An Interview with Lisa Lucas
by Szilvia Molnar
The following is excerpted from a conversation with Lisa Lucas in Issue 149 of The Believer. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad.
THE BELIEVER: Looking at everything that you’ve done throughout your career—and correct me if I’m wrong—I always saw you as a searcher. You and I got to know each other when you were working at Guernica—
LISA LUCAS: What was I like back then? Back in the Guernica days?
BLVR: I feel like you were this beautiful, forceful wind that swept in, wanting to connect and talk. You had a lot of passion and energy. You were always very warm and welcoming. But it also felt like you wanted a bigger challenge, both in the publishing world and beyond it. Do you recognize any of that?
LL: I’ve had this higgledy-piggledy path. I started in theater—I was raising money for a theater company—and because I got involved with the education department, I subsequently moved to a youth theater, where I worked on educational programs. Later, I went into film and I worked at [the] Tribeca [Film Festival], running educational programs there. Then I left and started at Guernica, which was this free online magazine. I went on to the National Book Awards, which was part of the National Book Foundation, an organization whose mission is making sure that literature is accessible to all. Then I went into commercial book publishing, which is one of the only industries that has the scale to move something to all Americans; it’s one of the more reliable ways to disseminate information to a large block of American readers.
BLVR: Was your path connected to the type of upbringing you had?
LL: I was really privileged in the sense that I grew up in a family that was part of the arts. My father was a musician; my mother was an avid reader and cultural consumer. They were interested in plays and dance and theater and books—it made my life really rich, and it made their lives really rich. I always felt kind of confused when I was super young and I’d be in spaces and say, “Oh my god, this book is so good,” and people would be like, “What?” They were not on the same page. It was never a question of being dumb or smart. It was never a question of being a snob or not. It was never a question of anything other than the fact that everybody is exposed to different things. For me, I saw that we were not offering invitations broadly to American society to participate in nuance. Every single thing I’ve ever done has been driven by this question: How do you make a thing accessible to more people? Whether it’s raising money so that literacy programs can thrive, or marketing those programs, or publishing a book and trying to think about the best way to get it in front of a lot of people—for me that is the most exciting work; it’s where my energy comes from. I’m a book person and a nerd, but I’m also an extrovert, someone who is very communicative and loves conversation, interchange, argument, and debate.
BLVR: Could you give me an example of what that might have looked like, in a tangible way, at the National Book Awards?
LL: Well, one random anecdote about my time at the NBA that’s perhaps related: I was on a train and I remember meeting a couple and chatting with them about books and work and life and politics. At some point, I had gone on so long about the book I was reading that I just handed it to the wife and told her I had another copy at the office and a different book in my purse. A few months later I did an interview with CBS News and mentioned that the National Book Foundation [NBF] needed financial support to grow. A few days later, I got a check for five thousand dollars from the couple on the train.
BLVR: That requires a lot of openness on your part and also an interest in other people, which can be a rare thing these days—to have the strength to connect with others rather than shut down. It seems as though you also feed off that. Returning to your background, can you see where that came from?
LL: I don’t come from cynical people. It’s always been important to me to not be cynical. I also grew up with people who very much paved their own ways. They were like, I’m not necessarily gonna do this the way that somebody else does it. I’m not necessarily gonna follow this rule or that rule, but I’m gonna actually chase the thing that makes sense to me. For me, that made me feel like who I was and what I wanted to do was OK, that I didn’t have to go be a lawyer or take on a more typical, well-understood professional career in order to be a person who had stability or success in this life.
One thing I like to share is that I’m much more exuberant than either of my parents. I think everybody was a little surprised when I came out with so much energy and personality. They always encouraged me to love what I loved without making me feel stupid about it. It’s not about money. It’s not about winning. It’s about being open-hearted and working together to create a more robust and widely accessible cultural apparatus.
BLVR: You’ve been a public figure throughout the years. Are there things you want people to know about you that you haven’t gotten the chance to express?
LL: Look, publicity is so superficial, right? I think I became a “visible” person when I started at the National Book Foundation. That visibility happened because there hadn’t ever been a person of color—let alone a woman of color—in charge of running that institution. It was 2016, and we were beginning to engage in a conversation about what equity and inclusion and diversity meant inside these different institutions. I wish people would think more about why my role was so overexposed and why there needed to be such disproportionate coverage of an arts administrator who can tell a good joke and likes a sequined dress—because that coverage tries to make it seem as though things have changed when they haven’t. It’s important to think about the pressure that that exposure puts on a person: we need to feel collectively like we’re doing better, so we’re going to put all this onto one human. Why not do the work to actually make things equitable rather than just highlight my one little corner, which is going to make my life harder to navigate, and my work harder to navigate?
I’m not shy. I neither hate nor crave attention. I feel neutral about it. I feel like a lot of the media and the publicity and the visibility has served my goals. Some of it is my own semi-compulsive need to communicate using Twitter and Instagram. But that also comes from being engaged deeply in conversation and connection, which is the ultimate root of my love of books and music and dance and theater and film and visual arts and the arts community. I’m really lucky that I have a point of view, and that I get to share that point of view, and everybody doesn’t have that opportunity. That has been helpful, but it’s also been an enormous pressure because of the focus on my identity. There’s no universe in which events would have unfolded in this way without my identity being what it is. No one wants to feel used. Nobody wants to feel like a mascot.
Also, it’d be nice to go through difficult things privately, but that isn’t always an option, for me at least. Of course, I could have just logged off my Twitter, but it’s not a choice for my personality. I’m not a hider. My dad died. It was important to me to be open about my grief. Right now I think I’m in a moment of very public exploration. If everybody’s gonna be wondering, What is she gonna do?, then I might as well have that conversation.
BLVR: And in all that, even if you’re not shy, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need care, or support, or patience, or respect.
LL: Yeah, I’m human. There’s the communication that happens on social media, which I find very comfortable and supportive, actually, like a blanket—I’m really invested in that community. But then there’s the media, where you can end up regardless of whether or not you actively chose to participate in it. I find that more challenging. It’s a lot of scrutiny.
But yeah, of course you need care. Every single one of us is just a person. Again, we’re communicating with each other using the internet all the time, which then creates an abstraction: you no longer become Szilvia; you become an avatar—I can see your Instagram picture in my mind’s eye right now, if I close my eyes. Even if there’s connection, it can become dehumanizing. I think we have to really figure out how to change that. Every decade, every century, every generation, it’s How do we become human in these new contexts? People can seem strong and be quite weak. People can seem weak and be quite strong. It’s very obscure when we’re all hiding behind the internet.
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