Lydia Host
Oyster River Pages: Why do you write and/or create?
Lydia Host: I don't know how to process the world around me except by recreating it in some way. I also have a strong urge to preserve things.
ORP: What do you think is the best way to improve writing and/or artistic skills?
LH: Practice and exposure to other people's art.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
LH: I read Turkish and French. Relatively little Turkish literature is available in translation, and learning Turkish has helped me appreciate the incredible volume of work from around the world that is not accessible to an English-speaking audience. Turkish also has great rhythmic potential and a kind of grammatically built-in assonance known as "vowel harmony", which have worked out into a rich Turkish poetic tradition full of music lessons for poets. Finally, Turkish has no third-person gendered pronoun. Women, men, and non-binary people are all referred to with the generic pronoun "o": o yaptı, o dedi, o sövdü, o öldü. This allows for wonderful ambiguities such as any queer person can appreciate, and the non-binary character O. in a novella that I recently completed is named in direct reference to this tradition.
ORP: How do children influence your art and/or writing? If you’re a parent, do your children like your art and/or writing?
LH: I think at least half of our emotional life takes place before the age of 14. Some people say that their life is their art, but I think that's really only true of children, and only because they are so spontaneously generative. After 14, you either have to have children or find a way to continue being one.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
LH: Vulnerability means temporarily forgetting that anyone will ever read what you're writing in order to include every true detail, even if it means drawing on emotions or episodes of your life that you are ashamed of.
