The First Book: Leigh Lucas

AUTHOR: Leigh Lucas
GENRE: Interviews
EDITOR: Annelies Zijderveld

SUGGESTED EXCERPT: “This isn’t advice but it’s helpful. I’d heard from so many poets I admire that it was hard, sometimes really hard, to get their first collection published. Some poets I know even published their second books before their first books because by the time the first was picked up they’d already completed and found a home for their second manuscript.”

The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Leigh Lucas: It wasn’t so much of an idea that came to me as much as I had to face the fact that I was writing poems about the same thing over and over, even when I tried to write about other things. It became clear to me I couldn’t write a book about anything else until I wrote this book.   

Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?

Lucas: Ten years. I wrote the bulk of the poems over the course of two or three years but there was a lot of futzing around before that, trying to figure out what the book would be, and years of editing, assembling, and filling the gaps after that. Then it took me a few years of sending it out (and changing the manuscript as I did) to find a publisher. I hope my next book doesn’t take quite that long!

Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?

Lucas: This is the first book I’ve written. I have started a few other ones, in a variety of genres, but never gotten very far. In the process of writing this book, I also discovered that once you think you’re 80% done, you’re actually 20% done because finishing it and editing it is a behemoth. 

Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many nos did you get before your yes?

Lucas: I got 80 nos from first book competitions from small presses over the course of 3 years, including four semi-finalist placements and six finalist placements that didn’t lead to publication. The first year I sent it out to 40 contests, the second year to 25, and the third year to 15 because the more I learned, the pickier I got about where I wanted to publish. (How do I remember all this? I don’t, but I kept meticulous track of my rejections in a Google doc.) It was at that point that I got an agent, who happens to be a fabulous editor, so at her urging I added a bunch of new poems to the manuscript and made a couple of changes to existing poems that made the whole collection stronger. She took the manuscript out for a year to the major publishing houses and bigger indie presses, but I was still getting a bunch of nos, so that’s when I sent it out myself to Boa’s Poulin Prize. 

Rumpus: Which authors / writers buoyed you along the way? How?

Lucas: My writer friends. Writing can be lonely so you’ve got to have friends who are pursuing it too. Plus, my friends have given me all of my life-changing book recommendations: Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Stray by Stephanie Danler, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, feeld by Jos Charles, Sorry To Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell… I can remember each friend who made me read every one of these heartbreaking and incredible books and I’ll never forgive them for it!

Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?

Lucas: Lord, did it change. Thankfully the early poems for this book never saw the light of day. The manuscript, over the years, also went through multiple expansions and compressions because I tried to be really disciplined about what poems made it into the final manuscript. There were many many poems that were once in this book that were darlings I had to kill. 

Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?

Lucas: I had a chapbook called Landsickess published with Tupelo Press, and I’ve had individual poems published with literary journals, print and online: Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Diode, Frontier Poetry, Smartish Pace, Alta Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, Minnesota Review, Barrow Street, Driftwood, Blood Orange Review, Harpur Palate, Two Hawks Quarterly, Leon Literary Review, and others. I’ve also had some essays and interviews published with Adroit, The Racket, and A Women’s Thing.

Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?

Lucas: This isn’t advice but it’s helpful. I’d heard from so many poets I admire that it was hard, sometimes really hard, to get their first collection published. Some poets I know even published their second books before their first books because by the time the first was picked up they’d already completed and found a home for their second manuscript. When I’d get a rejection from a press that I thought my book would be perfect for, I’d remember this and go ahead and send it out again. 

Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?

Lucas: I’ve heard the advice to write to one specific reader, but I actually don’t do that. My writing process does not have any readers in mind, which is a good thing because I would never have written most of the poems I have if I was focused on what people might think of me. This separation between the creative process and the publishing process has allowed me to be really unselfconscious and honest in my work, and I hope I can maintain that separation forever.   

Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?

Lucas: I had asked a ton of questions about the publishing process by the time I went through it, but I’d say I was still surprised by how hard it was to get myself to ask other poets to write me blurbs. Writers have so much on their plates, and it kind of killed me to ask people to do this unpaid labor. In the end, my blurbers were extremely cool about it all, and the agony I felt leading up to these asks was probably undue. Thank you to my very kind husband for being my sounding board for all types of anxieties of this kind.