Lisa Marie Basile has worked as a creative writer in poetry and prose, an editor for multiple venues, and a journalist, on both sides of the page, in unlike styles, bringing something of herself to each role.
“I’m so fortunate to have been able to work creatively in my personal and professional life, for the most part. More often than not, I’m allowed to let my personal voice shine through, and I’m so grateful. I think I bring poetry to all of my work. As an essayist, I try to keep a sense of liminality intact. Language that sings. The fluidity. The shape. In my nonfiction book, Light Magic for Dark Times (September 2018), which is a book of practices for regeneration, autonomy, creativity, resilience, glamour, sex magic . . . I approached it similarly: Make the reader feel something. Let the language dance a little. How do I describe what the poet does? It’s hard! I think I will work on a thousand different writing projects in my life, but all of them will have the bones of the poetry. Hard to shake.”
U.S. politics seemed to take mass consciousness by surprise this year. A popular club called The Resistance sprang up instantly, with a name seeming to imply an unavoidable stalemate rather than an alternative. I didn’t want to fight or surrender, that stuff seems like old news. Why not call it the Transformation if that’s what you’re after? I wondered. Why not do the opposite? In my interpretation, combining literary creativity with magic involves expanding possibility in art and life by writing a better way into being, then living it out. It’s that thing Einstein said, the theories of Robert Anton Wilson, Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller. “Just Say No” was a previous example of the same species of unempowering aphorisms. Whether or not she was likewise affected in this case, what’s her personal method of bypassing roadblocks like political slogans in life and writing with magic?
“I hope to answer this question. It’s a big one. I believe that resistance, empathy, awareness and compassion go hand in hand with creativity. To create, at least for me, the voice and tone and mood of a story, essay, or poem, I must inhabit and be inhabited by the world we live in. I must understand (to the extent I can–by watching, listening, osmosis, activism) the fear and trauma and reclamation and celebration of the world around me. I think a lot of artists are like this, but I also think non-artists think like this too. To live is to be aware, to speak out, to learn, to listen. The government must think we’re actually stupid if we are going to go or stay silent. We are not. What happened to this country is an abomination, but I can’t say it’s surprising. That’s why we have to keep speaking out, through art or otherwise. For me, simply wanting to create beauty or be inhabited by a state of beauty, is a resistance. Beauty can be ugly, too. But creating, making, sharing–it’s something good that we have, or still have, and that helps to counteract the violence, oppression, and loneliness of the world around us. That’s a form of magic. Putting energy to word. And word to energy.”