Get Lit! 2008: Thomas Lynch

Thomas Lynch

Lynch is a nonfiction writer, poet and a funeral director. He has won an American Book Award for "The Undertaking" and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has been featured on the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and has appeared on numerous television channels.

RS: The Get Lit! Web site describes your work as being about the binding ties of family, faith, language, home-place and death.  Do you consider this an accurate depiction?

TL: That sounds like something taken from the cover notes for "Booking Passage," a book of essays I wrote about my connections to Ireland and our family history.  So yes, that's an accurate description at least of that book. 

RS: One might assume that your involvement with a funeral home has a direct influence on your writing.  Is this an overstatement?

TL: It is one resource or vantage point, but certainly not the only one. 

RS: What is the purpose of your involvement with Get Lit!, in your words?

TL: Well, I was responding to an invitation.  I had other invites to Seattle so I thought I might make the one trip and do them both.  And festivals of literature bring out bookish people -- readers, writers, dreamers.  And I'm fond of bookish people. 

RS: Has your entire upbringing been under the backdrop of a small community?  Or have you experienced the city life as well?  How have your surroundings influenced your themes when writing?

TL: I've never lived in a city.  I've made long visits to London, New York, Dublin and briefer stays all over the nation and Europe and elsewhere.  But home has always been in small-ish places where the characters are more locally known.

RS: Can you compare and contrast the titles "Still Life in Milford" and "Bodies in Motion and at Rest?"  I am referring specifically to the actual titles of the works, not the works themselves.  They seem to me similar in the theme of movement and non-movement.

TL: "Still Life in Milford" is a title borrowed from the painting on the front cover of the book.  The painting, by Lester Johnson, has to do with Milford, Connecticut.  The poem, by the same name, tries to make some sense of it.  There are, of course, Milfords all over the English speaking world -- wherever mills were built on the river.  I wanted that title to have various meanings including the declaration that there was still life in Milford (as opposed to death).  "Bodies in Motion" is a phrase that always had a scientific ring to me, something Galileo might have written about, much like "the common notion of coincidence" a la Euclid.  As a person without math or scientific aptitudes, the language of science, the lexicon of technology, has always been attractive to me.