by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Poet Lisa Gill has traveled down some weird roads.
Europe, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, dreams and an innate knack for writing led the graduate student to win one of the nation's top awards for poets - a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She entered 10 poems from her first book, Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist.
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"A friend of mine encouraged me to enter," Gill said. "I don't really trust that I'm a good judge of my recent work, so I went with older work I felt I could understand."
Gill said she's always had a spark for writing. She lived in England and Germany from the age of 7 to 13, where she wrote poems about the landscapes and war.
"I was obsessed with poetry in elementary school, so I was doing things like writing my book reviews in ballad form," she said. "I was very into Shakespeare in fifth grade."
She said her parents were supportive of her writing, though they weren't especially literary. Instead, she got feedback from her uncle.
"I showed him a poem, and he spoke about its multiple layers," she said. "I was so thrilled to have somebody understand what I was up to."
One of Gill's theories about where she gets her writing ability is temporal lobe epilepsy.
Gill credits her condition for her insatiable urge to write.
"Sometimes that can manifest as hypergraphia, meaning the seizures might cause you to write a lot," she said. "It's just a personality trait that goes alongside with having a certain type of seizure."
She said another reason might be her childhood shyness.
"I didn't articulate myself well in speech, so writing was a way I could actually find a way to communicate with people," she said. "I could slow down and take my time."
The fellowship money is good for two years, and she is required to write a book.
"I proposed a two-book project," Gill said. "I'd had a dream that I carried a manuscript to Ocosingo (in Mexico). In the morning, I was like, 'What is Ocosingo? Does it exist? Is it real?' I started researching it and found out it was in Chiapas."
After she writes the first of her two books for the NEA, she will carry it to Ocosingo - to literally follow her dream.
"I proposed to the NEA that I was going to pay attention to my dreams," she said. "I don't know what I'm going to do once I'm there with the book - leave it in a coffeehouse, leave it at a bus stop, I don't know."
She said it's a see-what-happens type of project.
"I know something significant will happen there," she said. "It might be a conversation I have with someone. It might be that I hand a poem to somebody, and someone hands a poem to me. It might be very small, but even the idea of literally following your dreams is significant."
Traveling to Chiapas is a triumph for her because she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2003, which she wrote about in her most recent book.
"It was very traumatic," she said. "In about five weeks, I went from hiking six miles a day to struggling to walk across my kitchen. I went through a phase where I couldn't even read because my eyes were affected."
She has a form of multiple
sclerosis where she has relapses that can last for days or months, followed by partial or total recovery.
"I turned to poetry as a way of trying to come to peace with having this disease, and I spent a year working on a book," she said. "At the end of that journey, I have a lot more acceptance and a lot more hope."
