Lily Brooks-Dalton on Creating Hope

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Lily Brooks-Dalton about her latest novel, The Light Pirate.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: No one is obligated to write a climate change story that has hope you can choose to have it or not. But I think your story has hope, and you said earlier taking care of the things and people you love help you when writing difficult things and I’m wondering if that helps you create hope, or if that makes you create hope?

Lily Brooks-Dalton: Yeah, a little of both. It’s interesting. I feel like the form of a book and the length of a book feels really important to me, in terms of getting to that hope, you know.  Three hundred pages is a long time to kind of give due deference to the feelings of grief and doom and hopelessness. And that, to me feels equally as important as threading in this other stream of hope. You know, I think, on the occasions when I’ve been invited to speak about the book, or, you know, about writing in some way, it’s been a really interesting challenge to condense that process into whatever time is allotted to kind of try and get through all the things that are so difficult and hard to think about in order to try and gift the audience with this kernel of hope at the end. And it almost feels insurmountable to me, sometimes. And so, I guess that’s why I write books, because there’s something feels really dishonest and even sadder to me about presenting unearned hope. Or trying to tie a bow really fast before the grief has been fully witnessed and unpacked. So yeah, they have to go together, I think.

MR: in a way, what you’re saying or how I perceive it is you are creating a relationship with your reader. Like, you are not separate from understanding the emotional journey that this reader is on. I mean, yes, you have to have the sentence level, you have to have the plot, but there’s some other resonance, you’re talking about being the caretaker for.

LBD: Absolutely. And so, I think, you know, that’s another layer of that of the answer to a previous question about how does one take care of themselves while doing this kind of thing? Well, part of that is woven into the work itself. Like I’m endeavoring to show the reader something really hard and ask them to sit with it, and also give them something to take away from it that is a little bit brighter and a little bit easier to hold. And that’s for me, too. That’s something I’m creating for myself also, as I go.

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​Lily Brooks-Dalton is the bestselling author of The Light Pirate, which was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, one of NPR’s “Books We Love,” and a New York Times Editors’ Pick. Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky and her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has been translated into 18 languages. A former writer-in-residence at The Kerouac House and The Studios of Key West, she currently lives in Los Angeles.