Lyndsey Ellis
Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer and essayist who’s passionate about exploring intergenerational resilience in the Midwest. A VONA and Hurston/Wright Foundation Alum, Ellis was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and 2018 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, Entropy, The Offing, Shondaland, midnight & indigo, and elsewhere. She’s a prose editor for great weather for MEDIA and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought. Ellis lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books) is her first novel.
Featured Work
Bone Broth
Justine Holmes, a widow, former activist, and funeral thief, mourns her husband’s death during the aftermath of the Ferguson unrest in St. Louis, Missouri. As family tensions deepen between Justine and her three grown children, –an unemployed former Bay Area activist at odds with her hometown’s customs, a social climbing realtor stifled by the loss of her only child, and a disillusioned politician struggling with his sexual identity–the matriarch is forced to face her grief head-on. By reconciling a past tied to her secret involvement in civil rights activism during the early 1970’s in St. Louis, Justine quickly learns the more she attempts to make peace with her history, the more skeletons continue to rise to the surface.
Five Questions for Lyndsey Ellis
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My hometown inspired most of the writing. I’m indebted to the network of elders and natural storytellers that I had the opportunity to connect with in my youth. Also, the deep, rich (and often complicated) history there.
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Creating the ending was treacherous! It was difficult figuring out when or how to stop. I drafted tons of endings before reaching what felt right.
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Consuming. Laborious. Worthwhile.
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From as far back as I can remember—my mother took me and my sister to the library each week to fill a bag with books. That early love for reading shaped my desire to know about other worlds. When I was in fourth grade, I started writing stories; I filled up margins of countless notebooks with imagined worlds of my creation. Another childhood element that shaped who I am as a writer was that I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV when I was growing up, so I became an observer of the world around me and used my imagination.
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Bone broth, of course winks
