SIX MINUTES WITH LILY LEE:

Lily Lee, author of Addy the Bat and a Visit to Cat joins LitPick for Six Minutes with an Author! This is Lily’s first book and it was published earlier this year.

When did you start writing?

For me, reading goes as far back as memory, and writing has been starting and stopping ever since I learned that words could come out of pencils. If you were interviewing the great storyteller Tolkien, he'd explain what I mean by saying "any education is a never ending story- a matter of continual beginnings". Of course if you were interviewing my mother, she'd proudly tell you that when I was in fourth grade, I wrote a poem that was so adored by my teachers that they arranged for my entire class to read it aloud at assemblies. (This is a true but horrible story and makes me glad that you are not interviewing my mother.) But you're interviewing neither Tolkien nor my mother. You are interviewing me, the very same owlish little fourth grader whose early, most unfortunate success only cemented her status as "that weird girl who writes stuff".

By the fourth and a half grade, that precocious dipping of my toe in the writing sea had tattooed on my mind a few permanent lessons: 

1. Fourth graders who can't tell acorns from hazelnuts should not be writing poems about oak trees.

2. Writers will always be just one typo away from being writhers.

3. If you can just hang on long enough, weird turns into cool.

Who influenced you?

I'm going to call on Tennyson here, and quote his mighty "Ulysses":  "I am a part of all that I have met." In less elegant words, my life bumps against other lives all the time, in one way or another, and those bumps are influential. I'll bet you're the same. I'll bet if you pull on the threads of the things you love about your life, you can follow those threads back to a person: the cook who persuaded you to bake, the friend who encouraged you to sew, the neighbor who took you to a museum, the teacher who taught you to read as if stories were houses you could get lost in, the children who believed that you could tell a story worth listening to. And let's not forget the equally important influence of people whose dismissive opinion of your inner self causes you to shake your inner fist and resolve an inner, "Oh yes I can! Oh yes I will! Some way, somehow, I'll get it done!"

Do you have a favorite book/subject/character/setting?

Oh, yes. Hundreds of 'em, though like Alice in Wonderland, I have a difficult time making favorites out of books with no pictures and no conversations.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be an author?

Oh, I love dispensing advice! Here's a dish of my very best advicey-type tidbits, garnished with a side of pretty bullets:

❖    First, and most importantly: Stop reading this and go talk to someone more accomplished than I am.

❖    Second: Figure out what you love to read and figure out why you love to read it.

❖    Third: Try to believe that it is writing that makes you a writer. Publishers publish, writers write. Write because that's what you are. Write because you need to. Write because, as Rainer Rilke said, you would die if you were forbidden to. Write because Anne Lamott was right: publishing is not your salvation, but writing just may be.

❖    Fourth: Consider the lilies of the field, and the lipsticks of the cosmetics counter. Just as there seems to always be room in the world for one more flower and one more shade of lipstick, so there seems to always be room for one more well-told story. 

Where is your favorite place to write?

On paper. Composing on a computer screen is hard for me. It's a generational thing.
Oh. That's not what you meant. Well then, I seem to do my best writing near any big window that offers plenty of distractions from writing.

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?

I think I'd like you to know that if your bills are paid and you and your people are fed and your gas tank is full and you somehow still have nine dollars or so leftover, you might enjoy spending those nine dollars buying my book, Addy the Bat and a Visit to Cat at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can learn more about me, bats, and my book at addythebat.com. Thanks for asking these questions, and thanks for sticking around to read the answers!

Lily, thank you for spending six minutes with LitPick! This has been a wonderful interview!