In Conversation with Thomas Lynch
I was thrilled when I got a message from poet and essayist Thomas Lynch in answer to my request for an interview. It said, Maybe you could give a call, say tomorrow morning? We’ll have a chat.
I had made his acquaintance, as one does in the 21st century, through social media and after a few months of back and forthing earlier this year, we made plans to do a proper interview. When “tomorrow” arrives, I gleefully dial his number and wait to hear the lovely timber of his voice. We chatted the good old-fashioned way (via telephone) on an October morning from our respective Midwestern desks, the foliage outside a riotous mélange of red and orange. Lynch lives in Michigan, Up North as the natives say, on the edge of Mullett Lake with his dog, Carl, described lovingly as sweet but “stupid as a hula-hoop”.
Lynch is one of those writers I read deeply and often and his work never fails to make me want to write. On our call, Lynch speaks about the writing process and the difference between writing poems and essays ~ the poetry arrives like a gift…a word, a line, one aurally inspired iamb after the other, while essays are akin to thinking on the page.
Poetry was, and remains, the closest thing to prayer that I know.
~ Thomas Lynch
His days consist mainly of reading, writing and walking. He’s been industrious during the pandemic, having published a book of essays in 2020, called The Depositions ~ New & Selected Essays On Being and Ceasing To Be, and most recently, Bone Rosary, New & Selected Poems, about which the New York Journal of Books wrote, “Lynch’s poems are bathed in music, battered by grief, buttressed by humor. How it’s possible to achieve such a delicate balance is anyone’s guess. Therein lies Lynch’s magic. It is rare to encounter a poet so surefooted.”
These are books you can spend hours disappearing into as his subjects and meditations are varied and always intriguing. He makes astute connections, jumping nimbly from Milford to Montaigne, from dogs to dogma, from farts to arts. Lynch’s words will make you think and smile and weep. He will waltz you from cradle to grave and back again.
As I went back to reread some of his work for this interview, I was so taken by the introductions to his books, particularly in Bodies in Motion and at Rest and in Bone Rosary. I asked him if they were as easy to write as they are to read; Lynch’s work has a musicality that makes one imagine he writes effortlessly. “Essaying is more like poetry, going from image to image”. It sounds like an intuitive foraging amongst obsessions. His model for writing essays comes from Montaigne: “All Montaigne did was go from paragraph to paragraph and when he got stuck, he read a poem.”
Thomas Lynch is one of my favorite living essayists. His mordant humor and openness to grace and mystery are a tonic. I can think of nothing better than to have in one book this collection of his dazzling former essays, plus the dynamite new ones.
― Phillip Lopate
I ask Lynch about his relationship to solitude and his voice warms as he speaks of his love of quiet, of knowing he won’t be disturbed by the rhythms of others. And yet, he occasionally goes to an AA meeting, not because he’s overwhelmed by an unholy thirst (he has quipped: “The Irish are either priests or drinkers, and I’m not a priest.”) but because he’s in the mood for company. He notes that we humans are sometimes “mad for connection”.
The best part of language is when it makes sense between strangers.
~ Thomas Lynch
When I ask what he is working on at the moment, knowing many writers prefer not to speak of such things, Lynch reveals that he is occupied with a novel, and that while he has the whole story mapped out, that he knows what is going to happen, and when and to whom, it’s still a bit slow going. He says he’s been thinking about coming at it from a different angle and perhaps writing in the voice of one of the other characters. It is so reassuring to learn that writers as accomplished as Lynch still wrestle with the making of things.
He moves between the novel and another book he’s working on called “The Woke Misogynist” which is the most hilarious title I have ever heard coming out of the mouth of a writer. He describes an enormous book of words, “the kind that are doorstops”; a treasure rescued from some Salvation Army store that sits atop a lectern in his house on a lake in Michigan. In between crafting fiction, he will stand and ponder this word or that and write down his ruminations in response.
Toward the end of our conversation, Lynch kindly asks what I am working on, warning me not to edit my work with too much gusto. “It gets easier as you get older. If you’re too brutal with your edits, there’ll be nothing left.” I am grateful for his sage advice and promise to be less zealous with the delete button.
Just as we are about to click off the call, I mention listening to the actor Rafe Fiennes reading The English Patient. Lynch giggles and proceeds to tell me one of the most amusing stories I have ever heard. Years ago, as Lynch’s literary star was rising internationally, he was invited to read at a festival in East Anglia. Lynch was enjoying a cup of tea when he spied Rafe Fiennes off in the distance and was struck by how familiar he looked. He must be American, Lynch though. Perhaps he came to hear me read, he mused. Finally, Lynch walked over to Fiennes, stuck out his hand with a smile and said, “You look so familiar. Do I know you? Are you from the Rotary Club?” Fiennes, fresh from the success of Schindler’s List, said politely, “You may have seen one of my films”.
And with that fine tale told with Lynch’s signature wit and impeccable timing, we promise to try and meet in person “in the next decade or so”. In the meantime, I will content myself with his words, the poems and essays and the delicious anticipation of reading his new novel. Above all, Thomas Lynch’s work makes me consider the world with more tenderness and acceptance, where the chiaroscuro of light and shadow coexist quite naturally, where levity and grief become necessary counterweights, and where knowing and not knowing emerge as equally sacred paths.
Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times, the Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry , The Paris Review and elsewhere.
His work has been the subject of two film documentaries. PBS Frontline’s The Undertaking won an Emmy for Arts and Culture Documentary. He has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit and with the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He lives in Michigan and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
