Lynn Steger Strong on Leaving the Art Monster

“Life is lived on the ground, and mostly it doesn’t make sense, and mostly it’s messy, and mostly it’s mundane. I want to hold something of life inside of the things that I make. And I think if I didn’t constantly have people pulling me back into it, I would write whole books about who I think people are, instead of who they actually are.”

Lynn Steger Strong’s most recent novel, Want, was one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Books of 2020. Her first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has been published by Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.