Lisa Borders

Readers have asked whether Cloud Cuckoo Land is autobiographical, as first novels sometimes are. In truth, very little in the book comes directly from the author's life. Unlike Cloud Cuckoo Land's narrator, Miri, Lisa has never lived in Texas, has never been homeless, and can't carry a tune. And Lisa's mother would like you to know that she is nothing like Miri's mother.

However, certain events in Cloud Cuckoo Land, as well as the settings, were inspired by experiences in the author's life. Lisa's late father grew up in Beaumont, Texas, roughly the area where the fictional town of Prairie Rose is situated. One of the most gripping stories he told of his childhood involved his mother and a pearl-handled revolver, and a fictionalized version of this incident appears early in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Later chapters of the book are set in Philadelphia, where Lisa lived for six years. Like Jamie, Miri's musical partner in Cloud Cuckoo Land, Lisa was a Bruce Springsteen fanatic in high school whose tastes shifted to punk and indie rock in later years. (Not that she doesn't still think Bruce Springsteen's first four albums are masterpieces, because she does.)

Bands mentioned in the book whose members include characters involved in the story -- Chutes and Ladders, the Primates, Pterodactyl, and Cloud Cuckoo Land itself -- are fictional. But many of the bands mentioned in passing existed at the time and in the place where the story is set.

Lisa Borders's early years were spent in a limited southward migration: from upstate New York to Westchester County to the central Jersey shore to South Jersey, where she graduated from high school in Millville. She attended college first at Virginia Tech, which didn't suit her, and then at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Despite having taken her B.A. in biology (she once wanted to be a veterinarian, and in fact, she sometimes still does) she worked as a journalist for four years before realizing she didn't particularly like it. She then moved to Philadelphia for an M.A. in creative writing at Temple University, where, in her first workshop, the very first piece she submitted was a short story called Cloudcuckooland. Her workshop instructor asked if the story's "reality mitigated its banality," and after she realized she'd been insulted, Lisa vowed to show him: she would turn the story into a novel!

After a post-M.A. year of temp jobs and economic desperation, she moved to Burlington, Vermont to dust off her biology degree and study cytology, of all things. She received her certificate in cytology in 1992, and then moved back to Philadelphia to screen pap smears and fine needle aspiration biopsies, and to start working on a novel called Cloudcuckooland. In 1995 she moved to the Boston area, eventually cut her cytology hours to part time, and then really, really started working on a novel called Cloudcuckooland. In 1999, she finally finished a 486-page manuscript; two years and several more drafts later, her manuscript won a River City Publishing contest judged by Pat Conroy and Cassandra King. After many lively discussions with her editor regarding the title of her book, it was published as Cloud Cuckoo Land in October, 2002. She now really likes those spaces in there.

Lisa still lives in the Boston area, still works part-time as a cytotechnologist, and teaches creative writing at Grub Street Writers. She's had several really cool cats -- starting with Matthew, a cat so cool, she found him outside a club in 1986 -- and then there was shy Sam, and now the statuesque Sylvie.

Lisa has published a number of short stories in a variety of magazines, including Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, CrossConnect and Painted Bride Quarterly. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies at Hedgebrook, the Blue Mountain Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She recently finished her second novel, The Fifty-First State, set in the Delaware Bay region of South Jersey.