Originally from Montreal, Lisa Pasold is a writer and journalist who now divides her time between Paris and Toronto.
She’s published two books of poetry (with a third forthcoming), a novel (with a second in the works), and written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and guidebooks including Time Out, Fodor’s, The Globe and Mail, and more.
In advance of her October 4 talk on travel writing at the American Library in Paris, I caught up with Lisa to get the inside scoop on writing, revising, and her many adventures abroad.
You write it all – poems, articles, travel pieces, a novel. What do you get out of each of these different types of writing? Do they inform each other in any way?
In some ways, they all come from the same impetus: I want to connect with the world, whether it’s through writing a travel article or writing a poem. For a while I worked as a music journalist, which was quite ‘rock & roll’ (you really have to say that with a French accent), and now I’m mining all my weirdest music & fashion stories for my next novel. So as it turns out, the different kinds of writing inform each other very directly!
You grew up in Montreal so were accustomed to living in a bilingual environment. Now you live in a French-speaking country and write in English. As language is our currency as writers, can you describe the role living with these two languages plays in your work?
