Clients

Liza Ward

Liza Ward is the author of Outside Valentine, a novel published by Henry Holt and Co. and Picador and a forthcoming novel whose name keeps changing, but will be published by Riverhead. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Agni, the Antioch Review, Best New American Voices, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and Vogue. She talks like she is always out of breath, presumably because of the masterpiece images that are crowding out her brain. To read certain paragraphs of hers is simply to say, “Wow.”

The Sixty Second Interview with… Liza Ward

How do you take your coffee? First I took my coffee with 1% milk. Then whole milk. Then I took it with half and half. Now I use cream.
What kinds of advice do your friends ask you for? Advice? At this particular juncture they are the ones providing it for me unless it has to do with a dog.
Did you make up a bunch of lies as a kid? Even at the age of 5 I was lying about my age, telling everyone I was younger than I was like a fifty-something year old woman. I also traveled a lot on airplanes by myself to and from Nebraska, showed horses and was training to be an Olympic figure skater.
Of all the metaphors by which writing has been portrayed, which is your favorite? I like the famous E.L. Doctorow quote on writing a novel : “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Speed kills.
Do you have any writing tics or blind spots that you had to conquer the hard way? Never talk too much about what you plan to write before you write it. The project and other’s expectations for it deflate it before it’s even had a chance to be born.
What’s next for you? See? To say would be to jinx.

Our (current) favorite sentence of Liza’s: “He remembers how it dawned on him in pieces that the man was not a stranger after all, but the cemetery superintendent Captain Ames—though it seems to him now that every man is a stranger until his desire is revealed—until you know his secrets.”