Author Q&A with Lea Pounds

Lea Pounds holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She loves to explore brief interactions that tell a deeper story. As an avid people watcher, Lea gets her best ideas by eavesdropping on snippets of other people’s lives. She’s published in Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Novice Writer, and After Dinner Conversations. Lea lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and can be found online at leapounds.com.

Tell us about yourself.

My roots are in Central Nebraska where I was raised. I’m one of those people who left their small town to come to the ‘big city’ right after high school. For me that was Omaha and I’ve been here ever since. I have a grown daughter who’s married and has three sons. Over the decades, I’ve held jobs in marketing and health communication but I’ve always been a writer at heart. 

What inspired you to get your MFA in Writing after teaching graduate students in Public Health?

In middle and high school I had teachers that supported my interest in writing. I took a different path after high school but the idea of being a published author never went away. After I connected with a group of romance writers in my early forties, I started submitting to editors and agents without any success. Thanks to those romance writers I gained a solid grounding in craft, but I knew something was missing. As I started planning for retirement, including more time to write, I knew I needed more training. A poet friend, who was also a mentor for the UNO MFA program, introduced me to the program director. After talking with them, an MFA seemed like the way to go. I published my first short story in my third semester of the program.

How has your experience in Public Health influenced your writing?

My work in public health reinforced the idea that things are not always what they seem.  That’s made me more thoughtful in how I portray characters that are not like me. I do have characters that are of different races, genders, and sexual orientations but I’m careful about POV. I do research to portray them as accurately as possible and rely on my workshop group to hold me accountable if I make assumptions about those characters.   

As an academic in Public Health, I conducted qualitative research studies. Basically, I listened to many people’s experiences around a particular issue, looked for themes in their answers, and drew conclusions. I bring that experience to my writing by examining how a character’s outward behavior reveals their inner life. I think of my characters as if they’re real people and probe into why they might think, feel, or act the way they do.

How has people watching contributed to your story ideas? What’s your best strategy for ‘eavesdropping on snippets of other people’s lives?’ 

Restaurants and coffee shops are great places to eavesdrop. Doctors’ waiting rooms are a good source, too. When I catch a few words of someone’s conversation and watch their body language, I start filling in the blanks about what’s going on. Before you know it, there’s a story idea to explore. My first published short story came from overhearing a conversation about the impact on families with disabled children if the Affordable Care Act were overturned.   

“Rainbow Mittens” seems to me a story of wartime resilience. Did you have a specific war in mind when you wrote the story or is it a story of war in general? 

The idea started with a specific war and morphed into something more generic. I was watching news coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The evening news showed buses of Ukrainians arriving at the Polish border. There was a boy, about ten or eleven years old, standing by the bus stop. An aid worker turned to him and asked a question. When another bus came and went, the boy was still there. The worker asked the boy something again and the boy showed them the palm of his hand. According to the news, parents were writing the names and phone numbers of friends or relatives in Poland on the hands of their unaccompanied children as a way to make sure they ended up with the right people. I assumed that’s what was going on with the boy. It’s another example where a snippet ended up creating a story!

That got me thinking about other wars. In WWII, for example, Jewish parents living in Nazi-occupied territory sent their children to live with strangers to get them out of harm’s way. British parents in London during the Blitz sent their children to strangers living in the countryside. We’ve got unaccompanied minors at our southern border sent by parents desperate to get their children out of political and economic chaos that threatens their lives. 

How does historical fiction help us to learn from the mistakes of the past?

I’m not sure it helps us learn from mistakes of the past because we seem to keep doing the same things over and over. People in my age group are having flashbacks to the sixties and seventies. We are again seeing a President accused of crimes, oppression of workers, students protesting war, attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, and so on. History repeating itself. 

I do think historical fiction can help us understand the past. If we’re thinking in terms of works written by authors who lived in the past, I think it’s important for a reader to consider the cultural or social contexts that influenced the author. I once overheard two college-age women discussing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. They got hung up on Plath’s use of racial stereotypes that were common in Plath’s time but offensive by today’s standards. By failing to consider the context of Plath’s world, they overlooked the value of the book as a window into the struggles of women during the second wave of feminism. It could be argued that since the #metoo movement, we’re in a third wave of feminism. Books like The Bell Jar give insight into women’s past struggles that can be correlated to the struggles of women today.   

How do you feel your narrator’s wartime experiences influenced her adult life as a mother? Or helped her understand her mother’s decision to send her away? 

I think she learned the importance of keeping promises to your children. Her mother followed through on her promise to knit another pair of mittens. Hopefully, the reader draws the conclusion that it wasn’t easy for the mother to do that because she had to scavenge different kinds of yarn. The narrator sees the mittens as a symbol of her mother’s love. She knows that they were the only thing her mother had to bequeath to her. The mittens have been patched over the years because the narrator cherishes that connection to her mother. I think she would work to create that same kind of trust and connection with her own child.  

How do you keep writing a part of your daily life?

While I was still working, I generally didn’t write during the weekdays but blocked off Saturdays as writing time. Now I’m retired which makes it a lot easier. My child is grown and out on her own, too, so I don’t have a lot of family demands on my time. It’s just me and the dog. A couple of years ago, a mentor told me to treat my writing like a job. What she meant was to schedule dedicated writing time and show up just like you would if it was a job. I try to do that, not always successfully, but I’m getting better at it.

I also journal almost every morning. Several years ago I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She recommends what she calls morning pages, which is journaling three pages of long-hand, free-flow, brain-dump. I started doing that in earnest when I was working on my MFA and it really did help boost my creativity.   

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

A life worth living is the first thing that pops into my head. I suppose the definition of worthwhile is different from one person to another. To me it means having what I need to live comfortably and being able to pursue the things that interest me.

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Lea’s flash fiction piece, Rainbow Mittens, is featured in our Spring 2024 Edition ~ Issue #15.

We were fortunate enough to meet Lea in person at AWP this past February and pleased to learn that she received her MFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha. It’s always great to connect with new people who have shared experiences! The TGLR founding team met during the course of their MFA at UNO and that is part of what continues to tie us together, but the program has a long history and there are many people who’ve been through it that we have not met.

We have since invited Lea to join our growing community of writers and share in the experience of reading for and participating in journal collaborations. She’s now reading fiction with the short fiction team.

Thank you, Lea, for trusting us with your story! We’re glad we were able to connect with another fellow UNO MFAer and are excited to have you on the team! Onward we go!!