Q&A with author Amy Lee Lillard

Amy Lee Lillard is the author of Exile in Guyville, winner of the 2022 BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize; A Grotesque Animal from University of Iowa Press; and Dig Me Out from Atelier26 Books. She is the co-creator of Midwest Weird audio literary magazine and Fuzzy Memories Podcast. She publishes new work, including novels in audio installments, at Redeemed Rejections.

Her fiction and nonfiction appears in Vox, LitHub, Barrelhouse, Foglifter, Epiphany, Off Assignment, Autostraddle, and more. She received the Iowa Author Award in 2023, and was named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. She is also the co-creator and co-host of “Broads and Books,” the funny and feminist book podcast.

Interviewed by Moriah Hampton, PhD, an instructor in the University at Albany's Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI)

Congratulations on the publication of two books in 2024, Exile in Guyville and A Grotesque Animal.

What would you like to tell readers who are perhaps picking up your writing for the first time?

First – welcome! I write stories for the women who won’t smile, the women of all identities who have crossed over and can’t go back. That can mean speculative fiction examining our voices, our successes, or our complicity; that can mean other fiction exploring our rage, our bodies, or our queer joy; that can mean personal stories of defining and redefining myself as an aging queer punk in very weird times.

The desire for connection is a recurring theme in both your fiction and non-fiction. Why does this theme continue to interest you?

Connection and lack of connection seems to drive much of who we are as a society these days, doesn’t it? So much is written about loneliness, and the decline of community, and isolation as a tool for radicalization. So that theme always interests me.

But more than that, connection is the crux of autism. We don’t connect in the ways society has deemed appropriate and normal, so connection becomes even more difficult and fraught. That’s how I discovered, at age 43, that I was autistic – by realizing that it was a main reason for my difficulties making, keeping, and understanding relationships.

So I think in my writing I’m constantly searching for what connection means, what it looks like, and how it’s different for me.

Music plays an important role in Exile in Guyville, with the title of the collection borrowed from Liz Phair’s debut album, and song lyrics from other artists woven into stories.

What place does music have in your creative life, and which writers telling stories at the intersection of music do you recommend and why?

Music has always been in a tie with books for importance in my life. I eventually found my voice through writing, but before that, I found my voice through punk music. Other kinds of music too; the raw and stripped-down rock of Liz Phair, the industrial edge of Nine Inch Nails, the haunting beauty of Elliot Smith, the curious darkness of film scores and composers. The lyrics inspire me, the sound enlivens me, the structures and instrumentation surprise me.

For the longest time I thought music was something to just experience, but in the last few years I’ve found new creative voice through making music of my own. And that has opened space within me for my voice to develop even further. Now I have so many genres to consider when I want to tell a story!

Btw, Largehearted Boy is an excellent site featuring authors talking about the influence of music on their lives, and playlists for their work. On that site, I wrote a piece featuring all the songs referenced in Exile and Grotesque.

As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, how do you decide which genre is right for a particular idea?

Once you start writing, what leads you to develop certain ideas in a more experimental manner, for instance the gallery of “bad women” on display in A Grotesque Animal?

Until a few years ago, I rarely wrote nonfiction. I never thought I had a story worth telling, perhaps. Or I was afraid of exposing myself and other people in my life. Instead, I’d hide anything real in fiction; several stories from Exile in Guyville and my first collection, Dig Me Out, have some basis in my reality.

But a few years I started writing an essay. I didn’t know where I was going, but knew I wanted to explore some of the things I was reassessing from my life, now that I knew I’d actually been a special needs kid who didn’t get her needs met. That essay kept growing and growing, until eventually I realized I was writing a book.

It was then that I started getting excited about ways I could bring in different styles and approaches into a nonfiction book. I love reading books and stories with different structures, and thinking about structure excites me as a writer. Sometimes a structure is the key to bringing a story or essay together.

As someone diagnosed with autism in her forties, you have lived much of your life unaware that you fit on the spectrum. Masking, as explored in A Grotesque Animal, is an attempt to “fit into” mainstream society, though at great costs.

How has writing allowed you to grapple with experiential and imaginative realms beyond the mask?

Writing lets me play around in a world that I often feel uncomfortable in! It helps me process what I experience, and what I don’t. And writing is a place for me to explore the patterns and behaviors I spot that others might not. That’s sometimes a manifestation of autism: we watch people so carefully to learn how to be in the world that we can quickly get a read for people, see repetitions, recognize connections. My stories in Exile in Guyville, for example, often take a pattern I see in the world and play it out in an imaginative, speculative manner.

What’s next for you as a creative writer, podcaster, and composer?

I’m releasing an audio serialized novel in April! Over at my Patreon, you can find A Woman is a God, a novel in seven audio episodes featuring narration and original music.

Also at that page, I’m creating a place to talk about rejection as writers and creators. I called my page Redeemed Rejections because much of the work I’m releasing has been submitted and rejected many, many times. Rejection used to be the judge of whether my work was good enough for people to read. But after publishing three books, starting a literary magazine, and generally finding the confidence and proof that my work is worthy, I’m setting aside the traditional methods of sharing work, and talking in detail about rejection. And I invite other writers and creators to do the same, to share their rejection tallies like I am, to talk about what rejection has meant to their creations, and more.

https://www.amyleelillard.com/ | instagram.com/amyleelillard

Moriah Hampton, an instructor in the University at Albany's Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI), holds a PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo.

Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in The Coachella Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Ponder Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, inspired by contemporary fabulist fictions.