Meet Lis Anna-langston

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lis Anna-langston a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lis, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

“It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistent, you must also have the ability to start over.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read that quote a long time ago and it always stayed with me. This idea that we must not just persist forward with blinding momentum but also have the strength and ability to abandon the old and start over. F. Scott is one of my favorite writers and his work is infused with this theme, this idea that we must try again. Resilience is defined as bouncing back or recovering quickly and in art I think this idea is huge. Working through plot twists and rewrites and business decisions leads writers and artists across this vast terrain of resilience. From artistic choices to personal life this concept shows up endlessly in so many ways. To break free is a universal theme, to shed the chains that bind both emotionally and spiritually. It shows up in many ways but the most persistent is in this idea of freedom. To have resilience in our core values but in also our words, work, images, projects so that they may grow and change. Poems become short stories and phrases become the launching point of books or photographs. Resilience is transformation and that is at the heart of all storytelling. At its core resilience works when expectations are minimized. Trust is key here. Trusting the project to lead. My resilience comes from that truth, that knowing, and showing up to do the work.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I just won the NYC Big Book award for my latest novel, Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert. It is a tremendous honor. It is so much fun to be a part of this years winners.

I am deep at work on a new novel. It is YA and I love everything about it, including the research that went into creating it which was vast.

At the heart of what I do is storytelling. I do it via words and images. This idea of communicating a message of transformation is endlessly fascinating to me. I am very active in the literary community. From poetry to short stories to novels you can always find me creating something new. I think my brand is built on being real, on saying the hard things no one wants to say out loud and evolving. I have always been fascinated with the ancient world. That place where myth and history intersect. I love borders, these places where two things meet. I am endlessly fascinated by incorporating the old and the new. You’ll find a lot of it in my work. I’m interested in authenticity not just empty obsession. In how the flow of feeling connects with desire and helps us decipher meaning from moments and channel energy effectively.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

When I was little I was not allowed to give an opinion. I could say I liked or disliked something and express why but I was not allowed to just sound off and say I liked or disliked a thing without being able to back it up. There were opinions and facts. If I didn’t want to go outside because it was ninety-six degrees the weather was a fact. But I wasn’t allowed to say things like, “It’s so dumb that I can’t go outside because it’s too hot.” In short, my granny didn’t let me sit around and smack talk people. People misinterpret this as mean but it was such a gift. If I thought something was dumb or great or spectacular or ridiculous I had to have supporting evidence, reasons as to why I thought that and if it involved my core values I had to argue on behalf of those. Of course this is subjective but it is different than just sounding off in a snarky way to something you don’t like. In a world where everyone is constantly defaulting to opinion I see now the benefit of not falling into the trap of being led by emotion. Opinions are largely based on emotion, on how we feel about a subject, a person, a place, an event. But it is only opinion, not fact. It changes from person to person. Letting my values lead instead of random opinions I picked up here and there was key. In a world where people are obsessed and misled by opinion, it is truly a gift to have this insight.

I’d like to list tenacity as a quality, which I certainly possess, but honestly I think my greatest strength especially when it comes to writing is the fact that I work for the story. Story is queen/CEO/boss and I work for the story. I see a lot of writers burnout because they are constantly writing what they believe and want to promote into the narrative. I try to stay out of my way, let the story lead, be surprised and charmed by what it reveals.

The third quality is my ability to take the chance and write what the story is instead of squeezing it into a box. Recently I had a short story accepted for publication. I’d been sending it out for two years. It has a religious element to it that non-religious people didn’t seem to want to explore and very religious people I workshopped it with early on thought I was making light of religion, which I wasn’t. It is just a story about a woman trying to find her place in the world. I love it. It is one of my favorites. To take all of the parts out that made people uncomfortable meant changing literally the entire story. I think that is a trap artists fall into. The trap of doing things to please. We’re not here to please. No where in the job description of an artist does it say we’re here to please. In fact, Francis Bacon said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” I believe that. Art takes courage. I believe in letting the art evolve outside the carefully laid perimeters of society. Tell a great story. Let it be yours and not a watered down version that makes everyone feel comfortable. Comfort and complacency are the death of art.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Milan Kundera’s books played a significant role in my development as an author. His ability to infuse a story with historical facts and a dynamic plot really made me consider the intersection of historical fact and art. The Unbearable Lightness of Being became one of my favorite books. He has a way of taking very controversial subjects and humanizing them. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was another. Michael Ondaatje is a tremendous writer. The English Patient is simply one of the best books ever written. The style, the depth, and the subject all conspire to create this piece of literature that stays with me like a memory. Warlight was a stunning novel. I devoured it. Raymond Carver is a genius at taking a simple situation and turning it into a psychological study of character and behavior. I’ve read his entire collected works. James Baldwin is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His fearless exploration of the human condition is unprecedented. He is perhaps the most influential on me as a person. Go Tell it on the Mountain is one of the best books ever written.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lisannalangston.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lis.anna.langston/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551069611336