The Beauty and Danger of Place: An Interview with Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

“Where a place is holds great beauty, but it can also hold potential for danger as well.”

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. He also serves as series editor of The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories: writers of color. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, SLICE, Terrain, and many others. His nonfiction, interviews, and reviews have appeared in BOMB, River Teeth, Sycamore Review, Tin House, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has been supported by the Iowa Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Writing Center, Anderson Center, and others. He currently lives in the Driftless region of the upper Midwest and is a 2023-25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts.

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The first thing I wanted to ask about is location. I was able to read Mississippi River Museum, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, and some of your nonfiction work. And the location was interesting to me especially because I’m also from the Midwest; I’m from Michigan. So did you grow up in Iowa, and have you always lived there?

Yeah, I grew up in Iowa. I was actually born in North Carolina and I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is probably the second largest city in Iowa next to Des Moines, which is the state capital. I now live about two hours north of Cedar Rapids in a small town called Decorah. And we’re located in this area called the Driftless Region, which is sort of marked by dramatic hills and valleys and steep ravines. It’s quite lovely actually. It’s really unlike any other part of the state, which is probably what keeps me living in Iowa. Our neighbors to the north, Minnesota, they’re known for their lakes — the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” In Iowa we’re quite lake-deprived. But in this area of the state in particular, we have a lot of cold water creeks, streams, rivers. So that is where that sort of topography makes it interesting with the steep ravines and the cliffs and the bluffs and everything else.

And that’s interesting hearing you mention Cedar Rapids, because that was what I was going to ask about, especially with your stories from We Could’ve Been Happy Here. Have you always set your writing in Iowa or in places you’re familiar with? And how does that location affect your writing? Because you write a lot of vivid descriptions of nature and of the characters in the environment, so how does that impact your work?

I have tried to write about other locations, but I keep coming back to Iowa. I think partly, for obvious reasons, because it’s the only place I’ve really known to a great extent, to the point where I can conjure one of those, as you mentioned, vivid descriptions without having to reach too far. I have written other stories that take place in other parts of the Midwest, but they’re oftentimes places that I have a deep familiarity with. Places where I’ve traveled, mostly the upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of the Dakotas. I also spent some time when I was in grad school out in Vermont, southern Vermont at Bennington, and that’s like a second home to me. I love Vermont; I love the subtle Appalachian mountains, which are really great, big, green hills, which are also quite beautiful. I’ve tried writing about that area but, for whatever reason, I haven’t been able to do it with success, so I just keep coming back to Iowa.

Well, like you said, you’re most familiar with it, and it shows in your writing.

Yeah. The thing about setting too is I like to acknowledge the beauty of the place, I think partly because Iowa isn’t known for its richness of land and beauty. It’s known for flat, corn, hogs, and other unsavory things I’m sure I could probably list too. But I like to expound on the more beautiful parts of the state. I also like to create tension; where a place is holds great beauty, but it can also hold potential for danger as well. I think that’s interesting in how that setting can in turn apply pressure to a character or a narrator or a protagonist. I think that is an interesting dynamic that I try to play around with with regard to setting.

I like how you brought up characters because that was one thing I wanted to touch on. You already mentioned how your location obviously affects the content, and in turn affects the characters, so I wanted to ask about character in general. That’s what stuck out to me most in your short stories and works, the way you capture very real people — real characters with real issues and problems. So what is your approach in creating those real, everyday-type people?

I like spending time with those everyday, realistic type of people. In other words, I do like to write in the vein of that sort of realistic fiction. I think the expression of the characters on the page is a result of my spending just a lot of time with them on the page. The chapbook, Mississippi River Museum, that’s a story that I started I want to say 2015; it was a long time ago. And that essentially is a long short story. It’s published as a chapbook, but it’s like an 11,000-word short story. I spent a lot of time with Joe; I spent a lot of time with Christian. I spent a lot of time in that space with those people so that when it was time to put them in situations, I didn’t have to think about how they would speak, how they would act. They just sort of did that on their own because I knew them so well. Similarly with the book We Could’ve Been Happy Here, those stories, which I wrote mostly between the years 2012 and 2014 when I was in graduate school, those too were stories that I spent an enormous amount of time with so that I could drop into a scene with a character and challenge that character’s thoughts, actions, voice without really much of a thought. And that was just a result of sheer patience really and spending time with them. I think one of the lovely parts about being in grad school for me was that I had no pressure to publish. No one even talked about publishing. The conversations were around, like you were saying, character development, setting, language. Those things that first excite us into wanting to write to begin with. And so I was able to set aside all those after the writing stuff, like publishing, to just focus on the characters and the story itself.

I like that. And you said that you’ve done that with multiple works, spending time with them for years and years. Do you think that that is helpful with where you’re going with a story, spending longer time with it?

Yeah, for me it is. I think I’m on the slow end in terms of writing. I feel like there are people who sort of rattle off novels every year, every other year. Richard Powers, I don’t know how he does it; he’s the guy who wrote The Overstory. I feel like he writes a lot. And I’m happy for him; it’s just that my process is so much different. Let me give you one other example from a non-published work. I recently finished a couple drafts of a novel. And I started working on this novel, like really working on it with intention, back in June of 2022. And in August of 2023, so about a year and three or four months later, I finished one full draft of that novel. Now you think, well that’s actually not too bad. But I’m still in the process of writing it. But I started that project, parts of that project, some of the language in that novel, some of the words in that novel, some of the scenes in that novel, are from writing exercises and writings I was doing back in like 2009 or 2010. So, when I say I’m a pretty slow writer! I mean, it’s like glacial.

Well, it gets there eventually!

It gets there eventually, yeah.

You mentioned it with Mississippi River Museum; you referred to it as a chapbook. But like you said, it reads almost like a longer short story. And so I wanted to ask about the different forms you write in. Because We Could’ve Been Happy Here is a collection of short stories, and Mississippi River Museum is also quite short. And even in some of the works in We Could’ve Been Happy Here, they read sort of like flash fictions. Have you always written in those sort of shorter forms? And what draws you to those shorter works?

Yeah, other than that short anecdote I shared with you about this most recent work, this novel, I’ve almost always exclusively written in a short form. Short stories, flash fiction. I love reading short stories; it’s what brought me into being a writer. I’m trying to think of a fancy quote. It’s, “a writer is a reader moved to emulation.” Which is by, oh, I have no idea who said that. But anyway, when I first started getting into writing, I did it because I wanted to record family stories. So I was writing a lot of nonfiction and I was writing a lot of memoir-ish pieces, brief personal essays. And then I audited a creative writing class at the college where I was working and I loved it. I felt very liberated by the idea of writing fiction because I felt bound by this sort of contract you have with the reader if you’re writing nonfiction and it’s supposed to be true. Of course, I know now that that’s completely false. But at the time I was sort of constricted by it. But when I started reading fiction, things opened up for me that hadn’t opened up when I was writing nonfiction. I could just make things up. I could allow my imagination to work. My imagination was working when I was writing nonfiction too, but it was different when I was writing fiction. The first fiction pieces I read that I really loved, and I thought, I want to, at some point in my life, attempt to try something this beautiful. Knowing that it may never ever happen, but it was the thing that, again, as a reader, moved me to emulation. Moved me to wanting to be a writer. Those were all short fiction pieces. And so I started off as a short fiction writer. I still read mostly short story collections. I also read novels. But I mostly read short stories; I mostly read short story collections. I love to read them; I love to write them. So in my mind I’ll always be a short story writer first. If I ever get this novel published, who knows. But if I ever do, I’ll, of course, have a novel. But I’ll still always consider myself a short story writer first. Because that was my first love, it will always be my first love. And for the foreseeable future, I’ll always write short stories.

I like that you brought up fiction versus nonfiction. I always find that very interesting. You kind of got into it, but how does your process change when you’re in that fiction writing mode as opposed to nonfiction? Because I feel like for me, there’s a freedom with fiction because I can still technically write nonfiction, but just change certain details so that no one can claim that what I’m writing is about me. Do you find that as well or how is your approach different?

Of course, a lot of the work I write has roots in true or real events, true or real people. The freedom for me and where the story really starts to take off for me is when I have that little tiny thing that blossoms into a fuller story. I can’t know too much about the story, about the real story, otherwise it stifles my imagination. I’ll give you an example. I have a relative who’s been in and out of treatment for many many years. He’s an alcoholic. He makes his money gambling. So he was telling me this great story once about how he was in a treatment center and had his dad sneak his computer in for him so that he could do online gambling. And then when he was in a halfway house, he wasn’t supposed to leave after a certain time, but he would sneak out of the house to go Canterbury Downs, which is up in Minneapolis, to gamble. Because that’s how he made his money. He was what they call a grinder. I know that has different connotations now, but back in the late 90s, early 2000s, we referred to grinders as people who made a living playing poker. These weren’t just people who’d go out and play for fun. These were people who were paying the bills through poker. So he told me this story. We were at my house hanging out, and he doesn’t drink, so he was smoking. He must have gone through a pack of cigarettes and about three gallons of coffee when he was telling me this story, and I was taking notes the whole time, just scribbling notes. He said, hey I got a story for you and you need to write this down. So I started writing it down, and it was just such a great story. And there was some romance too. He had developed a romantic relationship with one of the blackjack dealers. So it had everything! It had gambling, addiction, romance. So then I went to sit down and write this story, I changed the name of the characters, changed some of the things. But then I maybe got like 500 words into it, like a page and a half, two pages into it. I had to stop writing because I just got stalled out. And what I concluded was that I already knew too much of this story for it to go anyplace else in the scope of my imagination. I couldn’t take it where I wanted it to go because I already knew the beginning, the middle, and the end. And so the most successful stories for me are when I hear of just a tiny little snippet of something and then I can allow my imagination to fill in the rest of it as it works through the parts of the story, as it works through the character development, and the story itself will take shape. But that story about my cousin, it was a story that won’t be written. If it’s written, it will be written in a form of nonfiction, or it will be written when I’ve already forgotten all the details of the story so that I can fill them in with my own imagination and let the story take a different shape. I don’t know if any of that even makes sense to you, but that’s how I think about fiction and nonfiction. And in some ways, as far as fiction-nonfiction goes. I think us, here in the United States, we’re very much occupied by this idea of nonfiction versus fiction. And I think in other countries, like in Europe for example, they aren’t as hung up on it. They’re more like, we want to hear an interesting story. They’re more interested in language and structure more so than is this fiction, is this nonfiction? That kind of thing.

Interesting. I like what you said about how when you’re in the process of writing, that’s when you discover where the story takes you as opposed to going in knowing the beginning and end. So, for you, it’s almost like you have to go in blind and see where it leads?

I’ve gotten addicted to this sort of element of surprise in the writing. I’m not talking about someone jumping out from behind a door, “surprise!” You know, that kind of surprise. The surprise could just be the moment in the story when the characters start to say and do things from which I had not predetermined or set out for them to begin with. Sometimes this happens sooner in the story than later. Sometimes it happens later than sooner. But I feel like as a reader, I enjoy when there’s this inevitable surprise that happens in the story or the book. I think similarly as a writer, I feel compelled by that. That I’m writing toward that. Of course, a lot of things have to happen before that surprise as a writer. You have to familiarize yourself with the situation, the setting, the characters, the conflict, all those basic literary elements. But then after that, that’s what I’m maybe writing for. That story about my cousin, the gambler, there was no surprise there. I knew how it started, I knew how it ended, and so as I was writing it, I was stifled by the fact that I was just sort of going through the motions. Like this was already predetermined. This was already set out for me, and I couldn’t divorce myself from the facts of the story and the new story that I was trying to create.

Right. And similarly with what you did when you were talking with your cousin, when he was telling you his story, do you find yourself doing that a lot out in the world, whether it’s eavesdropping or jotting down random notes or ideas, do you find that you do that regularly?

Oh I love to eavesdrop on people! It’s like one of my hobbies. And I do it unabashedly. I tell my students, and I know other people have said this too, but one of the wonderful things about being a writer is that it gives you permission to eavesdrop on people. I’m very much listening for peoples’ dialect, interesting ways of saying things. That helps me to find a character I think, when I can hear them speak. Oftentimes though I’ll hear a story or just like a snippet of a story and think, oh that was interesting! I’m working on a story right now, and you’re the only person in the world who knows this, so I’m going to just share it with you because it’s an example of how this sort of plays out. I was walking home one day from downtown Decorah, where I live. And there was a guy chipping golf balls from the little boulevard in front of his house into an empty lot across the street. He would chip balls across the street, and he would wait of course until the cars would pass by. But there were these huge divots, and once he made a divot he would go out and pick up the clump from the street and tamp it back down. And I, well, know a few things about him. He’s tall, he’s taller than me, probably like 6’3. He’s in pretty good shape but he’s an older gentleman. He’s probably in his 60s I’d say, so he’s older than me. When I say old I don’t mean old old, but older than me. He drives a blue Subaru. He keeps a golf bag in his trunk as far as I can see. He seems to be single. He lives in a duplex, and he doesn’t really talk to me when I walk by. But he’s not unfriendly, if that makes sense. I’ll just pass by him and I’ll nod and maybe make a comment about him chipping golf balls. Then he’ll just kinda do one of these (small nod), but he won’t talk to me. And I don’t really ever see him around town either. The one time I’ve seen him outside of his house he was hauling a snowblower from the trunk of his Subaru, and he was going to help somebody by snow blowing their sidewalk, or maybe he’d just got done slow blowing and he was putting his snowblower back. So that to me is an interesting character and situation. Someone who chips golf balls into an empty lot from across the street, walks over, collects them. All of this guy’s movements are very — they’re not slow; they’re almost meditative. So I started writing a story about a guy who lives alone in a duplex and chips balls from the boulevard of his street. But of course it’s not going to be a story about him. So I have no idea why I just told you all of that. I think it had to do with the question that you had asked earlier.

Yeah! Seeing the world around you and recording characters or situations.

Now, if you want to write that story about that guy, that’s fine too. I’m sure there’s plenty of room in the world for two stories like that.

Okay, ’cause I was gonna say, do you want me to not include that in the blog? Because now everyone’s gonna hear it!

Yeah. That’s okay, that’s okay.

Ha, great! So the last question I had is mainly one that I personally find very interesting, but I’m always fascinated by what a writer’s specific routine or process is when they sit down to write. Do you have a very distinct setup, or is it more fluid?

It’s changed over the years. When I first started to write I tried to wake up very early in the morning, and if I had a good hour of writing in in the morning, I felt like I could do anything else during the day and I would have at least gotten that one hour of writing in. That was a very good thing. That was more so getting a bunch of things down process. As far as editing goes, I used to print manuscripts, and my kids when they were younger were in a bunch of activities, and you’d go pick them up from that activity, but then you’d inevitability have to wait in the car for like five or ten minutes because coaches or whomever were keeping them late. So I learned, instead of getting upset about it, I would bring a manuscript with me and I would read it in the car. And if I could get into a page or two while waiting for my kids, that was one or two more pages edited that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So I was rigid about certain things, but flexible in other ways. I had the idea when I was younger that I thought I am not a real writer unless I am writing every day. And I had this perhaps toxic idea about what being a writer meant. I’m much more generous with myself now. I don’t think you have to write every day to be a writer. I’ve had to give myself permission to adopt that thought because I was very regimented about it when I was younger. When I was first starting out, I wrote every day. Now I try to write every day, but if I don’t, no big deal. I just write when I can. And I don’t get up early in the mornings to write as much anymore. If I’m in the middle of a project I will, but I do other things. I’ve got other things going on. Like I get up in the morning to play basketball for example, and that feels like an important part of my day too. Also I’m on this academic calendar, so I write in the summer a lot. And that momentum carries me through the fall typically. And I’ve gone many winters now without writing much. Of course I’m always writing. I’m writing down notes or thinking about things, but I’m much more generous with myself now in terms of what it means to be a writer as far as process goes. I’m much more relaxed about it.

I like that. And especially hearing you say that. Because I know I can definitely be a perfectionist and have an all-or-nothing type of mentality, so hearing someone like you say that, it’s really good to hear. Being generous with yourself and not labeling yourself as “not a writer” because you didn’t write today.

Yeah. I went like six months once without writing a single word. I was kind of in a rut a little bit. I was going through a rough patch personally, and writing was causing me a lot of stress. And I didn’t realize that until I said it out loud. I just said, I’m going to be done writing for the foreseeable future. I just said it. And after I said it, I was very much relieved about it. Then I didn’t write for six months. Like a solid six months. And that was back in 2021, early 2022. And then after that, for whatever reason, in June of 2022 I started writing again. It wasn’t forced; it just happened naturally.

Yeah. And like you said, sometimes you need that. To take a step back, so then when you get back into it, it isn’t as forced.

Exactly.

Jackie Reilly is a senior English major and writing minor at MTSU. She plays for the women’s soccer team.