Millburn-Short Hills Magazine Spring 2020 | Page 24

literature Sunny in Person, Sinister on the Page Reviews for South Orange author Laura Sims’ Looker are scarily good WRITTEN BY CINDY SCHWEICH HANDLER S 22 SPRING 2020 MILLBURN & SHORT HILLS MAGAZINE I had gotten into a graduate pro- gram for poetry and postponed it to stay longer in Japan. When I came back, I got an MFA at the University of Washington in Seattle. WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO WRIT- ING POETRY? I love the brevity of it. It’s so nice to finish something in a page. From a creator’s point of view, there are bursts of satisfaction that are so wonderful. You have to be exact with the language, and it often deals with high emotion. ARE YOU A LIFELONG WRITER? Yes. At William & Mary College, I stud- ied English and minored in Japanese studies. I had gone to Japan in high school on a scholarship for a couple months, fell in love with it, and went back after college. I was on the JET — Japan Exchange and Teaching — Programme for three years. You’re teaching English as an assistant teacher in K-12 classrooms, but you don’t have a lot to do, so I had a lot of free time for reading and writing. HOW DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE READY TO SEGUE INTO WRITING A NOVEL? In high school, I had some supportive teachers who loved my poems and I decided “I’m a poet.” But I used to write fiction when I was a little kid, and I had been wanting to get back to it for some time. It was always there for me. In my early 30s, I thought I would write children’s literature. After my son was born, I wrote two Young Adult novels. I used his nap-time to write a paragraph or so. HOW IS WRITING A NOVEL DIFFER- ENT FROM WRITING POETRY? It’s the daily-ness that helps chip away at it because it’s so long. When I’m writing a poem, it usually starts with a burst of inspiration. I can get words OF SCRIBNER outh Orange poet and novelist Laura Sims recalls writing a pair of poems when she was 5 or 6 years old. “The first was ‘I like crackers/ I like bread/ because they’re both dead,” she says. “The second was worse: ‘I like mothers/ I like fathers/ because they’re both both dead.’ Yes, ‘both’ twice. I’m sure my parents were a little unnerved by that.” The Richmond, Virginia, native laughs as she concedes that though her disposition is upbeat, she does enjoy dark books and TV shows, and “exploring the darker side of life. But I don’t want that in my everyday life.” She says that she has plenty to feel good about these days, since she, her husband and 9-year-old son are enjoying sub- urban life, and her debut novel, Looker, was published last year to warm reviews, including one in The New Yorker. On March 28, Sims will appear at the Montclair Literary Festival on a panel called, appro- priately, “Dark Matters.” Millburn & Short Hills Magazine asked her about her writing inspiration and process, and how the producers of HBO’s Sharp Objects were drawn to her work.