In the lead-up to the release of Hope: The Thing with Feathers, I’m going to be posting mini-interviews with my fellow ToC-mates! You can pre-order Hope: The Thing with Feathers here.
“For All That Is and Still Lives” is a quiet story of yearning for things already lost and the hope of appreciating what exists before it’s gone. On the tail end of a dud-date with a supposed nature-lover like herself, Marissa finds herself searching the familiar woods for the crow she befriended over the years. When all she finds is a single dark tail feather and a mysterious man of the wilderness, Marissa must decide if the well-beaten path is the right trail for her life, or if she desires something less predictable.
Writing Question: Writing can be a tough profession, and authors of all stages tend to get “no” more often than “yes.” How do you cope with rejection?
I cope with rejection through exposing myself to it. During 2025 I’ve set a goal to receive a hundred rejections. It’s now June and I’m only at twenty, but I’ve got quite a few stories out there waiting for responses, and I’m always writing and submitting. The good thing with this project is that I occasionally get acceptances too. The story in this anthology is the second one I’ve had accepted this year, and I’ve also had a picture book manuscript in my native Swedish accepted for publication. Of course some rejections will hurt more than others, and for me the worst ones are the near misses. Recently a story a mine was short-listed among several hundred submissions, but then it fell at the last hurdle, and those are the hardest to accept.
Hope-related Question: What’s your go-to strategy to feel better when life or the state of affairs gets you down?
Our lives in these times are so fragmented, so one thing I do is to always have notifications and sound switched off on my phone. This gives me control over my time and I try my best spend one dedicated hour per day to reply to messages and check in with my Substack community. But phones are built to be addictive so I don’t always succeed. After trying to market myself as an author on Instagram and Facebook, I stepped away earlier this year. I found they were trying to lure me into an endless feedback loop, but which only made me feel inadequate and unhappy. The final thing I’ve done is to stop reading and watching the news. This doesn’t actually sit well with me as I like to know what’s going on in the world, but again the aim of news reporting seem to be to always keep us in a state of fear and I chose to step away from that. All of these actions have given me more time to write stories, as well a longer concentration span. My choice is to engage with the world through writing.
Oddball Question: If you could meet one fictional character, who would it be and what kind of venue would you meet at?
Without a doubt, Dr Marinus, the involuntary immortal of author David Mitchell’s universe, who has no obvious superpowers, but who wakes in the body of a child 49 days after dying, alternating between living inside a female and a male host. Dr Marinus is a calm and benevolent being who occurs in several of David Mitchell’s books, but who makes his first appearance as a man in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is on my list of top ten books ever. With regards to venue, I’m expecting to see them every day, at the bus stop, in the coffee shop, at the hospital, either whenever I most need them, or just for a passing chat.
Lisa is a bilingual writer living on the south coast of England. In her native Swedish, Lisa is an award-winning children’s author, while in her adopted English she’s a writer of short fiction and novels. Her first novel, The Shape of Guilt, is a piece of literary fiction with streaks of magical realism published by époque press. She also works as a literary translator and a mentor of young writers. You can follow Lisa’s writing on https://lisafransson.substack.com .