{"id":220841,"date":"2025-10-30T08:59:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gardenandgun.com\/?p=220841"},"modified":"2025-10-30T12:35:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T16:35:25","slug":"patricia-lockwood-has-a-blowtorch-and-a-searing-love-for-savannah-and-charleston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenandgun.com\/articles\/patricia-lockwood-has-a-blowtorch-and-a-searing-love-for-savannah-and-charleston","title":{"rendered":"Patricia Lockwood Has a Blowtorch and a Searing Love for Savannah and Charleston"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The writer Patricia Lockwood revels in being unconventional. She first splashed on the literary scene in the 2010s via her zany Twitter poems and has gone on to become a Booker Prize finalist for her novel No One Is Talking About This<\/em><\/a> (2021) and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books\u2014all without a college degree, much less an MFA. <\/p>\n\n\n

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When listening to Lockwood narrate her books, as I did for her powerful Thurber Prize\u2013winning memoir Priestdaddy<\/em><\/a> (2017) and her most recent novel, <\/em>Will There Ever Be Another You<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(newly released), her writing voice and her voice-voice meld indistinguishably. Her words are shellacked with her impish, hyper-observant, hilariously irreverent self, her tone simultaneously deadpan and profound. In this latest book, she offers fever-dream reflections on a global pandemic and seems to enjoy the fact that her readers (or listeners) may be scratching their heads, wondering where she\u2019ll go next. You get the sense that she, too, may be wondering the same. \u201cI am presenting the experience, and I write experimental books,\u201d Lockwood says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lockwood is a poet at heart, and her deliciously lyrical prose shines in this latest autofiction account of a writer who loses her ability to write and make sense of the world due to Covid\u2019s mysterious aftereffects. Lockwood herself still deals with Long Covid symptoms from a bout with the illness early in the pandemic. The book feels both whimsically nonsensical and deeply serious, and it turns out, that\u2019s what a conversation with the Savannah-based author feels like, too. Lockwood can turn a phrase and capture the world\u2019s absurdity, its beauty and heartbreak, like no other, and now that she has talked her husband into letting her add a metalsmithing blowtorch to her creative arsenal, all bets are off. We asked her about that, her new book, and her life in Savannah as she prepares for an upcoming appearance at the Charleston Literary Festival<\/a> in November. 

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You kept journals during the height of your illness, often writing on benches in Savannah\u2019s Madison Square, and \u201ceverything goes in,\u201d you\u2019ve said. To me, <\/strong>Will There Ever Be Another You<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>feels similar, like a stream-of-fuzzy-consciousness collage of observation and of paying attention. Did you have a sense when you were making notes during this crazy time that this might be workable material?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started with writing \u201cThe Changeling\u201d and a couple of shorter pieces, like \u201cPresence\u201d and \u201cBe-ing A-live\u201d [now chapters in the new novel]. I was proving to myself, You can do this. You can write a couple pages. You used to know how to do this.<\/em> So yes, I had notebooks where I collected all these observations, these refrains that I was experiencing. And what you say about everything going in, that was where I arrived for this novel\u2014that everything goes in. My fear of the floorboards. My sense of being totally unmoored. There\u2019s always some amount of collage and assemblage in my work, especially toward the end where I\u2019m like, Where does this go?<\/em> but more so with this book because I wanted to represent the pandemic experience as faithfully as possible. It\u2019s a book about madness, or the state of being inside the whirlwind, so I\u2019m not going to write that in a voice that is, \u201cHey, everything was normal and regular.\u201d

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Tell me more about the jig-sawing process. Did your editor help you tease out the thread?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My editors have largely always left me alone. I worked with Paul Slovak for Priestdaddy<\/em> and No One Is Talking About This<\/em>, and he\u2019s like this seven-foot-tall, really calm grasshopper, and he was just perfect. He would drop a line that would ring in my head and I\u2019d be able to do something with it. But typically, I discover what my books are as I go. I probably filled maybe seven notebooks in preparation for this one, so there was no dearth of material. It\u2019s just a matter of, you know, at the eleventh hour, this anecdote goes here, and hey, here\u2019s the through line I\u2019ve been looking for\u2014it\u2019s been present all along. So, yeah, my books kind of uncover themselves.

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After \u201cbeing born in a trailer in Indiana and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest,\u201d as you say in <\/strong>Priestdaddy<\/em><\/strong> and in your bio, you and your husband, Jason, chose Savannah as your home. Why Savannah? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve been there on and off about ten years and, in that time, have lived all over the downtown district. We\u2019re now down in Starland. I love living in a place where art is happening all the time. When I see students walking by with their huge portfolios, I feel like I\u2019m part of something. I also love that because Savannah is art-oriented and the literary scene is a bit more diffuse, people don\u2019t necessarily know who you are. I like walking around and feeling like a free citizen of this place. It\u2019s great getting to do your own thing incognito. And Savannah, well, it\u2019s just one of the most beautiful places that I\u2019ve ever been to. When I travel somewhere, like say I\u2019m in Belgium and I\u2019m loving this beautiful Belgian landscape, and then I come back home and drive past these majestic trees and I just think, there\u2019s no lovelier place on Earth. It\u2019s always a good homecoming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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