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What happens when the themes that shaped your earliest writing continue to follow you across an entire creative life?
In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m joined by acclaimed poet and fiction writer Eleanor Lerman, author of King the Wonder Dog. Eleanor has spent more than five decades writing honestly about anger, loneliness, grief, love, rebellion, and survival.
Her work has earned recognition including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
Eleanor began writing poetry when she was very young, following the death of her mother and the sudden collapse of the close family life she had known. Those early poems grew out of anger and a powerful desire to escape. As a teenager, she began traveling alone from the Bronx to Greenwich Village, where she found the artistic community that helped her see herself as a writer.
We talk about what it meant to become one of the youngest finalists for the National Book Award, how she resisted being placed into categories, and why she has always thought of herself first and foremost as a writer rather than as a woman writer.
Eleanor also shares how she moved from poetry into fiction after believing that writing novels was the path to literary success. When novels did not feel natural to her, she eventually found her form in the short story. Her experience is such an important reminder that we do not have to force ourselves into a genre, career path, or version of success that does not fit who we are.
Much of our conversation centers on King the Wonder Dog, a collection of stories set primarily in contemporary New York. The book explores aging, illness, grief, and loneliness through the relationships its characters form with dogs and cats.
Eleanor did not originally set out to write a collection about animals, but her publisher at She Writes Press noticed the connection running through the stories and encouraged her to build the book around it.
We also get into Eleanor’s writing process, including why her fiction often begins with a place, how she imagines her memory as rows of filing cabinets, and why she often knows the final lines of a story before she writes the beginning.
Eleanor offers practical insight into revision as well. Drawing on her own experience as an editor, she explains why writers must read for clarity, watch for repetition, and remain open to the people who are trying to help make the work stronger.
This is a thoughtful conversation about finding the form that suits you, trusting your own definition of success, and accepting that certain themes may remain with us throughout our writing lives.
Listen in for an honest, generous look at what it means to keep writing across decades.
