A longtime Woodstock resident, New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Lesser is the co-founder of the Omega Institute, a two-time TED speaker, and one of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100—a group of leaders recognized for using their voices to elevate humanity. In her conversation with The Overlook, Lesser reflected on her literary and spiritual journey, from “seeing the world in a grain of sand” to “dancing when you’re broken open.”
Talk about your books and what inspired you.
My first book was suggested by an early and favorite Omega teacher, West African drummer Baba Olatunji, who exclaimed in the faculty dining room one day, “This is a universal spiritual tradition we’re creating, and it’s democratic and diverse. You should write a book about this. And you should call it “The Seeker’s Guide”. And so I did.
I wrote “Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow” when I was going through a divorce. I read a poem by Rumi that included the line, “dance when you’re broken open”. And I thought, that’s me. I am broken, my marriage and my family’s broken, but I’m also opening.
“Marrow: A Love Story” is about when I was my sister’s bone marrow donor and how we used that experience to heal our relationship as sisters.
“Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes” is about the need for women’s rights, women’s stories and women’s realities to be respected and heard. It’s based on my work helping curate and run Omega’s Women & Power conferences. This is my feminist book.
What authors have had a meaningful impact on you as a writer?
Emily Dickinson gets so much in her tiny words that have wit and brevity and electricity. I pair her with Walt Whitman, who was wildly verbose, alive, throwing everything into the pot.
“The Seven Storey Mountain” by Thomas Merton was the first book I read that was the genre that somehow I knew I wanted to write—memoir that’s also inspiring the reader to go within and take what they find in there to live their best life.
What’s your routine?
I try to write every day. I have my coffee, talk to my husband, then I go and write beginning about 9 a.m.
What’s your writing process?
I need a structure, I can’t move on to the next word unless the word before it is what I want. I write sentences word by word. I even sweat over the punctuation as I’m writing. So it can take me a long time to write a sentence. It’s more like writing poetry. It’s very tedious, but that’s the way I write.
Challenges?
Lack of self-confidence is always on my shoulder, this harsh doubting critic who’s begging me to get over myself and stop writing. It’s gotten better, but it’s still there.
Does living in the Hudson Valley influence your writing?
I’ve lived here for 40 years, including all the years of being a writer, and this is an incredible place to live. I walk the same hills and road every day, past where Bob Dylan lived, past where the arts and craft movement in the 1940s and 50s were. I’ve lived in Rhinebeck and I live in Woodstock now, and they both have a deep heritage of art and nature. And that’s very inspiring.
What are you reading now?
I recently read and enjoyed the “The Burgess Boys” by Elizabeth Strout.
What I think Strout’s trying to do in her books, and what I try to do, is to take away the shame we all feel about having these screwed up families, these lives where we’re all struggling to deal with confusion and fear. Strout humanizes all of the serious and shameful aspects of being a person, which allows the reader to feel seen and not so alone. And then it’s like, we’re free, free to just be humans together. We can stop blaming this person for that failure or having shame about our own failures and just play together.
Irish poet William Blake writes of seeing “the world in a grain of sand”. Strout sees all of humanity in the small family units that she writes about in book after book.
Other book recommendations?
I really liked the novel “James” by Percival Everett. I’ve been doing a lot of reading of American history right now because America is so much in my mind. The things we took for granted seem to be up for grabs now, like democracy.
And I have been reading “The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams.”
Adams and Jefferson had an acrimonious relationship for most of their lives, they had very different beliefs about what this democracy should be. They excoriated each other in many of these letters, but toward the end of their lives they came back together, and they nourished each other, and we need that right now in America.
Also, “Composed” is Roseanne Cash’s memoir about being Johnny Cash’s daughter. It’s fantastic.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.