About Lisa Birk
A graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator, Lisa Birk was formerly a teacher of writing at Boston University and the project manager of Harvard University’s Narrative Journalism Program at the Nieman Foundation. Her work has appeared in many publications including Orion Magazine, the Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix and The Boston Sunday Globe. It has also been anthologized in several books including W.W. Norton’s Abnormal Psychology. She is seeking representation for two novels, The Rehabilitation of Maria LaHaye and Chipped.
Novels are my second love, the roast beef in my diet. And I relish the meal. But I down short stories like chocolates. For their density. For their Pow! of feeling and their electric insight. I’d venture to say that…
I have just spent two-and-a-half years revising my novel.* The odds on getting it published feel, well, long. My writer friends (published and in-the-queue) tell horrific tales of editors** who do not buy the manuscript, but offer advice, “What if…
All my favorite books come from a “deep place of junior high trauma.”* From Harriet the Spy to The Outsiders, right on up through Rick Moody’s Purple America and Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Picture Olive at eleven. She has huge feet….
Some years ago I taught Communications 201 at Boston University. It was a plum job, as adjunct jobs go, because our students longed to be in the business of writing. They understood, as many students of creative writing do not, that…
I lost nearly all my sense of smell when I was eight. One day my socks itched and the next day I was allergic to seemingly everything including “all grasses in the world,” the grim doctor intoned, putting the kybosh…