Ali Liebegott
Ali Liebegott
Ali Liebegottis an award-winning American author, poet, and teacher. She has taught creative writing at University of California, San Diego and Mills College. She currently lives in San Francisco. Liebegott is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As of 2013 she has written three books: The Beautifully Worthless; The IHOP Papers; and Cha-Ching...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth8 August 1971
CountryUnited States of America
I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers.
I'm always struck with writing - I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm starting over.
For me writing is so perplexing, because if we were playing ping pong and we weren't writing - twenty years later you'd be just so much better at ping pong and this confidence with ping pong.
As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.
I feel very discouraged with the state of gay and lesbian publishing because I don't feel like we're really welcome in the mainstream and then you get ghettoized and put on some lesbian book club reading list where you don't want to be either.
Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.
I'm always wondering what is the job that gives the writer the most amount of time to write. I still don't know what the answer is as someone who has taught and is now working at a grocery store.
Lots of people hate gay people. You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, “It's not like I hate gay people.”
It's not like I hate gay people.
In Courtney Moreno's In Case of Emergency the working class save the world and themselves. A wonderful first book!
There's something very soothing about the simplicity of doing what's right in front of you: paying the rent, buying groceries, and when there's a little extra for a treat like cinnamon rolls, whoopee! When you live paycheck to paycheck, you only have so much to lose.
When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.
Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials.
I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.