Journalism, Storytelling, and Lineage: An Interview with Cassandra Lane

Porter House Review: Thanks for being willing to chat with us Cassandra! What projects are you working on these days? 

Cassandra Lane: Currently, I am in the throes of final production for L.A. Parent magazine’s March/April issue. I serve as editor-in-chief there, and though we are a mighty team, we are a supremely small one, so every production period, there is tremendous pressure and the ever-present question: Will we get it done? Somehow, we always do. I mention this, my day job — my career as an editor and formerly as a newspaper reporter (among other roles) — because I think it’s essential to acknowledge that this work is always in relationship to my creative writing pursuits. It’s up to us as creatives to define how we want to view the work we do for a living vs. our personal creative projects. We can choose to see them as enemies of each other (which I have been guilty of). We can choose to separate them as though they exist outside of each other. Or — as I have learned to do recently — we can examine the ways in which they feed each other. Because I work with words all day, I cannot technically separate the work I do at the magazine (or other publications) from the work I do as an independent writer. Even physically, they are no longer separate. I have worked remotely since the world shut down in 2020. I have one desk for my journalism work and one for my “creative writing,” but that is, at the end of the day, just a vision that looks good in my head. The two worlds constantly converge, and my personal creative writing projects are always a bit “out of balance.” That said, making print and digital deadlines regularly reminds me that I can do this work, one step at a time. It took me a while to finish my first book, but when it was published in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and even more responsibilities at the magazine and as a mother/remote teacher, that was a powerful reminder that the work will and can get done — despite how impossible it all seemed. My current personal project is influenced by this pressure, this feeling of impossibility. It is about the loss of language and cognitive ability; it is about the power of the guitar (my mother’s instrument) when language fails; it is about the question of ownership when it comes to story and words and music; it is about the liminal space between life and death; and it is about the search for the sound of love and forgiveness in this icy in-between.

PHR: Your most recent book, We Are Bridges, brings attention to ancestry and lineage. What do you hope people reflect on from your book, especially regarding historical erasure? 

Lane: My hopes were manifold in writing and sharing the book, but in examining all these facets of who I am in the world and why — including ancestrally — my initiating experiment was to carve out for myself some manner of self-understanding and compassion. By crafting myself into a “character” on the page, readers could be inspired to turn the lens on their own being and becoming. To appreciate the myriad refractions of light and darkness within them. For me, even in this conscious journey to “know thyself,” there was such a deep void. At the time I started writing the book, it was before DNA tests and improved genealogical research came on the scene, and I could only trace my mother’s family back to my great-grandparents. Well, one of those ancestors, Burt Bridges, who was my mother’s father’s father, was lynched, but outside of my great-grandmother’s oral story of this tragedy, there were no other records to verify Burt’s murder. I didn’t get my hands on the census report that includes who we think is the same Burt Bridges until years after I started writing the story. And so, I wanted to write into that void. That void, that erasure, became “the story” for me. And what I want for everyone is a profound sense of knowing and belonging, despite what another person or your country took from you. I wanted readers to lean into the sense of imagination and inner knowing I experienced in recreating my great-grandfather (and his love with my great-grandmother). We are more than records and other governmental and societal validations of our existence. And as survivors, we can reach back and grab some of the power and beauty that existed in those who were taken. We can memorialize them in words and songs and museums and history books — even if we don’t have all the facts and details. That cavernous place of where something or someone used to exist (think of the Twin Towers) deserves its place in history, its moments of silence, its poetry.  

PHR: You came into the creative world with experience as a journalist, someone who believes deeply in the power of storytelling. What do art and storytelling do that media or journalism often doesn’t or can’t? 

Lane: I think art and storytelling pick up where journalism leaves off, though through long-form and narrative journalism, including serialized pieces and documentaries, those worlds can blend quite effectively and artistically. In art and storytelling, you aren’t bound by fleeting news cycles. You actually must slow down versus rush to get the story out as you must across daily newsrooms and even monthly publications. You get to sit with your ideas and research more. You get to write slowly and revise (and revise some more), going much deeper into a subject or image or thought or exchange of dialogue. Even so, art exhibitions and books need the attention and support of the media. When I think about how the novel got its start — as serialized short stories in newspapers and other periodicals — it makes me long for a return to that. We have seen some of this merging in recent years, with even more newspapers dedicating space to creatively told personal stories. But I think magazines and newspapers should have dedicated spaces for short fiction as well. 

PHR: When you’re writing a piece that is about racism, war, or some kind of injustice, at what point, if ever, do you begin to think about your future readers? Or, in what specific ways does your sense of audience change when you’re writing about injustice, racism, and war? 

Lane: Right now, I can’t get over how divided we all are. Even people who used to be on the same side of the fence are fighting. I have always believed that “the personal is political and the political is personal.” So to make sense of it all, I have to distill these all-consuming horrors down into a drop that I can manage through first a few words, then a few sentences. In looking at the atrocities going on in the Middle East, for instance, I wrote a lyric essay about my first remembered experience with “war,” also known as sibling rivalry. In looking back at the little girls my sister and I were, and how we are on different sides of some heavy issues right now as adults, I am examining the part of human nature that gets us tearing at each other in the first place. We are all witnesses to each other’s stories, no matter where we are in the world. I am more interested in my reader’s heart than their face. 

PHR: What is the role of a writer or artist during times of political division, including the many this country has attempted to reckon with in the past few years? 

Lane: Some writers, including several contemporary writers I personally know, want nothing to do with writing about political and social “issues.” As a journalist and storyteller, I am interested in everything that impacts us on micro and macro levels. Is a war shooting gas and grocery prices to the sky so that the neighborhood grocery store is locking up small essentials like toothpaste and deodorant because its owners claim people are coming in and stealing these small items — and what does this do to the fabric of a community? Who is the security guard guarding the locked-up goods? Does he have a key? Has the escalating homeless crisis hit a character’s home in a profound way? Will this teenager be able to find a safe location to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? Will the librarian who shares with her a novel that centers a character who has an abortion be fired? 

Books don’t have to take the political and social themes of the times head on, but in writing about people and place, in “real” time and space, these large and small monsters we’re wrestling with as humanity should find themselves in some way part of the river that winds through our stories.

PHR: What are three books that you’d recommend readers to check out? 

Lane: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals, and Ramona Reeves’ It Falls Gently All Around.