you think we should read while we wait for yours?
LD: Negative Space is largely about my father—including parts of his life that happened before I was born, or when I was too young to fully understand what was going on. So I interviewed two dozen or so people to try to get a deeper understanding of who he was—to understand his art, and his addiction, and try to find a way to get to know him even though he’s been dead for twenty years now. That’s pretty much the central driving force of the story, me trying to understand who he really was. So I took a cue from David Carr and decided to include the research process as a main narrative thread in the book. I’ve been calling it a “reported memoir.”
There’s also a whole other thread about my life after my father died, when I was a degenerate drug-addled street kid, and the process of pulling myself out of that and into college and grad school and then a relatively stable adulthood. That part didn’t include research in the same sense, but I did read a ton of memoirs to try to internalize how you go about bringing readers into the most tender parts of your own life.
Some favorites, in addition to the ones I already mentioned:
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Those are the first ones that come to mind, though a couple of my very favorite memoirs are other ones that aren’t published yet! Books that my friends and students are working on that I can’t wait for everyone to read.
GI: What book would you love to read that hasn’t been written yet?
LD: I don’t know! That feels like trying to picture a color that I’ve never seen before—I don’t know what it is because it doesn’t exist yet! I tend to love books that push the boundaries of the memoir genre in some way, but part of the pleasure of reading those books is marveling at the creativity and originality, so I guess I never know what book I’m dying to read until I’ve already started reading it.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides: Stories from the Border. You can find him on Twitter @Gabino_Iglesias.
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