by Maria DeBlassie
Daily Lobo
Lisa Lenard-Cook has always been a writer, she said.
"They tell me when I was a little girl, I was picking up a pen before I could talk," she said.
Lenard-Cook has been nominated for the first annual Southwest Book Award in fiction for her novel Dissonance. The award, sponsored by PEN New Mexico and PEN Texas, is meant to honor outstanding writers in the Southwest.
Dissonance is a story about a Los Alamos piano teacher who inherits a diary and music manuscripts, Lenard-Cook said. These items lead the teacher to uncover a legacy that spills into her own life.
Lenard-Cook said the story came from studying three different things - music theory; Terezin, a World War II concentration camp for musicians and artists; and the history of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project.
"If those sound like three relatively unrelated things, they are," she said. "But that's what happens. Three seemingly unrelated things come together and strike a spark, and I start writing."
Although she said most of her books have interweaving plot lines, Dissonance is special because it uses music theory as a metaphor for the discord of the 20th century.
Her ultimate goal is to write the kind of books that resonate and connect with readers, Lenard-Cook said.
"I wanted to write something that has a social relevance," she said. "I want my writing to make some sort of difference to people and maybe to the world."
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Her favorite writers include Katherine Anne Porter and A.S. Byatt, she said. She's an eccentric reader, she said, reading everything from astronomy and physics books to literature on bird-watching. She digs through remainder bins at bookstores to find good reads, she said.
"I'm interested in just about everything," she said.
Lenard-Cook said all her interests inevitably find themselves in her novels, like they did in Dissonance.
She has lived in New Mexico for 30 years. She said her favorite thing about the Land of Enchantment is that people have few insecurities.
"There are so many people comfortable in their own skin," she said. "I don't know if that comes from the place or if it comes from the kind of people that are attracted to a place like this."
When it comes to writing, she said she learns something new every day. To be a writer, she said, you can't worry about what anyone else is going to think about your work.
"You have to be fearless," she said. "Like the Nike saying. Just do it."
The thing she likes most about her job is being able to write in her pajamas.
"Anyone who showed up here in the morning would find me still in my pajamas," she said. "I don't always remember to change."
She said Dissonance, published in 2003, has won many awards, including the Jim Sagel Prize for the novel. Although all awards were special, she said none have felt as exciting as this nomination.
"I think it's because I got nominated along with Rudy Anaya," she said. "I'm stunned. I'm honored. I think it's amazing that my book is up there with something of Rudy Anaya's."
Lenard-Cook said she lives by Gustave Flaubert's saying, "Be regular and orderly in your life, so you may be violent and original in your work."
