Lia's profile
Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections, including essays, poems, translations and artists’ books. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the AWP Award in nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Loyola University; other teaching venues include the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and the Glenwood Life Recovery Center. Her newest collections are "It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful" (poems) and "All the Fierce Tethers" (essays).
Statement and Project
As an essayist and poet, I’m interested in getting close to the experiences of others, and in recognizing the mysterious likenesses that exist between humans and the other-than-human world.
My current project is a collection of short-form essays that explore subjects like the holiness of decay (and our inevitable remaking), how we might come to love unconventional forms beauty, the wonders of green burial, the amazing persistence of lichen, and other anti-apocalyptic stances.
I feel a sense of profound urgency about the state of the world -- all the nuanced ecosystems and forms of care and justice that are under threat. I’m hardly alone here; this is the condition of anyone working in any art form today, trying to figure out ways not to be clobbered by the enormity of the tasks, losses, and necessary creative responses.
We moderns are beyond late in recognizing kinship. I’m working alongside the efforts of so many to revoke the supremacy of our ways of knowing and learn from the underground mycelial world, the complex intelligence of plants, the lives of oceans, forests, and marshes.
E.M. Forster’s line “how do I know what I think until I see what I say?” describes so beautifully the weird combination of presence and distance involved in writing. It’s almost primordial, that initial, unselfconscious sketching followed by the surprise of reflection. My purpose at the outset of writing is to remain patient -- to linger with the inklings, and to fully give over to curiosity. Questions I encounter on a walk, or when sitting to write, often start out simply: “What’s that one insect doing to that other insect?” or “What’s this response in me – that joy, that flinch -- all about?” Of course I have long-standing Big Concerns, and issues and rages and urgencies – but those are all written into, sort of snuck up on. I can’t start off armed with a subject or directed by an agenda -- I need to find my way towards conversation anew, every time. Over and over.
I live in Baltimore City, in an area where green space is at least accessible; green space is always a complex subject in a city and it’s the marginal, overlooked, and often degraded areas that draw me: our compromised creeks that are still homes for herons and foxes and crayfish; wooded edges of the JFX seeded with trash that work as archeological sites; scrappy, persistent urban forests; city streets that hold evidence of the lives conducted there. These spaces feel sacred to me as my home ground, as my land, even as they’re challenged and suffering and making do. I work where I am with what I’ve got – and with the belief that we are in no way separate from our land, or from the other beings who live here, and that what we do to the land we do to ourselves. Writing (art at large!) doesn’t merely reflect the zeitgeist, but changes it, offers ways of imagining that create the conditions for change, and maybe even more accurately, create a sensitivity toward the need for change, a taste for it, which I’m inclined to call hope.
