Visually apt urban poetry

As Karen Lillis sits down, it occurs to me that her choice to meet at the Tango Cafe is… As Karen Lillis sits down, it occurs to me that her choice to meet at the Tango Cafe is somewhat telling. It’s a coffeehouse that’s cash only, accentuates its Spanish motif with lessons in the language and despite its less-than-impressive vanilla milkshake, manages to stay in business right across the street from a Starbucks.

The Starbucks would have been easier to find, the drinks reliably delicious and they would have taken my Visa card, but Lillis chose the Tango Cafe. She comes across as honestly, though not rabidly, anti-establishment, and her choice of location seems to reflect a life spent actually making decisions along those lines.

Lillis places a stack of papers on the table and it wobbles. She exudes that chaotic energy so often associated with artists. Hers, however, is tempered with something I can’t quite pin down. Without much ado we transition into a rather tangential but open conversation.

She moved from New York to Pittsburgh in December. It was during graduate school at NYU that Lillis really moved toward writing the way she does now. She’d entered the program from more of a visual arts perspective, but one of her professors had the class write from photographs, particularly family photos. Lillis switched focus from abstract to more personal writing, emphasizing contact and communication.

One of her major themes deals with “the part of us that longs to be soft, loving, generous, and all the aggressions we come up against in others and ourselves that ask us to become aggressors or victims.” She wants “to write in a way that gets through people’s defenses.” The problem, though, is that “it’s not as easy to market.”

“The publishing industry,” she explains, “is set up [so that] even if you are someone getting novels published in the big houses, they’ve set it up to either make you a star or keep you a broke writer.”

Lillis didn’t allow the industry to keep her from getting her work out there. “In 2000 I published my first novel, ‘I, Scorpion’-[on] my own Xerox press, Words Like Kudzu Press. I took the book on a cross-country reading tour-doing 10 readings in eight cities. I booked it myself and stayed with friends along the way, rode by Greyhound on a six-week unlimited pass.” She added that her self-published book sold more than 100 copies at just one bookstore in New York.

Now Lillis plans not only to continue her writing but also to develop her combination “traveling bookstore” and independent press to get some of New York’s writers exposure here in Pittsburgh. It’s called Lillis Distribution/Pittsburgh, and she can be reached at EyeScorp@aol.com for more details.

Her aims aren’t merely to subvert the publishing industry and get some good writing in print. She sees her work as part of an effort to fight back against our modern culture, where “if we wanted to we could distract ourselves 24 hours a day and never think about anything real.”

As she said that, I realized what was tempering her chaotic artist’s energy – she grasps and accepts the reality of things. She doesn’t hide from it at all. She’ll experiment with style and form, but when she gives it to someone else to read she wants it to, she needs it to, connect.

“I often write about what’s real in us, what’s deepest, versus what in our daily lives asks us to not be real.”

Painters, sculptors and visual artists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your anonymity. E-mail Zak at rsz8@pitt.edu.