Interview by Jamie Li
A CONVERSATION WITH CORA LEWIS, AUTHOR OF INFORMATION AGE (Joyland Editions)

Reading Cora Lewis’ writing made me think of the James Baldwin quote about writing “a sentence as clean as a bone.” The prose in her debut, Information Age, is stripped down to its essential parts—a contrast to the digital deluge the narrator, an observant young journalist, finds herself in. The novella, a lean form in itself, is told in vignettes; each teeters on the precipice of revelation but stops short. What’s implied through omission is an invitation to fill in the rest. It’s like Lewis wanted to see exactly how much she could cut away from the narrative while keeping its emotional core pulsating and alive. 

The result is a literary dot-to-dot drawing. Lewis provides the essential points, and readers connect them using their own set of associations to form a unique image. In its 201 pages, Lewis captures the disorientation of wayfinding through early adulthood in our chronically online era, the contradiction of feeling both detached from and ambitious about work, and the slipping grasp we have on relationships as we get older.

In our conversation, Lewis delves into how this minimalist style, far from creating distance, actually builds a profound sense of intimacy with her protagonist and her world. She describes how her sensibilities as a journalist became powerful tools for fiction and why the novella was the right form for her debut. 

Jamie Li: Your novella is told in fragments and snatches of dialogue. Did you know this would be the final form when you set out to write it? What do you think the form allowed for?

Cora Lewis: That seemed to be the way that I was writing most naturally. As I went on, I wrote some of the longer scenes where you linger, which gave it more of a narrative structure and tried to describe the characters a little more. But the vignettes were definitely the chosen mode from the beginning for the book. It opened up space for a reader to bring their own thoughts, feelings, associations, and connections between these experiences.

Jamie: Despite the book’s spare prose, you do a great job giving readers a sense of intimacy with the narrator. I think for a few reasons: there’s a cast of well-drawn supporting characters and the events of her private life are heightened against the detachment she feels toward work. How did you think about balancing her external vs. internal worlds?

Cora: The blurriness between the external and internal was something that interested me. Maybe one way I dealt with it was by having less interiority for the narrator than many characters get. That way, the external and internal could be treated with a similar objectivity.

Jamie: I did notice there isn’t much interiority, but at the same time, there are so many details that clue you into how she might feel by way of observation, which is a sort of proxy. As you were crafting this narrator, how did you decide which observations to include?

Cora: That’s exactly right. In our MFA program, they talk about the pathetic fallacy and how what a narrator notices in the external world can reflect their internal worlds. I was definitely going for a lot of that. Some of the scenes with the natural world, or where she’s in nature or in the country outside of the city, are hopefully more calm and meditative than life in the city, which can reflect the pace of work and the pace of romantic relationships that come and go. The formal choices—which descriptions the readers get—hopefully reflect a mood that then changes throughout, even though there isn’t so much internal sharing of emotions.

Jamie: There are often these juxtaposing vignettes that result in some unexpected humor. Then there are others that follow thematically and give more of a sense of cohesion. How did you think about stringing different vignettes together?

Cora: I was trying to create a balance between scenes from her professional life, her personal life, her family life, and make sure there was a nice distribution of all of those, even though they’re all receiving a similar treatment. I definitely wanted meaning to accumulate for a reader when it came to the role technology plays in our relationships and our lives, and how communication is changing with technology—or not changing.

Jamie: What role do you think humor plays in the book?

Cora: I definitely wanted there to be humor in it, just because so much of what is memorable in dialogue, conversation, and interactions is what’s funny or lighthearted. I wanted there to be a warmth, even though there are these heavy subjects, and it can be a challenging, disorienting time of life in your 20s. Throughout, of course, there are these absurdities and injections of levity, even in these more painful experiences.

Jamie: The vignettes give a feeling similar to scrolling on our phones, whiplashed from topic to topic, and a perfect reflection of the “instantaneous information age” that’s referenced in the book and has only accelerated since the 2010s, when the story takes place. What do you think your narrator would make of 2020s doomscrolling?

Cora: She would be as sucked into it as ever, and maybe there’d be even more ChatGPT exchanges and interrogation of AI, because it does seem like that is accelerating. Of course, Trump was elected again, so there is this sort of repeat quality, rerun energy to the 2020s as well.

Jamie: Do you think the tone would be different?

Cora: Maybe in a more mature tone—a less young one—it would make a certain amount of sense with the experiences that have informed a more mature life. Maybe it would even be more cynical, jaded, or hardboiled.

Jamie: You come from a journalism background—how did that experience shape your fiction-writing instincts? Did you ever find it at odds? Or did you fully embrace how it manifested in fiction?

Cora: During my MFA, maybe I found them to be at odds because I didn’t have a lot of practice making things up—or really any practice making things up—since it’s the opposite of what you do in journalism. So, in that sense, they’re not a natural pairing, but in other ways, attention to dialogue and detail, drawing connections between different interviews, scenes, and experiences, are all crucial parts of journalism that really serve fiction, and certainly this kind of fiction that mimics a reporter’s notebook.

Jamie: Were there habits you had to unlearn?

Cora: Probably the dryness and the hesitation to embellish, embroider, and rearrange. I had to work on those habits. I needed to be less wedded to reality and accuracy, and more to emotion, feeling, and narrative.

Jamie: Aside from straight reportage and clean writing, what other journalistic sensibilities did you bring into the fiction writing process that supplemented the work?

Cora: Economy of language, compression, and concision are all hallmarks of a certain kind of journalism and are reflected in the book. Maybe a propensity for quotation and citing sources. I tried to bring in excerpts of emails, message boards, text messages, and a quiz—almost like original source documents embedded in the text to create that sense of realism. Also, a desire for tonal consistency and consistency of voice.

Jamie: How did your book find its way to Joyland Editions, and what made them the right home for Information Age?

Cora: I feel so lucky to be with Joyland Editions and that we found each other. Madeleine Crum, who’s one of the editors, had read a short story of mine in the Yale Review and asked if I had any stories for Joyland. I did, and we worked on that together, which became a section of the book. When Michelle King decided that she wanted to found a press devoted to novellas, Maddie asked if I had a manuscript. My manuscript from my MFA was essentially a novella; it was more like 30,000 words than the 40, 50, or 60,000 words you need for a novel. I sent it to them, and they said they wanted to publish it, and we edited it for something like six months. I think it’s a very unlikely path to publication, so I’m aware of how lucky I am.

Jamie: What does it mean to you personally to debut with a novella, especially in a publishing landscape that tends to sideline shorter forms?

Cora: I love a slim volume. I think it’s too bad that publishing houses don’t want to put them out and they’re not as commercially successful.  I do think people enjoy being able to read a shorter book in one sitting. People keep telling me they’ve read my book in one sitting, which I take as a compliment. I would still like to write a full-length novel. So, in a way, this is an interesting introduction to the publishing world. Maybe I can still say my debut novel is in the works.

Jamie: What was your biggest challenge in the editorial process?

Cora: Because these vignettes, episodes, and scenes could be arranged so many ways, the biggest challenge was trusting that the final arrangement was the right one and letting it be taken from my hands—not continually revising and rearranging, which I certainly would still be doing now.

Jamie: There was so much I related to in this book as someone who also spent most of my 20s in the 2010s: going through the motions building a career, navigating dating, making new friends and holding onto old ones. What do you hope readers get out of Information Age?

Cora: It’s a hopeful book, and I hope maybe people in their 20s now who read it find it engaging and reflective of something that’s still true about the experience. I know I always appreciated reading about professional women in their twenties when I was one. I hope people enjoy and are entertained by it, and maybe it leads to interesting thoughts about what that era was about, as well as the experience of being in your twenties in a city.

Jamie: What’s next in your writing?

Cora: I’m working on a longer project in a similar style and with similar concerns. So far, I mostly have ambient scenes, less of a plot, and more of a set of interests and ideas. I remain very interested in artificial intelligence, so I think that could stay as a fruitful, central concern for my writing.

Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park. Her novella, Information Age, is out this summer.

Jamie Li is a San Diego-based writer and holds an MFA in Fiction from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she served as Managing Editor of Hunger Mountain. A VONA/Voices alum, her work appears in Slant’d Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Points in Case, and elsewhere. She’s received support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center, and is a 2025 Seattle Public Library Writers’ Room Fellow. She’s currently working on her first novel. Find her on Instagram @j.a.m.i.e.l.i.

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