Diane Lefer 

by

Daniel M. Jaffe 

Diane Lefer, a prolific fiction writer and dramatist, brings broad life experience to her literature: she’s lived in locales as disparate as Oaxaca, Mexico and rural Maine, has worked in factories and potato fields, as a bilingual interviewer for an AIDS education project in Harlem and the South Bronx, and has helped immigrants who were detained for deportation from Los Angeles.  Her books include two short story collections, The Circles I Move In and Very Much Like Desire, as well as the novel, Radiant Hunger.   Diane’s newest collection, California Transit, recently won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books.

I asked Diane how she decides which stories to collect into a book. “The Circles I Move In was my first collection. I put into it the stories I thought were best, several set in Mexico, the rest in New York City – my different circles. It was less about deciding what to put in, and more about deciding which stories to leave out. That collection includes a number of first-person stories and I think the pieces rely a lot on voice. After that, I wanted to try to write more traditional third-person narratives. I wondered if I could. And the stories that came out of several years of that approach ended up in Very Much Like Desire. I moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and that opened up so many opportunities I didn't have in New York. I always loved the desert. Now I can hike there, and the desert often shows up in my work.

“In NYC, there wasn't a lot of wildlife besides pigeons and squirrels and my landlord wouldn't even let me have a cat. Here, I live with a wonderful cat named Desi, and I've been able to join the research department at the zoo. We never do experiments with the animals, but behavioral observations and studies aimed at improving their quality of life. When I went to the zoo, I had no intention of using it for material, but I'd come home and tell all these stories about the sex lives—or frustrating lack thereof—of the endangered baboons we hoped to breed, and everyone was saying ‘You have to write about this!’ and I kept saying, ‘No, no, no,’ but of course eventually I did.

“And the politics. The political themes are now much more overt in my work. The characters don't usually express my own opinions. I hope the stories don't preach or judge. Issues of race and government affect us all everyday in our daily lives, and I think the sociopolitical aspects of our lives too often get censored out of fiction. We're so afraid of being labeled political rather than literary.”

Given that Diane writes both plays and fiction, I was curious as to how she decides which literary form best suits a particular subject.  “These days,” Diane explains, “when I start writing, I don't know which way it will go. My drafts sometimes end up in two directions, part of the draft becoming fiction, part ending up as a play.

“Several years ago, I found myself in a dormitory room reading a Patricia Highsmith novel. So I'm sitting on this creaky single bed with sheets that don't fit the mattress. I'm reading this bleak amoral fiction and staring at these cinderblock walls and I scribbled down a few lines that came to me about a bleak room. I got home and found the page and thought I'd keep going and maybe it would turn into a little prose poem. Close to 200 manuscript pages later, I stopped and it became California Transit, the title novella of the new collection. I certainly didn't expect that to happen.” 

How does Diane’s rich life experience inform her writing? “Life experience informs how I see people and the world even when I'm not writing directly about politics, or oppression, or race. And then there are times ... I feel the need to tell these stories, out of the probably naive belief – If people only knew, they wouldn't let this happen. When I was interpreting for people imprisoned by INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service], I was so outraged by the human rights abuses, I tried to get media coverage of the situation. The press wasn't allowed into the detention centers. Amnesty International wasn't allowed in. But there I was. At that time, Monica Lewinsky's blue dress dominated the news and I couldn't get newspapers or TV interested in the plight of some low-income locked-up immigrants. I was obsessed … This was prior to 9/11. This was happening in California, not at Guantanamo. I ended up writing a play and a novella about people caught up in the system. 

“But I mostly work from imagination. I'll do research. Our society doesn't value literary culture very highly. Being a writer often feels so self-indulgent and socially useless. I mean, who cares? So I've always had a political or activist side to my life ... There were things I felt motivated to do, but I didn't think of them connected to my writing life. In fact, for a while I was worried about exploiting the experiences. When I worked with people who were in trouble and struggling, I absolutely never wanted to see them as ‘material.’ But of course, experience always informs your fiction.”  

Commenting on her experiences as a potato picker, Diane explains, “I did that a long time ago for two reasons. First, I was broke. Second, children worked the harvest and some lawyers I knew wanted a firsthand account of how child labor was treated. That was the mid-70's, and I only recently wrote a play set on a potato farm.” This new play, Harvest, follows “an upper class girl from Hong Kong who thinks working the potato harvest in Idaho will let her see the real America. But things start to get a little too real.”

Produced by Playwrights’ Arena and directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera, Harvest recently finished a successful run at Studio/Stage in Hollywood, California. And I can say it was true that Diane Lefer’s previous work was a good indication of what to expect. Harvest  was a thought-provoking delight. Diane Lefer's homepage can be found at:

http://ourworld.cs.com/__121b_9oEuJmGCu/uZmZRJrzgO6Nmsdvxyb3cxYmFYy85wvu2l0qePBLb6HQ==

Dan is the author of The Limits of Pleasure. He regularly publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers, has compiled and edited an anthology, and translated a Russian-Israeli novel in addition to teaching fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan's web site is http://danieljaffe.tripod.com/ and he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it