Lisa Ko

Today on The PEN Pod, we spoke with writer Lisa Ko about the evolving role of the writer in a time of uprisings. Lisa Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers, which follows the path of an undocumented immigrant from China and her son, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a 2017 National Book Award finalist. Lisa spoke with us about the intersections between the movement to abolish ICE and the current fight against police violence, the role of storytellers in a time of crisis, and the question of how we write our survival.

What have these last few weeks looked like to you?
It’s been interesting. I actually just got back home to New York City last week after a semester out in Las Vegas. I was there for a semester-long fellowship that was extended due to the pandemic. To return home to New York during this national rebellion and a particular moment of reckoning with institutions, it has felt very hopeful and exciting. It’s also worrying in some ways, because there is so much at stake, and it’s really only the beginning of a long fight. It’s really an uprising against white supremacy and for Black liberation. For so many people, especially those who are invested in the current system, I’m seeing them find it really impossible to imagine a new world. So I think of it, in a way, as a time that’s like a crisis of the imagination that really calls to action many of our skills as writers—to interrogate and imagine and transform and to confront.

Your book was inspired by a true story of an undocumented person arrested by ICE, and right now, we’re dealing with violence enacted by law enforcement. The changes that we’re seeing pushed for in police departments—do you think that could extend to ICE and to the way that we treat immigrants in the United States?
Yeah, absolutely. I think both policing and ICE as an institution are really part of the same system of state violence. The police literally work in tandem with ICE, and they do business with one another. The same stockholders here profit from both. We’re seeing the prison abolition movement here, thinking transnationally and connecting the need to abolish anti-Black criminalization and policing, connecting that to abolishing ICE, the military, and capitalism—redistributing those resources for people who need them.


“For so many people, especially those who are invested in the current system, I’m seeing them find it really impossible to imagine a new world. So I think of it, in a way, as a time that’s like a crisis of the imagination that really calls to action many of our skills as writers—to interrogate and imagine and transform and to confront.”


As a writer, how do you think we might reflect back on these twin pandemics of both virulent racism and COVID-19? How do you think we’re going to write about this moment?
It’s a very important moment. I think there are just really so many intersections. We’ve seen COVID disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities here in the U.S. due to pre-existing structural racism, in equal access to healthcare and housing, and environmental racism. We have a government that’s been deliberately withholding resources and information from all of us. We see the pandemic happening abroad in countries, subject to U.S. economic sanctions. In a lot of ways, this really affirms our roles and the importance of storytellers and writers—the need to record and collect the stories of people who are not going to have their stories told by the media or the history books. Writers are recording the stories of workers or people in prisons or in the streets.

In some ways, we’re really seeing this crisis of imagination—the ability for a lot of people with race or class privileges to see history and reality, but also envision both the worst and the most beautiful possibilities for the future. You hear a lot of people having their greatest desire be just to return to “normal.” My question is, “What can we do as writers, as skilled imagination practitioners, to counter this?” To not just dismantle the things that are wrong now, but also to create something better.


“In some ways, we’re really seeing this crisis of imagination—the ability for a lot of people with race or class privileges to see history and reality, but also envision both the worst and the most beautiful possibilities for the future. You hear a lot of people having their greatest desire be just to return to ‘normal.’ My question is, ‘What can we do as writers, as skilled imagination practitioners, to counter this?’ To not just dismantle the things that are wrong now, but also to create something better.”


Do you have advice for other writers right now? Are you finding it more challenging to write amid this moment, or are you more inspired by it?
Maybe somewhere in between. I think it’s looked different for me. I’m not writing in the same way I was prior to the pandemic or the uprisings. I think it’s actually totally okay not to be writing like we used to, either. Nobody I know is, and I think that if you are, that definitely feels unusual because it’s not a usual time.

I’ve been doing a lot of recording. I’ve been journaling and recording every day since I was five, so that’s definitely a part of my practice. I want to put the things down in terms of my own life and how I’m seeing things around me. I’m also working on revising a novel and some essays. I think of the practice of imagining another world as a survival mechanism that I’ve kind of had in place since my own childhood. Even when the future does feel uncertain, like right now, it feels important to use that—to imagine a future for ourselves as well as our characters.

For writers, I think it’s really a time for our skills to be put into practice. We’re connecting the dots. We have those skills to see context and offer work that’s truly visionary, not just the kind of decontextualized craft of the MFA workshops. We’re seeing this really interesting reckoning with the publishing industry and the whole system of literary fame and awards. I think my advice is to really focus on reframing the narrative. Ask questions and push yourselves to ask, “How can we write our survival?”


“I think of the practice of imagining another world as a survival mechanism that I’ve kind of had in place since my own childhood. Even when the future does feel uncertain, like right now, it feels important to use that—to imagine a future for ourselves as well as our characters.”


If someone were to pick up The Leavers today and read it, how do you think they might read it differently than when the book first came out?
It’s interesting. The book came out in 2017 during, you know, the first year of the Trump administration. There are a lot of incidents in the book which were based on real-life incidents, springboarded from the Obama administration. Detention camps and family separation were things that were coming into the news headlines with more frequency in 2017 than they were in 2009. There is this sort of moratorium on travel and borders closing—not just to people outside of the U.S. wanting to come in, but also the borders being closed to us, as American citizens. We can’t leave and go to Canada; we can’t hop on a plane and go somewhere else. I would find that interesting for certain readers, who aren’t from immigrant backgrounds, to see how things that have been put on others are now infiltrating a more widespread population.

Lastly, what are you reading right now?
I’m reading a lot of books—a lot of really great ones. I’ve been reading Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, which is a biography of Lorraine Hansberry. I’m also reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, which is this really fantastic speculative fiction novel that involves two siblings in the prison system.


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