Interview / Lauren Davis 

 

Lau­ren Davis

Edi­tor-in-Chief Sean Cho A.*: Lau­ren Davis’s debut sto­ry col­lec­tion, The Noth­ing (YesYes Books,  2025), draws read­ers into Wash­ing­ton’s Olympic Penin­su­la: a land­scape that’s as haunt­ing and mys­te­ri­ous as the strange worlds her char­ac­ters nav­i­gate. In our con­ver­sa­tion, Davis talked about how writ­ing fic­tion gave her a new cre­ative out­let beyond her poet­ry, opened up about the phys­i­cal toll that writ­ing can take, and explored how silence, set­ting, and the unex­pect­ed ele­ment shape sto­ries about iso­la­tion, loss, and unset­tling wonder.

While The Noth­ing is your debut prose work, you’ve been an accom­plished poet with mul­ti­ple col­lec­tions and chap­books: Home Beneath the Church (Fer­n­wood Press), When I Drowned (Kel­say Books), Each Wild Thing’s Con­sent (Poet­ry Wolf Press), The Miss­ing Ones (Win­ter Texts), and your work with Whit­tle Micro-Press.

In an inter­view with The Leader, you men­tioned, “I start­ed writ­ing poet­ry as soon as I could spell,” and lat­er, when dis­cussing The Noth­ing, you said “(fic­tion) was a place where I could exper­i­ment, with­out the pres­sure of it being any good.”

What fresh per­spec­tive did writ­ing fic­tion offer you? Were there moments of sur­prise when craft­ing The Noth­ing? Are there lessons you’re tak­ing back into your poet­ry practice?

The process of craft­ing The Noth­ing was made entire­ly of sur­pris­es. I was sur­prised to wit­ness the dark turns my mind kept tak­ing in the sto­ries I wrote, that fic­tion offered me a place to indulge my shad­ow side, much more so than in poet­ry. I was sur­prised that it was, in fact, quite plea­sur­able to take those dark turns. I was also sur­prised that, at oth­er times, espe­cial­ly the final edit­ing phase, it felt like I was using a dif­fer­ent part of my brain than I use for poet­ry, a part that was a bit atro­phied and low on oxygen. 

One thing that I did not expect was the seem­ing dis­ap­pear­ance of my abil­i­ty to write poet­ry. It was as if I could not write both poet­ry and fic­tion at the same time. I felt like I had been forced to choose, though I had not known at the time I was mak­ing a choice. I would sit down and try to write poet­ry and find I was writ­ing the same poem over and over, or that I was writ­ing what I was pret­ty sure was gib­ber­ish. This went on the entire time I was work­ing on final edits for The Noth­ing, and it con­tin­ued after the book was released. I had this belief that I had angered Poet­ry with a cap­i­tal P by turn­ing to fic­tion. That I had betrayed Poet­ry, and Poet­ry would no longer speak to me. This is a very fan­ci­ful way of think­ing about writ­ing, but it felt like the only expla­na­tion. I am accus­tomed to long silences in my cre­ative process. I have nev­er been a dai­ly writer. There have always been ebbs and flows. But this silence had a dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty to it, and it went on longer than nor­mal. I have writ­ten poet­ry since I was a small child. Why was the abil­i­ty sud­den­ly gone?

What I did not con­sid­er was my phys­i­cal health. If I had tak­en a bird’s‑eye view soon­er, I would have real­ized there was some­thing big­ger going on, and I would not have felt lost for so many months. My mind was not work­ing the same way it had been before because some­thing was wrong at the cel­lu­lar lev­el. It wasn’t until I was sit­ting on the couch one day short of breath for absolute­ly no dis­cern­able rea­son did I accept that I need­ed to go to the doc­tor and maybe get some blood­work. And only when the results came back, and I found out that I had a nutri­tion­al defi­cien­cy that could and would affect my cog­ni­tion, did I think to myself, no, maybe it is not Poet­ry pun­ish­ing me for step­ping out­side our rela­tion­ship. Maybe it is, in fact, that I need to take a sup­ple­ment. The irony is I had been read­ing books on neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty for over a year, yet I had not con­sid­ered the cor­re­la­tion between my cre­ative health, over­all phys­i­cal health, and brain health.

It was eas­i­er for me to see how phys­i­cal pain or poor men­tal health could dis­turb my writ­ing process. It was much hard­er for me to accept how nutri­tion, or lack there­of, could com­plete­ly throw my cre­ative prac­tice off. I am pret­ty sure this means I am going to become an insuf­fer­able cre­ative writ­ing instruc­tor that rec­om­mends not only nature walks and a read­ing prac­tice, but also mul­ti­vi­t­a­mins, eight glass­es of water a day, and year­ly checkups. 

That being said, it’s obvi­ous I sim­ply do not have the reserves and sta­mi­na that oth­er writ­ers have. There are end­less exam­ples of writ­ers who have cre­at­ed mas­ter­pieces under extreme duress—mental, phys­i­cal, and spir­i­tu­al. But that’s not my story.

I don’t feel as if Poet­ry has left me now. I believe I had not main­tained the prop­er home for it, and nat­u­ral­ly, it could not live there. My present task is to recre­ate for it a benign, healthy place to preside.

I’m inter­est­ed in the worlds and tonal­i­ties The Noth­ing cre­ates: at times sur­re­al, at oth­ers ground­ed in real­i­ty, and some­times exist­ing in what you describe in an inter­view with What We Read­ing as “slip­stream.” These var­ied modes seem to play into recur­ring themes of iso­la­tion, loss, and grief, which often leave read­ers with what Aaron Burch notes as “a haunt­ing feeling.”

How are you think­ing about set­ting and place as vehi­cles for these themes? The spaces in your sto­ries often feel both spe­cif­ic and dream­like: how do you craft that bal­ance between the con­crete and the ethereal?

As a poet tran­si­tion­ing to fic­tion, set­ting isn’t some­thing you pre­vi­ous­ly “had to” con­sid­er in such con­crete fash­ion. Did the for­mal demands of cre­at­ing fic­tion­al set­tings lead to any inter­est­ing insights about how place func­tions in your work more broadly?

Most of the places men­tioned in these sto­ries, real and imag­ined, are on the Olympic Penin­su­la, where I live. The Olympic Penin­su­la is geo­graph­i­cal­ly iso­lat­ed. The ter­rain is large­ly rugged and much of it is unde­vel­oped and impass­able. Before mov­ing here, I was com­plete­ly igno­rant of the fact that there are rain­forests in the con­tigu­ous Unit­ed States. The trees are so large that, at first, they fright­ened me. You can walk into the rain­for­est a few feet and become com­plete­ly dis­ori­ent­ed and lost. I know, because it hap­pened to me.

These char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Olympic Peninsula—remoteness, rugged­ness, dan­ger­ous­ness, otherworldliness—made it the per­fect loca­tion for the sto­ries in The Noth­ing. The rain­forests will swal­low you with one wrong turn. There is already a nat­ur­al bal­ance between the con­crete and the ethe­re­al here. I just had to take advan­tage of it.

In my poet­ry, I’ve writ­ten about many loca­tions in Wash­ing­ton State, but I wrote about them more out of a sense of rev­er­ence. I don’t think that same lev­el of wor­ship­ful­ness comes through in The Noth­ing. Instead, there’s more def­er­ence and fear in my fiction.

I great­ly strug­gled with a sense of cohe­sion in this book, and “place” was the final thread that I delib­er­ate­ly sewed. When I was first orga­niz­ing the man­u­script, I kept order­ing the sto­ries with the same mind­set that I ordered pre­vi­ous poet­ry books. My pub­lish­er told me the sto­ries, in their pre­vi­ous order, were talk­ing to each oth­er. She said it as a neg­a­tive. I couldn’t under­stand how that was a prob­lem. I didn’t real­ize I need­ed to order things so that the sto­ries didn’t cre­ate a false sense of bleed­ing into each oth­er. Inter­con­nect­ed­ness wouldn’t come from one story’s end­ing insin­cere­ly echo­ing anoth­er story’s begin­ning. It came from theme, tone, and, last­ly, place.

I want­ed to dis­cuss one spe­cif­ic sto­ry, “Into the Sun” (also pub­lished in Cut­leaf in Novem­ber 2022). Ear­ly in the sto­ry, Jonathan “asks” ques­tions but his lips do not move, and there is no sound. By cut­ting out spo­ken dia­logue entire­ly, you plunge the read­er into an imme­di­ate sense of dis­lo­ca­tion: an uncan­ny absence of voice that mir­rors the char­ac­ters’ own uncer­tain­ty. This silence car­ries through to the final rev­e­la­tion of the lim­i­nal space: when they dig and dis­cov­er the glass bar­ri­er, the nar­ra­tor’s dream­ing body lies in per­fect, silent repose.

In poet­ry, white space func­tions as a form of silence: a place where what isn’t said becomes just as sig­nif­i­cant as what is writ­ten. How was the emp­ty dia­logue oper­at­ing for you in this sto­ry? Was it func­tion­ing as a kind of nar­ra­tive “white space” that both dis­ori­ents the read­er and pre­fig­ures the sto­ry’s rev­e­la­tion of the paused, lim­i­nal realm?

I’m not try­ing to be coy, but I real­ly don’t know where “Into the Sun” came from. When I sub­mit­ted it to lit­er­ary jour­nals, it felt like a leap. And lat­er, when the same edi­tor who accept­ed it for Cut­leaf helped me with the over­all struc­ture of The Noth­ing, I told him I nev­er real­ly expect­ed the sto­ry to land. He sug­gest­ed I make it the first sto­ry in the man­u­script, and I still felt like I was ask­ing too much of it. A great deal depends on the first sto­ry. It can make or break a book. But I took his sug­ges­tion, and he was, of course, right.

 My inten­tion with many of the sto­ries in The Noth­ing is to make the read­er ques­tion their expe­ri­ence and inter­pre­ta­tions con­stant­ly. I want the read­er to feel as if they are not on sol­id ground, as if they aren’t quite sure if what they are read­ing is a prod­uct of a character’s real or imag­ined expe­ri­ence. So in that respect, the white space was meant to dis­ori­ent the read­er. But there are things about the worlds I cre­at­ed that I will nev­er tell any­one. I was work­ing on a piece and anoth­er writer asked me, “Did xyz hap­pen?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And she said, “The read­er doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to know, but you need to know.” I’ve car­ried that insight into the cre­ation of every sto­ry. I know what’s going on, but it doesn’t mean I am going to tell any­one. So in that respect, I am, in fact, being quite coy. 

I appre­ci­ate your con­nec­tion between poet­ic white space and the white space in “Into the Sun.” There’s also an unin­ten­tion­al and unfore­seen metaphor there about the “white space” I expe­ri­enced in my cre­ative life while fin­ish­ing up The Noth­ing—that long cre­ative silence I am just now dig­ging my way out of. I think each moment of white space—in poet­ry, in the world of “Into the Sun,” and in the cre­ative life—holds more ques­tions than answers. I am a wor­ship­per of ques­tions. I fear the unknown. I fear uncer­tain­ty. But I also trav­el again and again, like a dis­ci­ple, to those blurred edges. What is devo­tion if not worship?

Lau­ren Davis is the author of the short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Noth­ing (YesYes Books), the poet­ry col­lec­tion Home Beneath the Church (Fer­n­wood Press), the Eric Hof­fer Grand Prize short-list­ed When I Drowned, and the chap­books Each Wild Thing’s Con­sent (Poet­ry Wolf Press), The Miss­ing Ones (Win­ter Texts), and Sivvy (Whit­tle Micro-Press). She holds an MFA from the Ben­ning­ton Col­lege Writ­ing Sem­i­nars. She is a for­mer Edi­tor in Res­i­dence at The Puri­tan’s Town Crier, and she is the win­ner of the Land­ing Zone Mag­a­zine’s Flash Fic­tion Con­test. Her sto­ries, essays, poet­ry, inter­views, and reviews have appeared in numer­ous lit­er­ary pub­li­ca­tions and antholo­gies includ­ing Prairie Schooner, Spill­way, Poet Lore, Ibbet­son Street, Ninth Let­ter and else­where. Davis lives with her hus­band and two black cats on the Olympic Penin­su­la in a Vic­to­ri­an sea­port community.

*Sean Cho A. per­formed this inter­view while Lau­ren Brazeal Garza, Inter­views and Reviews Edi­tor, was on hia­tus. Lau­ren curat­ed this interview.