Tell it Real and with Love: An Interview with Helen Elaine Lee
I first met Helen Elaine Lee in October 2024 when she came to the University of Massachusetts Boston to teach a masterclass on fiction. I had just devoured her latest novel, Pomegranate. The story follows a woman named Ranita as she struggles to regain custody of her children after serving time in prison. Of the novels abundant strengths, what had impressed me most about Lee's storytelling was how Ranita's character development was so closely entwined with her family, friends, and past. Lee conveyed an understanding about human interconnectedness that many writers either lack or fail to express. Her writing felt both refreshing and familiar in the way truth always does.
As Lee sat in the front of the UMass classroom, poised and prepared for her discussion, I kept my ears perked, hoping to hear the secret to writing and publishing a book as good as Pomegranate. These expectations are an unfortunate byproduct of masterclasses. Many aspiring authors still hold onto some small hope that there is a shortcut to good writing, and if anyone could offer advice or wisdom, it would be Lee. She has been publishing successfully for nearly thirty years with three novels and numerous awards under her belt, including the 2024 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other literary magazines. Her essay about working with incarcerated men was published in The New York Times Book Review.
Luckily for me and the rest of the MFA audience, the wisdom that Lee shared during her discussion was better than a get-published-quick scheme. It was a validation of the uncertainty involved in writing and living. This uncertainty is shared by all writers, successful or not. "We don’t know how the plots of our lives will develop," she insisted. "The only way to discover what’s in store is by living and writing with devotion to the unfolding process and its mysteries."
Born in Detroit to a criminal defense attorney and a literature professor, Lee credits her father for endowing her with a sense of justice and her mother with inspiring her love of books. After completing her undergraduate studies and law degree at Harvard, she dreamed that publishing a novel would allow her to pivot from a legal career that paid the bills to her real passion for writing and reading. During her discussion at UMass, she recalled the euphoria of completing her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, after five years of hard work. "I printed it, packed it up, and took it to the post office to send off to my agent. It weighed 6 pounds, 7 ounces, and I sent birth announcements to my friends."
Initially unsure whether she could support herself without a lawyer's salary, Lee lived with the uncertainty and worked through it. She continued to write and publish. She left her job as an attorney and began teaching, working her way toward tenure at MIT. Though she stopped practicing law, her father's influence on her sense of justice remained strong. For ten years, she directed the PEN New England Prison Creative Writing Program and served on its board.
The themes and strengths I admired about Pomegranate are present in all her work. Often covering multiple generations, Lee's characters have all been shaped by personal and collective histories. “There is no present moment unburdened by the past,” she explained in her masterclass. Arguments, deaths, racism, and mistakes are specters that continue to haunt for years, if not lifetimes.
When I met with Lee a second time at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square, she was busy working on a new novel. She informed me she had reached the enviable flow-state that writers often chase; she was so fully immersed in her fictional world that reconnecting with life outside the page took some adjustment.
During our discussion, we went over her new project and the trajectory of her writing life. She was just about to retire from her position at MIT, which would give her more time to devote to writing and family. Even though we were relative strangers, speaking with Helen was like meeting with an old friend. Listening to her advice was both comforting and energizing. In writing and in person, she is full of grace, truth, and wisdom.
— Anna Vallée
You’ve published three novels: The Serpent’s Gift, Water Marked, and Pomegranate. How has your writing process changed over time? What have you learned in writing each book?
Early on, I struggled for discipline, restlessly jumping up from my writing to tend to household tasks or the mix of the law-related work and other gigs I was doing to support myself, unable to settle unless I had just the right writing space and a block of time. After The Serpent’s Gift came out, I was able to shift to teaching at MIT. And becoming a single mother by choice a few years later was clarifying. If I didn’t prioritize what mattered, I would never manage to write. I became more disciplined. And then, as my mother, who had moved from Michigan to help me raise my son, began to have health problems, there was a stretch of difficult years when I was taking care of her and my son. I developed the ability to write in the spaces between work and family responsibilities, but that did make the immersion required for writing novels hard to come by.
Although teaching claimed some of my creative energy, it also fed my writing. It gave me the explicit challenge of examining and discussing the ways in which the choices made about the elements of fiction contributed to meaning. And a way to try and live what I was imparting to students about how writing fiction requires a commitment to process, with its excavation and development, self-interrogation and revision, mystery and wonder. I have just retired after 30 years at MIT, and the thing I will miss most is the collective brainstorming of the workshop. I have loved guiding the conversation about what we want the work to say and do, and the journey of getting that intention on the page. It has been exciting to engage with students in that way, and that process has nourished my writing.
My understanding of my life story and myself as a writer was deepened with each book. We bring our lives to the writing, and I came at Pomegranate having raised my son, lost my mother, become middle-aged, been a professor and taught for nearly 30 years. All that has formed me and shaped my sense of what matters is reflected in that novel. Since writing fiction is mysterious…it’s hard to say where you get a particular detail or dialogue or plot point, or how you arrive at the way to show something…I can’t attest to all the ways I’ve learned to be who I am as a writer. But I did come to see one thing about my narrative voice through being required to cut 13,000 words of the manuscript of Pomegranate that I had submitted. Rather than cut full chapters or sections, which would be like playing Jenga and would threaten to collapse the whole, I started on page one. And the process of asking what was essential in each sentence and scene was rewarding. I saw that after letting my voice run free, returning to it again and again to impose greater restraint was good for the telling, for the not knowing that spurs curiosity, and for the reader having room to do the work of putting the pieces of the story together.
How do you begin writing your novels? Do you have characters in mind? A setting? A conflict?
There are a few interrelated things I’m always thinking about…through-lines in my imagination…that seem to lead me to the characters and their predicaments. I’m interested in how we pull light from darkness to renew and reinvent ourselves. The role of narrative in our lives. The process of grappling with our pasts. And the polarity of loss and possibility. My lens is Black, feminist, queer. And my aim is to tell the stories of my peoples, drawing on our languages and landscapes and histories, in ways that will help us to see ourselves and also resonate for all readers.
Each of my novels has had a different kind of genesis.
The Serpent’s Gift was inspired by family characters and stories. My grandfather was a teller of tales, or “lies,” in the Black tradition. My great Aunt had a woman lover for over 50 years and was crippled by a back street abortion. A risk-averse aunt lived vicariously. I started with those story seeds and imagined a context for the characters. Then, in Water Marked, I departed from family material and began thinking about a tale I’d heard about a man who had fabricated his death as a way in to exploring the effort to leave one’s life behind, and the reverberations of that choice. And the seed for Pomegranate was planted in me by my father, who was a criminal defense attorney. He taught me that everyone has a complex and important story, that many people grow up without love or opportunity or choices, and that justice is a fiction for some of us.
Much has been written about incarceration from an academic distance, but fiction has the potential to move people past fear and indifference, and I wanted readers to feel the lived and emotional truths of addiction, imprisonment, and recovery. Although my father’s work meant that those caught in the criminal legal system were not distant or invisible to me, I volunteered in prisons and houses of correction, leading creative writing workshops over many years to try and earn the story I wanted to tell. For years I just listened, and then characters, including Ranita, the protagonist of Pomegranate, began to take shape and live, first in my head, and then on the page.
Do you have a writing routine or any rituals you follow?
With a few exceptions, I turn off my phone and write every day from morning until mid-afternoon, and I try to get started before I answer emails or do other work. If I start the day with something else, I tend to lose my way. This practice is a daily demonstration that my writing is of primary importance. Before I begin, though, I give myself the treat of doing the NYT Spelling Bee. I am often able to come in and out of what I’m working on over the course of the day, and when I’m able to be immersed, what I’m working on is running through me while I garden or take a walk or do everyday tasks. Just before sleep, I’m reaching for my phone to jot down something to include or rethink or consider about what I’m writing.
Writing entails such uncertainty and doubt, without the safety of right and wrong answers, of solving for x. For my MIT students…mostly scientists and engineers in the making, this is hard. For me, trained as a lawyer who felt like she was in a tiny, prescriptive box, this feels liberating. It made me want to jump up and shout in celebration when I moved from lawyering to writing fiction. Still, the risk and messiness and ambiguity are daunting. But through a grounding practice, the transcendent experience of creativity is possible. The structure of a practice allows me to approach writing as a process, bear the emotional difficulty of bringing my own life to the work, and risk the imaginative leap.
Writing has also come to be the source of coherence in my daily life. I began transforming Ranita’s appearances in my earlier work into a new novel when my mother was dying. It held me together, I found. And it continues to do so, through loss and change.
How do you approach research?
Although the research that has fed my imagining has included published data and first person accounts, the most meaningful insights have come from personal interactions. For Pomegranate, I set out to learn about what I had not experienced by volunteering with people who were incarcerated. I interviewed people who had been imprisoned, their family members, and people who had been in community with them. To try and educate myself, I read first person accounts, published data, online postings and studies, anthologies, fiction and nonfiction on incarceration, the criminal legal system, addiction, and trauma. I watched films, and I talked and worked with people with experience in those areas, and to make the story and its details ring true, I talked to psychotherapists, DCF caseworkers, and criminal defense lawyers.
I also drew on the personal. Loved ones pained by addiction and abuse. My own story of mothering, and daughtering, and family. My understanding of the ongoing roles and intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in our lives. My experience of queerness and queer communities. What I know about the tensions between fierceness and sensitivity, belonging and marginality, the struggle and recompense of speaking out. I drew on my experience with the mandate to carry on. The healing forces of narrative and nature. The ways in which the present is burdened by the past.
For The Serpent’s Gift, in addition to talking to family members and looking at family letters and scrapbooks and photographs, I did a lot of reading about The Great Migration, illegal abortions in the 1920’s, and the time periods in which my characters lived. And for Water Marked, I read about local culture and history and researched the experience of making visual art.
In addition to your novels, you have published numerous short stories in literary magazines. Does your writing process differ when you are writing short stories versus novels?
It takes me years to write a novel, and it’s challenging to hold in your mind the scope, the whole, of something so complex and evolving. So much unfolds over the course of the writing, and I have found that my intentions and my understanding of what I’m after shift as I understand the characters and their motivations more fully, as my ideas develop, as I question myself. Changing even one thing means changing the whole. But if I am able to stay in the world of the novel and live the lives of the characters in my imagination over an extended period, I know it like I know a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle I’ve been working on and can think, Oh, that piece is over there and it belongs here.
As a reader, I love the sprawl of a novel best. Transported and hanging out in the world long term, investing and coming to understanding gradually, seeing what will happen slowly. Being in the heads and hearts of the characters, living their stories, is such a gas. My mom’s dissertation for her doctorate in comparative literature was on 19th Century French, English, and Irish novels, and she passed down her love of thick, rich novels to me.
Writing short stories, which depend on distillation and concision, feels altogether different to me. And for me it’s harder. It’s quite a challenge to make the reader care right away and provide an experience of meaning that is profound and cuts deep in very little space. I am—by nature—long winded, and I’m always seeking the circuitous conversation that will have many chapters and maybe never conclude. But I did write stories in those years of maximum juggling, and I have a few in process now. The novel I’m working on now started as a short story. I was nearly finished with it and realized that its scope and events were much broader than could be housed in a short story. It keeps on expanding, deepening, and taking unexpected turns. A marathon instead of a sprint.
Gifts of fruit feature in two of your novels: The Serpent’s Gift and Pomegranate. Do these gestures have any symbolic value? How do you approach symbolism in your writing?
Yes, both novels begin with gifts of fruit.
In The Serpent’s Gift, an orange, which embodies both sweetness and acidity, is given to a woman who is running with her two young children to escape her husband’s violence, in their recently integrated neighborhood. A woman opens her door and provides a refuge. In that scene, which was inspired by the life history of a friend of mine, I was looking for a way to show the duality experienced by the children, of both losing safety and trust, and being offered love and belonging, as it turns out. The narrator marks the moment in this way: “That night of oranges, where loss and receiving met. Lined, unknown hands and a gift of fruit. Running, and an open door.”
Somehow, I didn’t realize while writing Pomegranate that in its opening, I was articulating the theme of loss and receiving in a similar way. I had been given the gift of the pomegranate as a symbol of the precious and rare act of choosing during imprisonment, by a friend who was incarcerated. I started off being compelled by that idea, and by the plain exterior of the fruit belying the striking jewels within, and as I wrote, it gathered meaning and came to resonate in additional ways over the course of the novel. In the opening, it is the gift given with love and generosity during a time of loss. The possibility of wonder that lies beneath the surface of what is seemingly ordinary and unexceptional.
As fiction is grounded in the concrete, I try, anyway, to use objects such as the orange and pomegranate so that they feel integrated and not imposed, so that they accrete meaning over the course of the novel and contribute, along with the other aspects of the story, to my thematic goals.
In both of these openings, I am announcing that although we are wounded by experience and inheritance, abundance and generosity exist…around, between, and within us.
And sometimes we find our hands filled, perhaps through memory and imagination, with what we need. It may be with something everyday, or seemingly ordinary, that turns out to be pivotal.
In Pomegranate, Ranita wants to be a better person, but she struggles. She’s haunted by her past addiction and the people who refuse to see her evolution. What do you think about the role of traditional character arcs in fiction? How did you think about Ranita’s arc as you were writing?
I would say that Ranita wants to be a fuller, well-er person who is resisting the pull of oblivion to choose life, accept herself, and raise her voice. I see her story as a journey of healing, and that involves struggle. Setbacks and triumphs. Ups and downs. I wanted to show how addiction and trauma and sexual violence pave the way to imprisonment. And I wanted to connect the trauma of imprisonment to this society’s history of enslavement, exclusion, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and racial violence. But I also wanted to show the spirit of resistance that is healing, empowering, and ongoing, and that is a fundamental aspect of the story of Black survival, in this country and throughout the diaspora.
With Ranita, I wanted to tell a story that was true to her struggle with societal, historical, and personal forces, with a feeling of building momentum and significant stakes, including the custody of her children. And I wanted to show the forces that are at least as strong as the negative ones…hope and possibility, love and community…and to give her the resources of books and intellectual curiosity and attunement to the natural world to draw on. Now, that story isn’t going to be delivered through some simple conflict-climax-resolution arc.
There is no single approach to structuring a story or novel. A story’s problems or questions or conflicts, which might exist in the form of friction… tension…disparity…are the engines powering the narrative forward. And although momentum needs to build over its course, a story that is true to life might rise and fall episodically, any number of times, and the structure might spiral, or move back and forth, or be circular. Different kinds and degrees of resolution are possible, too. I neither want to leave the reader completely in the dark, with everything unresolved, nor tie up every thread. There’s some balance between a sense of satisfaction or completion and an open-endedness that leaves the reader with reverberating questions, with a fuller understanding of the story’s problems, even if they remain unresolved, and room to keep imagining. I think often of my son, who is a visual artist, saying how important it is for an artist not to connect up all of the dots for the viewer.
Two of your novels revolve around reluctant homecomings. Sunday Owens is reluctant to return to her small Illinois county, and Ranita is reluctant to return to her home outside of prison in Boston. What role did setting play in these novels? How do you approach setting generally?
While Sunday had tried to leave her home behind, Ranita is eager to return to the children and home that she is prevented from visiting by the family reunification process governed and overseen by the state. Still, coming home after imprisonment is complex. And that is partly conveyed through the world of the story, through what home is…and in Ranita’s case, through what the world of Oak Hills prison is, as well. Those settings, in terms of the physical and in terms of social context, are fundamental to the story, as they show the environment that shaped her, negatively and positively, and the one with which she will have to reckon to thrive.
Setting is so often taken for granted. I’ve read a lot of disembodied student stories that are happening somewhere amorphous and undefined, and not grounded in the concrete. But even idea driven stories are not by nature abstract. In a story, something particular happens to a particular individual, here, in this place. And it is, somewhat paradoxically, through the specific that we understand the universal.
One of the building blocks of fiction, setting gives readers a world to enter, a toehold for the story, and the world of events to believe in and invest in. And the story elements of plot, character and setting are interdependent. Inseparable. The characters and the “what happens” are shaped by the story’s environment. The people and the events interact with and act upon the environment. And setting is more than the physical world, natural and created. It is also social context: culture, language, idioms, speech patterns, sounds, smells, tastes, sensibilities, historical backgrounds and periods, inhabitants, social fabric. And I love figuring out the details that will make the world come alive, convey who the characters are and what they are dealing with, and do thematic work by helping to embody meaning.
Readers can make unfounded assumptions about novels and their authors. Has this ever happened to you? How do you draw the line between the personal and professional as a writer?
These days there is an appetite, fed by social media, of access to the personal lives of writers. Instagram followers want to see your home, your writing space, your pets. An introvert and empath, I’m fiercely protective of my privacy, which made being on social media, a requirement now that books are sold digitally, emotionally difficult. Is there any aspect of life that is unmediated, that is private? Is there a moment that is not corrupted by the effort to sell something? Now writers are asked to sell not only our books, but ourselves. We are expected to promote and perform with endless pitches and posts that feed the algorithm, lest we become prematurely irrelevant. It’s absolutely dystopian. And terrible for the work, which depends on stillness and quiet reflection and emotional honesty.
I was fortunate to have the resources to hire a social media consultant for Pomegranate, and we worked at figuring out Instagram posts that would be about the content of the book. And I did my best to police that line and resist the push for greater access, saying “No,” for example, to the request to tape and post a small book club conversation that otherwise promised to be an unmediated, intimate exchange of genuine reactions and ideas. The presence of the video camera changes us, and not for the better. And it’s unnerving to know that anything you do make public will live forever online, perhaps out of context. I couldn’t function, much less write, if I didn’t draw boundaries between public and private.
If you’ve read Pomegranate, you’ve taken a walk through my head and heart, which already makes me feel exposed. The story came through me, and in that book is a politics revealing how I see the world and what I care about. Yet the thirst is for the factual truth. Which reflects a misunderstanding of fiction writing. It’s the writer’s job to imagine lives and worlds different from her own, and the amalgam of what you’re drawing on from your own life and what you have imagined is a beautiful mystery. Yet what is on the page is presumed to be literally autobiographical.
Writers are often interested in imagining things that we have not experienced. But I did worry that readers of Pomegranate would presume that I’d had a mother like Ranita’s, when in truth, I had a very warm and loving mother, and we had a wonderful and close relationship until she died at 94. She was a literature professor…a Black woman pioneer…and she gave me stories and books to see by. She was there for me always. She helped me raise my son. And she believed in me, as a person and a writer, even when I doubted myself.
So, I sought to imagine what it would be like to have the opposite kind of mother, one who would have had a role in wounding Ranita. I imagined the kind of parental behavior that would have been disabling and lead to disempowerment and addiction. Her feeling that her mother has invalidated her emotionally is devastating. And Geneva’s transmission of shame about the body and its appetites has a profound effect. But I also wanted to portray Geneva as complex, in her own right and in terms of how Ranita perceives her. She is a product of her individual and family experience, societal values, and cultural inheritance. Indeed, we often pass down the things that have hurt us. And by the way, many readers have told me told me that their mothers were like Geneva.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Pay attention. Read deeply and broadly. Dream. Develop a writing practice. Approach writing as a process and revise, revise, revise. Don’t be silenced by doubt.
In my study I have several quotes beside my desk. In one, Eudora Welty writes about what she learned from Katherine Anne Porter about how hard writing is: The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than like a trusted lantern to see your way by.” Welty goes on to say, “Katherine Anne was helping me to recognize living with difficulty as a form of passion.
Another is from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”: The tale of how we suffer and how we triumph and how we are delighted is never new, but always must be told. It’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
And one is from Virginia Woolf: It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
How do you hope your work will be remembered by readers?
There’s a lot of clever fiction writing out there in which authors are performing their intellects, and conceptual stories where the characters fee like afterthoughts or chess pieces being moved around by the authors. The novels that have spoken to me and changed me most profoundly are the ones in which the ideas are embodied in the elements of fiction: the what happens, the people, the place, language, voice, point of view, structure, concrete detail. I want to be broken open. And I want to work for meaning. But I want that investment to be in service to something bigger than the writer’s ego, or the marketplace. And I find myself saying, often out loud, “Tell me a story about people.”
I hope readers will say that the people in my novels and stories were real and complex, and that they cared about them. That the language and voice were rendered with power and care. That the work asked readers to stretch, and that even if they thought it would be about people with whom they had little in common, it turned out to be about them, too. That it conveyed the struggle and wonder, loss and possibility in our lives. That it depicted Black people, women, and queer people with humanity and complexity. That I told it real and with love.
I believe, all the way down to my feet, in the power of story to illuminate and transform. And I hope readers will say that I took part in that.
Helen Elaine Lee is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Best African American Fiction 2009. Her novel Pomegranate, published in 2023 by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, won the Publishing Triangle 2024 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, was a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was named one of the 20 Best Books of 2023 by Amazon. She is a Professor Post-Tenure in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT.
Anna Vallée is a fiction writer, MFA student, and creative writing instructor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She was a semifinalist for The Adroit Journal’s 2025 Anthony Veasna So Fiction Scholars, and her short story won a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. She currently serves as the coeditor of Literally magazine. Before starting her MFA, Anna worked at Harvard and MIT. She has an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Instagram: @avallee.writes