Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Elizabeth Lesser (TMWYR Ep. #56)
Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Elizabeth Lesser
A series of self-portraits by Catskills’ literary voices
My interview on August 15, 2025, of Elizabeth Lesser, New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Omega Institute, the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York.
A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on October 17, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock, New York, and my interview with Elizabeth can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Howard Altarescu
H: Thank you, Elizabeth, for joining me for the inaugural Catskill Writers' column for The Overlook.
You're the co-founder of Omega Institute, the internationally recognized wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change workshop and conference center, and a New York Times bestselling author of several books, most of which I've read and loved. I just finished Cassandra.
You've given widely celebrated TED Talks; you’re one of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100, a collection of a hundred leaders who are using their voices to elevate humanity; you've been a midwife, and birth educator; you cook and garden and read; and you take long walks almost every day. You're living a full life. And I'm so glad to consider you a friend.
E: Thank you, Howard.
Talk about your books and what inspired you.
H: First, what was your first book and what inspired you to write your first book?
E: My first book is The Seeker's Guide. It is, I think, 26 or 27 years old now. And what inspired me to write it was, as you said, I'm the co-founder of Omega Institute, which is a holistic learning center. It's based on the idea, Omega is, that, well, like when you were saying, I've lived a full life, it's based on this idea that you can learn throughout a lifetime to live a fuller and fuller life. And for some people, that's keeping their body healthy. And for some people, that's having a spiritual life and developing that life in some people. It's having a philosophical grounding or psychological wellness or becoming a better writer, a better artist, a better runner. And so we cast this wide net of what does it mean to grow and learn across a lifetime? What does it mean to become a better person? Our slogan is awakening the best in the human spirit. How do you do that?
And as such, over the early years of starting and helping run Omega, especially when I was curating the programs, I just like, hmm, that guy's an interesting writer. Let's get him. That person's a great doctor. That person is a shaman from West Africa, things like that, inviting them, having them come. And then I was also the person who wrote all of our catalogs and I had to read a huge amount of books and take a body of work and turn it into a pithy word poem course description. And I was just learning so much about all these diverse subjects. And also I was developing a really good bullshit detector. Like who knows, who walks the talk in the book. People would come and teach and they'd be like, just full of contradictions. And of course we all are, but like really. And one day I was sitting in our faculty dining room. There's this cast of characters surrounding me. Floyd Patterson who was teaching. Tao of boxing, you know, he's a heavyweight boxing champion. And he was also very spiritual, come to find out, and Allen Ginsberg and his Tibetan teacher and people like that. Huston Smith, who was one of the great American Bill Moyers- type person looking at religion and the unity of all religious ideals. And I was sitting next to one of my very favorite Omega teachers who had come from the beginning and actually stayed with us until he died a few years ago, the West African drummer Baba Olatunji. Baba Olatunji had come from West Africa on a scholarship in the 1950s, gotten involved in the American renewal of art and music in Harlem. He'd been one of Dr. Martin Luther King's friends and had been on all the boycotts and the buses.
Baba knew his mission in life was to bring West African culture and drumming and music and dance to the West. Anyway, I loved him. I was sitting next to him and he waved his fork at all the people in the faculty dining room. And he said, “this is a new tradition we're creating. This is a universal spiritual tradition and it's democratic and diverse. You should write a book about this. And you should call it a seeker's guide”. And I was like, okay, Baba, I think I'm going to do that. And I did.
Other Books
H: So talk a little bit about the other books you've written and or works you've published. I know you've written at least three other books.
E: Yes, I've written three other books. The Seeker's Guide was very research driven, very long, but I also had stories about my own failures and successes with all these different traditions. And people would say to me, I read your book. Well, I read some of your book. Well, I just read the stories about you. And I thought, okay, the next book I'm going to write is all going to be stories.
I was going through a divorce and I was very much asking this question, what makes some people survive and thrive in traumatic losses and change? And what makes some people break down? And I was listening to a poet at Omega who translates Rumi, the poet Rumi, and he had a translation of a poem that said, “dance when you're broken open”. And I thought, broken open, that's me. I am broken, my marriage is broken, my family's broken, but I'm also open, like it grew me up. It helped me find out who I was, so to speak. Grew me up. And so, that was the genesis of my book, Broken Open, How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.
And then after that, I wrote a book called Marrow, which is about when I was my sister's bone marrow donor and how we used that experience to heal our relationship as sisters.
And then I wrote Cassandra Speaks, When Women Are The Storytellers, The Human Story Changes. And that was based on the work I'd done at Omega, helping start and run our Women's Leadership Center. And the combination of inspiration and rage that women have been left out of the human story, especially the leadership story, for so long. Cassandra Speaks is my feminist book. I'm a feminist my whole life, inherited from my mother. Of all my books, it was the hardest to write in that I don't consider myself a feminist scholar, although I certainly have immersed myself in the literature and also these Women in Power conferences we did at Omega have brought some of the great women thinkers and leaders onto our stage.
It is really interesting. I'll just say a little bit about this. If you try to train yourself as a quote-unquote spiritual person or just a good person, part of the training is to let go of your own opinions that might get in the way of seeing your fellow humans as just viable beings. And I've trained myself so much through meditation and prayer and therapy and all the things I've done to see the world from both sides, it's almost a problem in that it’s hard for me now to come down firmly anywhere. I'm just so open to other points of view, other passions, people's wounds, what made them the way they are. And so writing a book that was firmly about the need for women's rights and women's stories and women's realities to be respected and heard often came up against my spiritual openness and I think it made it a really interesting book for that reason.
How would you characterize the themes in your books?
E: Well, oddly, exactly what I just said. If you're interested in having a happy and generous life, keeping an open mind and an open heart, even while having a very strong backbone, like strong, strong sense of self, strong boundaries, even as your heart is really soft and open, your mind is curious, and you kind of tune your antenna to the soul realms, whatever that means. That is the theme of all of my books, staying open and strong.
What authors have had a meaningful impact on you as a writer?
E: As a writer, I've read so many books about writing, but I'm not going to mention them. I read poetry a lot. like, let's say, Emily Dickinson. I study how she gets so much in her tiny words that have wit and brevity and just electricity. It's amazing, right? And then I like to pair her, let's say I'll read one of her wacky, amazing things, with Walt Whitman, who just was wildly verbose, alive, not caring about brevity at all. Like I'm just gonna just say it all, like throwing everything into the pot. So I like to read the poets because they're really working with language.
H: And did you study poetry academically or is this something you developed on your own over the years?
E: My mother was an English teacher, a high school English teacher, and she made us memorize poems. I still remember some of them. She would make us memorize, like Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee. Things like that. She loved words. She loved literature. And I think in college I probably took some poetry classes. I don't remember, but I've always read the poets.
H: Was there a book or poem that you read that made you want to write? Was there something you read that was a specific influence?
E: The first book I read that was the genre that somehow I knew I wanted to write, which is memoir that's also inspiring the reader to go within and take what they find in there and to live their best life, was Thomas Merton, who wrote The Seven Story Mountain.
Thomas Merton was a Jesuit monk. He was raised in Europe, very American, but a very well traveled intellectual. He went to Columbia and when he was at Columbia, he fell into a deep depression and started really considering a religious spiritual life. But he got into Buddhism and all things like that and eventually ended up becoming a Christian monk. But he was very, very open. He's influenced a lot of Catholics. Anyway, he wrote this memoir about his search called The Seven Story Mountain. And I read it when I was at Columbia undergrad at Barnard, and I was very influenced by him because I was very involved in the civil rights and anti-war stuff, but hungry for a spiritual life. So that book, Thomas Merton's The Seventh Story Mountain.
Writing Routine
H: So talk about your writing routine and your writing process. Get up every morning and write for two hours?
E: Well, I stay up really late at night. Stupidly. I keep thinking I'm going to change into the kind of person who goes to bed early and gets up early, but it hasn't happened yet, so I don't think it's going to. So I don't get up until like 7:30 or 8:00, and then by the time I'm writing, it's usually like 9:00. First I have my coffee, talk to my husband, then I go and write. And I try to write every day. Whether it's successful or not is a whole other story, but I try to write every day.
Writing Process
H: I've heard fiction writers talk about planning their entire book, some do, some don't, some just write a character and follow the character. How much planning goes into your books?
E: A whole lot of planning. Even when I've tried to write fiction, which I've tried to do many times, because memoir in a way is fiction, it's the fiction of my own memory, and it's character driven and it's story driven, I need a structure. That structure often is nothing in the end what it started out looking like, but I am always futzing with the structure. I need it, I'm a structural person.
H: And have you always been that way or have you evolved to that?
E: No, I've always been that way. I think what helped me a lot was the writing of those Omega catalogs. That's what taught me the need for timelines, structures, pagination. Like I knew nothing of that. None of us did when we started Omega. We didn't know what we were doing. So I was self-taught in editing and structuring this 150 page catalog. And that really has served me as a writer of books.
H: I am so impressed, always, by how much you all didn't know and how much you've achieved. It's wonderful. It's extraordinary. On timelines and what I'm writing, I've been telling people in the last two weeks, I feel as if I've had a breakthrough because I made a timeline. And now I can.put the pieces together, I can write my scenes.
E: That's so helpful.
H: Has there been writing advice you've received that you've decided is flat wrong?
E: Well, it's not flat wrong, it just doesn't work for me.
H: Yeah, that's a way to put it.
E: The idea that you write shitty first drafts, I forget who came up with that, Anne Lamott or Julia Cameron, this idea that like, just get it out, get it out. Write the draft. I don't think I've ever had a first draft. I write a sentence word by word. I've written four books this way, so obviously it can be done. I do not recommend it, but I can't move on to the next word unless the word before it is what I want. Even the punctuation I sweat over as I'm writing. So it can take me a long time to write a sentence. It's more like writing poetry, I think. It's very tedious, but that's the way I write.
Challenges
H: And what challenges have you faced? What's the biggest challenge you've faced as a writer?
E: It's the biggest challenge I still face. I know people are always surprised to hear this from me and from a lot of writers, I think, it’s my lack of self-confidence, my “who am I to say this”? “This has been said before.” “The world really needs another book?” You know, it's always on my shoulder, this harsh doubting critic who's begging me to get over myself and stop writing. It's gotten better, definitely gotten better. I can shush it more easily. But it's still there.
H: Can you shush it more easily because you've had success with your books? You're a New York Times bestseller.
E: I have to imagine that's true, that that helps, but I think also all the work I've done on myself and just what happens naturally in aging, which is, I don't care anymore what they think, like, I'm just going to do it, you know.
H: Now, is this self-doubt what you're describing in Cassandra as imposter syndrome?
E: Yeah, definitely. It's the devil's women more than men, but men suffer from imposter syndrome.
Was there a moment that made you feel, “Yes, I am a writer”?
H: And when did you just realize you were a writer? Was it after your first book or before your first book maybe?
E: I always was a writer. You know, I was one of those little kids with a diary as it was called before journaling became a verb and I always wrote, always, stories, just what happened during the day, like that.
But I think there was one moment that sticks in my mind when I was like, my god., I really am a writer.
I had signed my first contract for my first book and I was walking out of the Random House offices. At that point it was on East 50th Street in New York City. That's where a lot of the literary things were in those days. They've moved all over now. And my father, who was an advertising man, a Madison Avenue ad man, had died the year before I signed that contract. And I was walking out of Random House and I realized, my god, the building a couple of blocks up on Madison was my father's office. And I got there and I stood there and I started crying right there as people walked by me, saying, I did it, Dad. I'm a writer.
Do you hear from readers?
E: I do. It used to be letters back in the day, but now it's all emails and/ or comments on social media. And I absolutely love it. I love being in conversation with readers.
H: And have you gotten input that influences what you've written subsequently?
E: Not what I've written. I think it helps with that imposter syndrome thing, especially my books which I write with the intention for someone to find themselves in the words. I'm intending that we find each other on the page and help each other, so to know that that's happening is very gratifying to me
Does living in the Hudson Valley influence your writing?
E: Well, I've only ever lived here. I mean, I didn't grow up here, but I've lived here for 40 years, and all the years of being a writer, I've lived here. So I imagine other places are great places to live for writers too, but this is an incredible place to live. I mean, you said in the introduction to me that I walk the same hill and road every day and I walk past, that's where Bob Dylan lived, that's where the arts and craft movement in the 1940s and 50s were. I've lived in Rhinebeck and I live in Woodstock now and they have a deep heritage of art and nature. And that's very inspiring.
Do you have writing projects underway you would like to mention?
H: So do you have writing projects underway that you'd like to say something about?
E: I will say that I am writing a book.
H: Excellent.
Tell Me What You’re Reading
H: Now, I know you recently read The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout, who is really terrific. You and I were both struck by what I consider one of the very best lines in the book. It's Jim and his brother Bob who are the Burgess Boys. Late in the novel, Jim says to his brother that he has no family. And Bob corrects him:
“You have family, you have a wife who hates you, kids who are furious with you, a brother and sister who make you insane, and a nephew who used to be a kind of a drip, but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family.”
What does that passage mean to you, and does it relate at all to your work, your books, and so on?
E: I love that line, those sentences mean so much. The great Irish writer and poet William Blake said to “see the world in a grain of sand”.
Like Elizabeth Strout sees all of humanity in these small family units that she writes about in book after book. She picks a small town in Maine, the same few characters and just drills down into them. And she sees all of family in this one family.
And what I try to do in all my books is to take away the shame we all feel about having exactly that experience, these screwed up families, these lives where we're just struggling to understand anything, our fears, our shames, and to humanize all of the tsuris, so that we can escape the shame. And then it's like then we're free, oh, let's just be humans together. Let's stop blaming this person for that failure or having shame about my own failures and let's just play together. And I think that's what she's trying to do in her books. We fall in love with these very flawed, sometimes awful characters because we forgive them like we're supposed to forgive ourselves.
H: To see the world in a grain of sand. Amazing. There's one other piece of the book that you and I spoke briefly about. This is a story about relationships, including sibling relationships. And there's a twist in the novel's narrative that highlights the impact of the past on present relationships. I love when a story has an unexpected but effective twist. Does that resonate with you at all?
E: Yeah, I wanted to write Marrow, the story of my sister Maggie's bone marrow transplant and her subsequent death, about that twist, that she and I loved each other but had unspoken, unresolved, mysterious blocks in our relationship that I could never get to the bottom of. And then it was such a shock that of all of the siblings and family members, I was the one who tested as her perfect match.
And we went into therapy before the transplant to see if we could get our cells to love each other as much as we were learning to love each other through the process. So that maybe her body wouldn't reject my cells. One thing she said to me in therapy was, you know Liz, you don't have to be perfect to be my perfect match.
She had experienced me as someone who was always trying so hard to perfect myself. And I think that was the twist for us, that we healed our relationship by just relaxing into who each of us were together.
H: Did you call that a soul marrow transplant?
E: A soul marrow transplant instead of a bone marrow transplant.
H: That was beautiful. Thank you for that.
Other book recommendations?
H: What other books would you recommend? What books have you recently read that you liked?
E: I really liked the novel James, by Percival Everett. I've been doing a lot of reading of American history right now because America is so much in my mind, all these things we took for granted that seem to be up for grabs now like democracy. So I loved that. I loved the twist in that book. That was an amazing ending.
And I have been reading the letters between Jefferson and Adams [The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams]. I keep it on my bedside. It's huge. It's over 500 pages.
And, you know, they had a very acrimonious relationship for most of their lives. The two of them really, besides being the creators of the Declaration of Independence, etc., they really created the two-party system in this country, they had very different beliefs about what this democracy should be.
They were so harsh on each other in many of these letters. They really excoriated each other. And then toward the end of their life, after years of not writing or even talking to each other ever, they came back together and their letters are more about, oh, we need each other, we need these two points of view. They are nourishing to each other and we need that right now in America
So I'll just pick it up and open it up and read part of a letter every night before I go to bed. It's so edifying about what's going on now, and you know, they died within hours of each other on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, they died. It's an amazing story, their story.
H: And the only reason that story can be preserved is because they wrote letters that were retained.
E: That's correct. That's a beautiful idea.
H: What will we have in the future?
E: We'll have emails.
H: If they're retained.
E: Well, they will be. And therefore, I really think people should put more time into their emails and use punctuation.
H: And make them poetic. In a figurative sense.
E: I love the emails I get and give and I love the texts. I think it's great. I think writing is happening all the time. Substack, emails, it's okay.
H: Finally, what's on your nightstand? What are you going to read next?
E: Well, I read those letters.
I went and saw the singer-songwriter Roseanne Cash at the Assembly in Kingston the other night, and I’m reading her memoir and it’s fantastic. It's called Composed.
H: Is this Johnny Cash's daughter?
E: Yeah, Roseanne Cash. She's a great writer, not just a songwriter, she's a great writer, and this is a memoir about being her father's daughter.
H: Beautiful. Thank you, that was great. That was wonderful. I loved it.
A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on _________ in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock, New York, and my interview with Elizabeth can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, available on Spotify and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
