Profound Surrender: An Interview with Ellis Avery
Interview by Melody Nixon.
EA: Up until the age of 38, when my mother died, I would have said an emphatic yes, writing is what gives my life meaning, together with loving and being loved. Life felt like a game where I traded my youth for books I could point to proudly. Maybe I’ll feel that way again one day, either when I’m better or when I’ve made my peace with not getting better.But for now, my brush with mortality—my mother’s and my own—and my subsequent confrontation with chronic pain and disability has made me feel less self-important about my writing, less product-driven and more process-oriented. The fiction I’m working on, I’m doing for pleasure, not out of a need to prove myself to the world (or to the imaginary biographer, who is probably my mother) as a novelist.I still write daily haiku: I think keeping my senses open to each day’s unique flash of beauty and humor—and finding the words with which to share it—is what gives my life most meaning. That, and love. To be honest, it feels like I’m playing a different game right now, one where life gets increasingly difficult, but if you can find something to be grateful for all the way to the end, you win. By those rules, I’m batting a thousand.
Read the full interview here.
Ellis Avery is an accomplished author, editor, and teacher. Her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction, a Stonewall Book Award, and an Ohioana Library Award. Her second novel, The Last Nude, also won a Stonewall Award. Avery edits the Public Streets column at Public Books, and writes daily haiku poems on Twitter—a year’s selection of which have been recently published as her first volume of poetry, Broken Rooms.
Melody Nixon, a New Zealand-born writer living in New York City and Stuttgart, Germany, is the Interviews Editor for The Common.
