youareamongfriends.com
lindseymarkel at gmail.com
ljm.tumblr.com
True things about:
I write mostly short stories these days, but I was writing on the internet alongside the dinosaurs.
I also wrote the book You Are Among Friends: Advice for the Little Sisters I Never Had, which is a self-explanatory title.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Introduction for William Lychack, given at Lesley University, June 26, 2011
When it came time to request my second-semester mentor here at Lesley, there was an unfamiliar name on the faculty list: one William Lychack, a fiction writer who was returning after a hiatus. The first Google result for his name was my fateful first impression, the following excerpt from his 2004 novel The Wasp Eater, published by Houghton Mifflin:
The mother stepped across the room and pushed closed the dresser drawers until they all lay even. The house seemed to hold its breath as she turned with her mouth pinched down and her chin trembling so fast she could not have been controlling it. The boy watched her and felt as if he’d swallowed a bit of metal—a washer or a coin—and someone was bringing it back up along his spine with a magnet.
The level of poetry and palpable detail swimming in these three sentences embodied the writing I strive for in my most optimistic moments. The professional reviews I found agreed with me; Polly Shulman of The New York Times Book Review says “This spare, meticulous novel opens out like a poem, its deceptively casual images bearing an entire universe of weight.” Writer Adam Langer ranked this Lychack person, out of all the authors he’d interviewed, as a “Gold Medalist” in the “Genuinely Decent Human Being” category. The William Lychack Wikipedia page said he had worked both as a Mr. Softee Ice Cream Man and a Judo instructor. And he had read his piece “The Ghostwriter” on NPR’s This American Life, which, frankly, seemed like overkill. I was still sold.
