Far West Press Writers Lily Lady and Sophia June On Authentic Desire and Airing Dirty Laundry

Lily Lady and I met on a day that they technically weren't supposed to see anyone else.

“I have a day for the world and a day to myself,” the writer told me the first time we talked on the phone. This method is a self-protective one that helps them balance their role as a public-facing artist, and as a person who needs downtime -— especially amidst the relentless onslaught of potential plans to be had at any given evening in New York City. But they made an exception and agreed to meet me on one of their days.

It was my last day working at Nylon magazine, and I had a bartending gig later that night. Lily was about to move to Los Angeles. In our narrow window, we talked. With an easy intimacy, we sat on the floor of their Bushwick apartment and talked about their new poetry collection NDA from Far West Press, the cult favorite Hudson-based indie press helmed by Willie Crane. Lily and I had never met, but both recently had work published in Pretty Obscure, an anthology newly out from Far West, of poetry and fiction.

We talked about the demands of a life of art – particularly of confessional literature, where the boundaries between self often get obfuscated, where demands and self-confession swirl into something complicated. It’s a topic Lily and I have both considered a lot. Lily explores it in NDA, a confessional work about the performance of self and gender that oscillates between being intensely personal and coyly concealed. I’ve explored it in my own writing, as well as my notorious viral article “The Makings Of A Literary It Girl.”

Below, Lily and I discuss conscious cultivation of mystique as artists and writers in the public eye, our authentic desires, and more.

Sophia June: You're moving to LA from New York on Wednesday, which are the two settings of your new book NDA.

Lily Lady: Is there anywhere else?

SJ: Not really. What is inspiring the move? Or as you like to put it, the relocation of HQ.

LL: It's very pedestrian, but I was mourning the loss of the beautiful weather when fall was coming. Summer in New York is so unique, but then someone said to me, there's more summer than ever every day. Even in winter in New York, there's just more summer. So, I feel that there's more of me in New York than ever. Always increasingly. And so even if I'm not physically in New York, there's no scarcity. “Move” sounds so permanent, but I'm pretty mobile. How are you feeling about your last day at Nylon?

SJ: What’s funny to me is that everyone is asking me what I’m doing tonight, and I'm like, I'm working. I'm bartending. For most of the time I was at Nylon, I was also bartending. That is what I like about bartending. I like that it is this constant throughout whatever I do. My best friend texted me today and was like, “How are you feeling? You have a hard time with change. Everyone does. But you especially do.” I think a lot of people probably think that about themselves. It's not extraordinary, but it’s still hard.

LL: Do you find that that's the case? You have a hard time?

SJ: 100%. It’s funny timing that you're moving to LA on Wednesday, and tomorrow, I'm turning 31, which also marks five years in New York for me. I love it when so much happens at the same time, and you are coasting on adrenaline, and there's not enough time to think about anything because your life is really happening. There's no time to be sentimental about it. I find this in writing, too. I can't write about things until it's been years since they've happened. When I try, it falls kind of flat for me.

LL: What are you writing through right now?

SJ: I'm writing through three years ago. I'm working on a novel and it takes place in the summer of 2021. Everything that I wrote during that time is helpful to think about to remind myself of the place I was in, but I don't use any of it. It's more like a backstory.

LL: The window dressing. And the broth.

SJ: Exactly; the spice in the broth. What about you? What does time look like for you when it comes to writing? When does NDA take place?

LL: I'm not very sentimental. I really keep it moving. As much as I make it a practice not to look forward, I try not to look back. I move things at a pace that lends itself to things happening right now that may be more interesting to me or just more generative than moving backward or forward in time. Writing of the past feels cleansing. So I chew it, work it through, put it on the page, and then get on with it. With NDA, it's similar. The tent poles of NDA surround this email exchange that I had with this director in LA a few years ago. Those emails are published verbatim in the book. I think, well, not every poem is directly about this person. It's more the energy that I was experiencing at that time is set down in the book.

SJ: You've excavated it. As you're moving through experiences, are you writing about what you're feeling?

LL: I usually write in bursts: the thing has to be said, it vomits itself on the page and then maybe tweaks here and there, and then fashioning it into a collection happens later. I am writing from the place of feeling while it's happening. When I'm writing, I'm writing a version of myself onto the page. So I like to play with playing up the more difficult parts of my personality, the more unlikeable parts, because it's fun to test the audience. How far will they go with a narrator? But all of it is still, at least, in this collection. It's a version of me. I wonder, with your novel, what part feels separate?

SJ: I've created a character in my likeness who is thornier, more annoying, and more passionate than me. You have so little space and time to convince a reader to come with you that it's useful for her to show all of her cards at once. It started with her being a lot more like me, but in writing, I've realized that I am writing my best when I'm outside of something, when I'm in a social situation where I feel out of place, when I’m at my most observational. I try to create distance between us so that I can see her as something separate.

LL: I think that while it can be very alienating and isolating to feel separate from one circumstance, I do find that that is often the disposition of the writer, the journalist, and the artist because the praxis is the documentation. Almost inherent within that is to be there but also not be there. Even during a lot of my childhood, I felt very separate from both myself and my circumstances. That can be challenging. Now, when I notice it, I feel, like, oh, I don't actually feel separate from the community that I'm in. I do feel that maybe my role is to document because I find it so beautiful. We're here. But we're also thinking about what this will look like when it's something else when it's a piece online that we're sending to our parents saying, “Look, I'm alive. I'm doing something.”

SJ: I'm alive in Bushwick on a mattress on the floor.

LL: If it's not cinema, then it's just crusty. And for it to be crusty, cinema is a beautiful, beautiful dialectic.

SJ: We've talked about you as a character, but the emails are real, and parts are redacted. How do you figure out what you want to share and how?

LL: I try to follow what feels most natural. I am interested in my own life cycles of ritualized humiliation. There is stuff in NDA that would hit on this, where I'm airing my dirty laundry, but I'm in control of which pieces of my wardrobe are on the clothesline. I find what's most titillating is striking a balance between these disclosures and omissions while all the time being in control of the pipette of information, and that is very manufactured. At the same time, it's a book; it's an object. It's silly, it's playful. There's that distance between who I am in NDA and who I am on my solo days.

SJ: Some things remain sacred.

LL: For sure. Maybe I'm overestimating what's sacred because I sometimes find it hard to locate what my authentic desires are. What are your authentic desires?

SJ: I think, especially when we're talking about literary communities or whatever, you can go to four readings in a night, and that’s really special. But every time you go out, there's this feeling of, am I going to meet someone that will change my life? Maybe peace for me looks like not feeling so reliant on this constant handshake economy, just putting my head down and getting a lot of work done, and trusting that things come from that. I really appreciate writers who are down to just talk about the work and be supportive. I guess that's what I desire: To write and to make work that I feel really excited about.

LL: Yeah, that's a perfect answer. What I'm hearing you say is that you desire to feel grounded. You desire to feel connected authentically to the people that you engage with.

SJ: One of my mantras is just: my feet are on the floor. I have to tell myself that I'm here and things are okay.

LL: It's kind of the only thing that's happening. There's nothing that happened before. Whatever's going to happen after is probably just potential.

SJ: It's not that serious.

LL: My desires are similar. I love to feel grounded. There's something really intoxicating about New York where, exactly like you said, you can go to four readings in a night. You can go find a gallery opening and meet ten people that you've never seen before, but you kind of know of. And it can be so nice to hop, hop, hop around. I find myself running towards the corner, and I'm a dog chasing its own tail around the same corner. It’s so nice to be high in that way. But then trying to see it for what it is, which is to get a little high and then return to something.

SJ: I have to get to my bar gig. But do you have any final words about your move or party or anything?

LL: My final words about my move are, “So excited to adventure.” About my party tomorrow, I think nothing so serious is going on. And your birthday, how are you feeling about it?

SJ: I'm so excited. Half a decade in New York, and more to come.