Anna Joy Springer: The Beautifully Worthless is somewhere between a novel and an epic poem--the story's told in prose--in letters from the narrator to her girlfriend--and in verse, which is both lyrical and narrative in its own right. How do you see the combining of genres working together to weave this story? What is each genre's role in developing the narrative?

Ali Liebegott: Originally, the piece started as a poem. I was sitting in this weird basement room in Brooklyn writing one line after the next that started with "I wish, I wish." Later as the poem developed, I realized it was an epic. I was wishing for a place to go to, a magical place without sorrow or despair. The poem became a journey and the letters developed into these breaks in the poem, like little postcards that identified things like: town, place, emotional state, etc. They were also places that allowed a more flippant attitude to contrast the verse.

Anna Joy: You started writing The Beautifully Worthless while you were a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence. At the same time that you were a student, you were working full-time as a waitress. Tell me a little about your life when you were trying to navigate school, work, and writing a book? Is your writing practice different now that it was when you began writing The Beautifully Worthless?

Ali: I was living in Brooklyn and taking two subways and a train up to Sarah Lawrence a few times a week. I was actually doing an undergraduate and graduate degree simultaneously, and I was working at this horrible restaurant/brewery five nights a week. It was crazy, but mostly I was just drinking a lot. I was trying to control my drinking around the school hours. When I came home from Sarah Lawrence, I'd let myself buy a 40 and drink it on the subway as some sort of reward. And then of course, I was allowed to drink all through my waitress shift. I just remember really trying to not fuck up school with my drinking. I don't remember saying, "I need to write every day." I just remember scrawling madly about this married woman I was in love with at the time. Writing poems and making up stories for her. One day I showed up at school with nothing for my writing teacher and she asked me about my writing practice and I told her, I was having trouble writing. She said, "Write one hour every day." I said all indignantly, "What poet only writes one hour a day?" She said, "It's more than you're writing now." That shut me up. I think in the "one hour a day" The Beautifully Worthless started. Thanks, Suzanne Gardinier. Now my writing process is different. Part of it is because since I stopped drinking, I tend to have more energy for projects so I have a lot of different projects going at once. But the at-least-one-hour-a-day still holds true. It's especially helpful when I'm working on long pieces, to stay connected to them.

Anna Joy: Your protagonist is a young woman, a dyke, who goes on a sort of quest. She is deeply sad but it seems that her sorrow sharpens her sense of humor as well as her eye for beauty and value in mundane and even overlooked people, places, and things. What is the ultimate object of your heroine's quest? Without giving the story away, what does she find?

Ali: I don't even know if she knows what she's looking for. Or if she does if she'd be able to identify any kind of found thing. Mostly she wants hope. She wants a kind of perfect world where gays don't get murdered and poor people aren't supposed to live off welfare cheese, and despair isn't everywhere. It's kind of enraging to think that that's too much to ask for out of life. If you asked me what she found, three or four years ago when I finished the book, I'd tell you something different than what I'd tell you today. The last image in the book is her looking down at her hands in this darkening campsite.

Anna Joy: What is the definition of love--love of parents, of lovers, of friends, of self--in The Beautifully Worthless? In what ways do the protagonist's, as well as your own sexual orientation affect definitions of love within the world of the novel? What about in this world?

Ali: I have no idea how to answer that. She loves a manifestation of a real situation. It's like the carrot seems better in front of the horse's mouth. Not to say the horse doesn't like it when it gets it. Did you know at the dog track, they lead the dog's around the track by hanging an inflatable bone in front of them. At least the carrot's real. Can you imagine finally catching the bone, but eating a balloon instead. Does that answer the question?

Anna Joy: Did you suspect that The Beautifully Worthless would be such a chick-magnet? Have you always seduced women with your gorgeous manipulation of imagery and lyricism?

Ali: What do you say you and I go over to the dog track, little lady, and look at the balloon art? Just for the record, I've never bet on dogs. I think it's evil. I have bet on horses though, which I also think is evil. Why can't we all just bet on carrots?

Anna Joy: You're working on a couple books now--tell me about them.

Ali: I'm working on The IHOP Papers which is a novel about a young lesbian pancake waitress who follows her community college philosophy teacher to San Francisco because she's in love with her, and an illustrated novel called The Crumb People, which is about a post-September 11th duck feeder who falls terrifyingly in love with a duck named Slim.

Anna Joy: Why make a stand for what's beautiful and worthless? Why now?

Ali: I'd never wanted to make a stand for what's beautiful and what's worthless. But when I got the free checkbook holder for joining the poet's union, they insisted that as poets our job was to find the beauty in the mundane. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision…but the checkbook holder was really beautiful. A kind of bright red pleather…

Anna Joy: I've been told that I have to write the book I've always wanted to read. Is The Beautifully Worthless that book for you? What other writing made The Beautifully Worthless possible?

Ali: I'm really proud of The Beautifully Worthless. It felt magical, the whole process of making it. Literally, it led me to those places that ended up in the book. I'm not saying it was divinely inspired, but there was a quality of discovery that has never happened in writing my other books. It was like barfing up a baby. But in a good way. I read a lot of epics and novels in verse after I knew that was what I was writing. Probably the most influential writers for this book were: Anne Carson, Maggie Dubris, Larry Levis, Denis Johnson, Alice Notley, Emily Dickinson, Anna Ahkmatova, Pablo Neruda, Dante, Rilke… Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson shook my world. So did Willieworld by Maggie Dubris. They were exactly the examples I needed to bridge the gap from The Inferno. Am I forgetting anyone? Oh yeah. All of us who are writing our stories that have no place in the literary cannon.

Anna Joy Springer, a beautiful and brilliant ball and chain, has little fangs and barks like a deer when excited. Teenage fans call her "The Bird Lady," because she writes, almost exclusively, about birds. Before moving to Sandy Dayglo to teach at Eileen Myles' School for Wayward Writers, she did lots of femme jobs, made neon sculptures, sang in "legendary" punk bands Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow, and read her purple prose with Sister Spit. She currently tongue-lashes misogynists, writes weird and lengthy cross-genre messes, and ponders the many species of love, radical performative pedagogy, and the gyre of ethics in konsumer kapitalism. She loves Ali.