Last Exit to Brooklyn, at the age of 12 or 13.
Is there an all time favourite book, or one you keep coming back to?
All of E M Cioran… The Temptation to Exist, The Trouble With Being Born, All Gall Is Divided, Short History of Decay… Cormac McCarthy, Suttree and Blood Meridian… Joan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless, Marks of Identity… Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
Can you tell us a little about your own writing process. Do you have a ritual or regimen, do you write long-hand, into a word-processor or dictate?
Consume massive amounts of coffee, enough cigarettes to kill off all of Texas, pace a hole in the floor, rip out clumps of hair, kick the wall, scream AS LOUD AS YOU CAN and then settle down and JUST DO IT!
With speeches, stories, books… I always start writing at five or six a.m. and quit by ten or eleven. Paradoxia I wrote on an old typewriter. It took about three months. It just didn’t feel right doing it on the computer. For my columns I use word-processing. Songs spurt forth whenever they feel like it, so I usually keep notebooks full of random lines… which eventually get compiled… or they’re shat out all at once.
Any advice for the aspiring writer?
All a writer needs to do is find their voice and tell thee truth. Or at least their version of it. Editing is one of the most important aspects of what makes good reading. Most of my editing is almost ‘in-camera’. I have such a fat-free style, and being the contrarian I am, I usually need to expound more, not edit. But that’s me.
What do you think the social roles of the writer are?
Depends on what kind of writing… The only ‘social duty’ a writer has is to not be boring.
Read the extended Scrawl interview with Lydia Lunch here ...or go to the official Lydia Lunch website.
