Lisa Russ Spaar’s debut novel Paradise Close, out in paperback next month from Persea, combines lyrical prose with the pacing of a thriller. Spaar’s background as a poet shines through as she tells the entwining stories of Marlise Schade, a struggling 14-year-old orphan in 1971, and Tee Handel, a sixty-something living out his days in solitude just before Trump's election. I corresponded with her about her transition from poetry to fiction and a book about second chances.
In a past interview, you said that you’d been thinking about situations and experiences you wanted to delve into that didn’t fit into poetry. What about these situations compelled you to address them in prose rather than poetry? And why fiction rather than essay or memoir?
I think maybe another kind of poet, a more confessional or narrative or identity-driven one, might have had no trouble at all delving in poetry into some of the “situations and experiences” to which you allude: mental illness and adolescent trauma, intergenerational dysfunction and legacies. But the mostly brief, sonnet-haunted, highly musical, and “veiled” poems of desire that I write (for God, for the natural world, for the L/lover) didn’t seem to allow for quite enough space and duration for the myriad stories I was trying to weave together in Paradise Close.
I did think about approaching this material in other ways, as perhaps a lyric essay or in a memoir. I’ve been working a bit recently with lyric essays, and I love the form, but for this story I didn’t want to have to weave in too many researched facts (though I did plenty of reading in primary and secondary sources for many aspects of the novel) in a way that seems important, at least for me, to include in a lyric or other assay/essay. And as for memoir, yikes. I just wanted, I suppose, some of that poetic “veil” I mention earlier, something I feared a memoir wouldn’t afford. Much of Paradise Close is based on my own experience, but, frankly, apart from not wanting to hurt or misrepresent any real persons in the work, I also found my own life experiences not as interesting and complex as I hope I’ve been able to make them in fiction, by inventing characters and amplifying in those fictional characters and experiences the emotional heft and gist of things I’ve absorbed from “real” experience.
What tools and experience from writing poetry helped you make the transition to writing fiction? What obstacles did you overcome?
To be honest, I’m not sure I have “overcome” those obstacles! In both poetry and prose, I’m still motivated by what Anne Carson calls stereoscopic vision: when one idea or character “floats” over another in a way that is provocative or revelatory—that’s when I’m hooked, whatever I’m writing. That said, in poetry, I can focus on what Emily Dickinson called, to paraphrase, the inscrutable champagne of the “interior,” and in fiction, my characters have to move and to speak in and to belong to an exterior world as well. I have no formal training in fiction, but my teachers have been the many, many, many novels and short stories I’ve read and reread over the years. In fact, I have probably read more fiction than I have poetry, and that has been true all of my life. Books are our best teachers maybe. Still, I do feel the lack of the kind of focus an immersion in fiction writing might have provided me. While I can feel that something is off in a poem and eventually know how to address it, that’s not always true for me with fiction.
This novel sprung from two distinct short stories you were writing that you eventually realized rhymed with each other. Were those original stories told from an omniscient POV as well? What made you sense that an omniscient narrator would work best for this novel?
Both “origin” stories for Paradise Close were also in third-person, but I tried various approaches along the way—different points of view for various sections—first, even second person. Finally, the approach in Paradise Close is not precisely omniscient, is it, but limited omniscient, right? So in any particular section, I’m mostly narrating within a focused point of view—and this is true not just in my treatment of the main characters, but of the minor ones as well. I finally settled on limited omniscient because if the novel is to work, we/the reader can’t really know who everyone is and how they’re connected until part three. Or at least that’s my hope.
You’ve mentioned how the poems of Emily Dickinson often seem more interested with a situation’s aftermath rather than precipitating events. How much did this philosophy play into where you started each of the three parts in the novel?
I haven’t really given this much thought until now. But, yes, I think each of the novel’s three sections throws the reader into a world in which antecedent, unnamed, has already occurred, and, if it’s working, the narration then finally conjures that precedent by the way characters react to its absence or to their inability or unwillingness to state exactly what precipitates their responses to it. The novel is less concerned with placing blame or finding precise sources for trauma than it is with seeing how people live on despite those things.
In a passage about the revolutionary mind of William Blake, Marlise muses on what might have been if Blake had been dulled by modern antidepressants. How does Silas, the painter and romantic interest of the teenage Marlise, fit into this theme?
I think about this a lot, and I’m not alone. A host of medications help people with various disabilities and otherly-ordered chemistries live. Most medications are, of course, toxins with positive side effects if dosed in the right cocktail, with the right timing, etc. But many who take them do so with mixed feelings—how much do the benefits outweigh their other effects? Were Blake, Van Gogh, Mew, Woolf, and host of other geniuses mad? Depressed? Bipolar? We cannot know, though many have speculated. And how would talk therapy and/or drugs have limited or enlarged what work they made and might have made in the world? Silas, a bit of a renegade, was a loose cannon, in a way, going off his meds for clarity, ending up in the shock rooms anyway. One big question of the book is: “why do some of us live and thrive? And others, just as creative and full of potential, not?”
As you explored themes about aging, what did you learn while writing that surprised you?
I found a renewed caring for my younger self and a grateful acceptance of my aging self. I’ve been privileged, saddened, and gladdened to witness my elders sink into dementia or living sharp, active lives into their late 90s. As I become an elder myself, I try to stay as present as I can, knowing that, as Theodore Roethke would say, “Great Nature has another thing to do / To you and me.”
Since finishing Paradise Close, how has your writing life looked? How have you been balancing fiction and poetry?
At about the same time that I was finishing up Paradise Close, I had also finished up gathering up a new and selected volume of poetry, Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems. That volume included poems from all of my previous collections and included new poems. After putting together a sort of career-marking book like that, it sometimes takes a while, as my friend the fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg says, “to grow a new brain.” But I have been writing poems, and a new collection of poems, Soul Cake, will come out in 2026. I’m also working on short stories, reviews, lyric essays, and a new novel. Not sure what will come of it all, but I guess that’s not why we writers often do what we do, is it?
